The French cloud computing company OVHcloud experienced a major network outage on the 13th of October. While the incident was blamed on ‘human error’ it is another reminder of the fragility and resulting problems of an excessively centralised cloud computing market.
Context
OVHcloud is one of Europe’s largest cloud service providers, second only to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems. Alarmingly, the incident happened only two days before it was due to become public in one of the country’s largest initial public offerings (IPOs) of the year.
While massive by European standards, the company dwarfs in comparison with the giants. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control almost ⅔ of the market .
Limited consumer choice and uncompetitive prices are apparent issues, but massive outages and disruption are even more concerning. Moreover, we cannot ignore these concerns in a market projected to grow about five times by 2030 .
What’s the problem?
With several major internet outages over the past few years, the issues of centralisation have become apparent. When the homepage of Fastly, handling 10% of all internet traffic, went down a few months ago, security experts noted that internet services have become too centralised and lack resilience .
“The web as a whole was intended to be decentralised ,” he said. “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,” (emphasis added) summarised the issue David Warburton, of the cybersecurity company F5 Labs in a Guardian interview .
What’s the solution?
Decentralisation is vital to breaking the cloud market monopoly and making the web more robust. Essentially, it is the only viable solution we currently have.
Our Cudo Compute ecosystem gives you decentralised cloud computing resources by leveraging our network. The latter is a blockchain that will connect developers and consumers to the former. As a result, you’ll have access to high-performance computing without being at the mercy of monopolistic providers.
Beyond making the market fairer and more competitive, we aspire to do this ethically and sustainably. Thanks to our partnership with Climatetrade, we committed to becoming a carbon-neutral blockchain .
How can you make a difference?
If you feel motivated to support the more decentralised, sustainable, and connected world we’re creating, you can help us realise our vision!
P.S. If you’ve already bought your CUDOS tokens , you can make the most of them by staking them on our platform and get rewards.
About Cudos
The Cudos Network is a layer 1 blockchain and layer 2 computation and oracle network designed to ensure decentralised, permissionless access to high-performance computing at scale and enable scaling of computing resources to 100,000’s of nodes. Once bridged onto Ethereum, Algorand, Polkadot, and Cosmos, Cudos will enable scalable compute and Layer 2 Oracles on all of the bridged blockchains.
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Originally published at https://www.cudos.org.
