Last week I came across an old article explaining how overdependent we have become to Amazon Web Services. The article highlights an incident that took place on February 27, 2017 that led to Amazon S3 being down and affecting a third of the Internet. Many websites including Business Insider, Quora, Medium and even AWS’ own dashboard were down for several hours.
While one can give credit to Amazon for limiting such incidents ever since, the threat of a widespread outage is real & scary. It's also amongst the worst nightmares you have as a developer - a break down of the infrastructure layer that you have no control/fix. Another interesting fact to this overdependence is the impact it has on the stock market and investors. Out of a number of high profile tech companies that filed for IPOs recently - Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Slack and Zoom, many highlight a common risk in their S1 filings; platform risk due to the dependence on AWS. In other words, we are now talking billions of dollars worth of shares that indirectly depend on AWS. With the recent bull market runs being largely driven by tech companies, this assumes greater significance. The monopolistic nature of the Amazon Web Service can't be good for the future - competition is needed in this space.
Standing up to a monster like Amazon can sound like next to impossible. But with the right amount of funding and world-class talent at its disposal, hopefully, someone will be able to do that by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. Luckily we have projects like DFINITY meeting these criteria.
DFINITY is currently building public blockchain computer, powerful enough to host business applications at scale and power the future of cloud computing. DFINITY's vision is centered around eliminating platform risk for developers, in other words, developers (and investors) of Uber, Lyft & Pinterest wouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure layer on top which these applications are built on.
If DFINITY is successful in building a decentralized computer that can scale, then it might offer the best solution to fix the overdependency on Amazon Web Services.
