FeatureThe modern internet is approaching its 40th birthday. Despite its age, it still proves to this day how well it was designed, with many layers of resilience and redundancy. In fact, the web as a whole was intended to be decentralised. By not relying on any one central system, it meant that many different components could fail, and internet traffic could still find a way to get where it needed to go.
What we’ve seen over the past decade, however, is the unintentional centralisation of many core services through large cloud solution providers, like infrastructure vendors and CDNs. We can think of these cloud solution providers as the supermarkets of the web. Many of us appreciate the ease of buying groceries from one large store rather than visiting a dozen different ones on the high street. Similarly, these cloud solution providers deliver many benefits, such as simpler application deployment, reduced management complexities and economies of scale.
In a traditional internet app deployment model, an outage of a server or misconfigured application might take out a single website. As we saw today, similar problems with a cloud solution provider can end up taking out all of their customers, resulting in not one website being taken offline, but hundreds or thousands. The impact can potentially affect organisations’ digital experiences, revenues and reputations.
Cloud solution providers provide immeasurable benefits to their users, but we shouldn’t forget the lessons of the past. The “re-centralization” of the internet through these cloud solutions is now causing the very problems the original design of the internet was intended to avoid through redundancy. It’s important we consider an approach that moves us away from single points of failure or we will likely see more issues like we did today.
