Cloud Computing As Leverage
Using services like Amazon Web Services reminds me a little of the high amounts of leverage banks rack up. It’s efficient, however if everyone is doing it, there can be a buildup of interdependencies that can topple the system.
It seems to me that if more and more web products are based on cloud services, we’re really centralizing a lot of the reliability and performance of these sites in a handful of places. Should Amazon suffer a catastrophic failure at any of its facilities, a not insignificant amount of digital wealth would instantly disappear.
The solution, to echo Nassim Taleb, is to be a bit more redundant. I’d like to see people run more of their own cloud infrastructure.
