How Decentralised Cloud Computing Can Empower The Common Man

In 2018, Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean) starred in Johnny English strikes again —  a parody action-comedy of James Bond that humorously portrayed the problem of centralized control. While the movie's plot was a traditional struggle of good vs evil, the villain's pursuit of power, through a novel tool, showcased a flaw in today's world.

The villain was a young and attractive Silicon Valley tech billionaire who aimed to gain control of the government through the internet. To do so, he only had to acquire control of a small set of servers through the signatures of head of states. His goals may seem outlandish, but they aren't.

Many cogs play a role in supporting the internet and most of them are in the hands of a few established companies with large, centralized computing power. The effects of the failure resulting from the outage of Amazon Web Services are a testament to the power these companies have.

Amazon's cloud division, AWS, offers computing power, storage, and other services. The service temporary failed in 2015, and during the hours in which it was down, major platforms like Reddit, Netflix, IMDB, and other major websites and applications went offline. And of course, Amazon's own e-commerce platform was offline too.

As spread out as the internet may seem, it increasingly hangs on the infrastructural support of a small number of companies. This allocate to them a huge amounts of power.


A Decentralized Cloud

Cloud computing is a common term most people have heard before. Cloud computing is a service that allows applications, SaaS, websites etc. to outsource the needed computing power, data delivery, and data storage.