Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about how the push away from decentralization of core things to centralization is a huge mistake!

Downside of Centralization

If we've done some good things in the recent past, one of the most important things that we've done is really gotten good at decentralization of infrastructure on a massive scale. What I think is really becoming an issue though, is the push to eliminate that decentralization and bring it back towards centralization, and the world clearly saw why this is the case the past few days.

Centralization offers some certain advantages that's for sure. We can't have decentralized everything at the moment. For example, centralized auto manufacturing has been one of the biggest booms of productivity and decreased the cost to produce a car so dramatically that there are far more cars than people in the world. Yes it's mixed between a few major automakers which could be considered decentralization, but it's the middle between centralized and decentralized. People in 1 million garage factories aren't putting the cars together because that would be incredibly inefficient and waste a lot of time and resources. Instead it's centralized for efficiencies.

Where this centralization definitely is a considerable problem is in the technology space. The vast majority of our computer infrastructure is run on Windows as an operating system. Yes it has it's benefits, but at the same time, with the recent releases of it, those benefits are really starting to become less apparent. As well, since most of the servers in the datacenters are running Windows, one of the other thing that many datacenters are choosing to use is the same security vendors such as CrowdStrike. This centralizes it in another company..

So then we also have the "Cloud" (basically just datacenters owned by these megacompanies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others, it's nothing magical but someone else's hardware where you rent and put your software.. nothing magical at all) that is a bit more spread out among the big companies, but still primarily with the big 3 companies Microsoft, Amazon and Google. So this means that if one of the components gets affected in this mix where MOST people are using these things, then you're in for quite a ride.

The world absolutely saw this as an occurrence over the past few days. Airports were down, hospitals were offline, nearly every major industry was hoodwinked into signing up for this "cloud" bullshit and putting everything in their hands. The servers weren't the problem, but the software on the servers.

Just a few years ago, this "Cloud" thing wasn't even a common name. People had heard of the term and what it was used for, but it really wasn't something many people were interested in. A lot of companies had their own datacenters and housed the stuff in-house. Yes it certainly required capital investment but at the same time, one of the most important things is that you were close to the data, wherever it was. This meant that if something went sideways, you could get on the phone with the team that supported it and get things back to normal fairly quickly, and often with not a lot of impact at least in the grand scale of things. Certainly not taking out whole sectors of the technology grid!

This headstrong charge into trying to convince everybody to go with the same cloud companies, using the same software, with the same datacenters is really a dangerous game. People quite literally died in the last few days because of the outage. I guess you could always say that about something, so maybe that's a bit melodramatic but it feels like it's a good point to get across. By charging into centralizing everything where there becomes single points of failure, you are building a recipe for disaster.

I sincerely hope that we can all take this as a lesson, and stop this headlong rush into centralizing into everything the same and instead go for decentralizing and increasing the market competition. When there are more companies, more choices and people don't all do the same, these things are considerably mitigated in terms of how much one issue can affect others. If not 75% of the servers were using CrowdStrike as part of their security stack and instead 50% were using CrowdStrike and 50% were using SkyHigh or something, we would have felt 25% less pain. Spread that across the globe and you've got a considerable amount less impact than the opposite which is happening. These companies are trying to force people into more centralization and that's a really dangerous prospect!

What do you think, do you think this was a bad sign of what is to come if we keep centralizing things so much? Let me know in the comments!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated}

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