Amazon and Microsoft Don’t Want You to Know About This Cloud Alternative

The need for decentralized cloud infrastructure has become increasingly evident, not only to compete with centralized infrastructure but also to offer greater security and reliability to users. But those of us in the Web3 world know that it's difficult to make clients understand why decentralization is better in this area. In this article, I'll explain my perspective and experience in both worlds (for example, as a Microsoft MVP and Alibaba Cloud MVP) on how we can begin to mainstream decentralized clouds to both corporate and personal users.

What are the similarities between centralized and decentralized clouds?

Before looking at the benefits of decentralization, we need to look at the similarities between centralized and decentralized services. This will help us understand at what point there isn't a single factor that makes a customer switch to a decentralized provider, and how we can differentiate ourselves later.

These similarities can be broken down as follows:

• User experience: Although centralized services have more features (because they have been on the market longer), the user experience is similar when using interfaces from decentralized providers, so the learning curve is minimal in this area.
• Infrastructure as a Service: Decentralized providers have focused on simplifying access to infrastructure for their users, specifically as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) where there is no difference (in terms of functionality) between the two types of providers.
• Scalability: Both centralized and decentralized services are designed to scale with user needs, allowing for the management of larger volumes of data or users.

There are many more similarities, and taking them into account is especially relevant when we want to sell decentralized solutions, where we need to look at other features that make a difference so our customers can decide on the options we offer, and that's what we'll look at now.

The technical advantages of a decentralized Cloud

In technical terms, we know that decentralization is the main factor because it gives us unique characteristics, such as:

Broad participation

Any person or institution can contribute to the ecosystem with resources, applications, etc., making the ability to build, deploy, and use services completely open and more adaptable to any business model.

Incentives

Participants can be rewarded for their contributions, attracting more stakeholders and creating a richer, longer-term ecosystem.

Greater resistance to failure

By distributing data and resources across multiple nodes rather than relying on a centralized hub, a single point of failure is less likely to impact system availability.

Reduced latency

In a well-established decentralized network with many participants, latency can be much lower than in its centralized counterparts because nodes are more likely to be closer to the end user.

And there are other very valuable technical features, such as flexible and unlimited scalability, seamless operation, open innovation, and more. But these won't be features that will be useful to sell to your customers since they are looking for certain attributes that are not technical, are not found in centralized services, and can make decentralized services start to scale to millions of customers.

The benefits for end users and customers

But decentralization isn't a special factor for a customer when deciding to use a service (if you think about it, there are still people who believe that the money in their bank is their money and can't be restricted). Decentralization is a bridge to real benefits for end users, and some of those benefits are:

High availability at a lower cost

In my experience working with various clients and implementing cloud solutions, they often seek to reduce costs and do so by compromising on high availability, confident that there will be no problems or at least that the impact will be very low. The reality is that they later realize that high availability is key, but they no longer have the budget to improve their implementations.

This is where decentralized services make a difference. In addition to the lower cost of use by not depending on a single entity, they also provide greater confidence that high availability can be achieved by distributing the workload among many nodes distributed globally.

Greater security in data processing

If we look at the latest news about security breaches in many applications and services, we see that all (or almost all) of them reside on centralized servers, because it only takes one error or attack (not always as sophisticated) for user and customer data to be exposed, including their behavior and privacy. This not only reduces the levels of trust in some platforms but can also help us increase them in the decentralized Cloud.

Decentralization, supported by infrastructure like blockchain networks, can provide greater guarantees regarding data processing, such as data sovereignty because they are based on proven encryption methods with decades of research and use. That's what we have to sell: secure infrastructure and encryption methods that empower our customers over their information.

Greater customization

One of the advantages of a decentralized ecosystem is that the level of development and services that can be built are completely open; the only limit is your imagination (and resources, of course). It's in this realm that you can sell something unique, something truly different.

Centralized services, while they allow for some customizations, are always associated with their own products and you can hardly make adjustments and connections. Many times you will have to do some additional development (which can complicate your defined architecture), which is an effort and resources to consider, while in a decentralized Cloud, you have greater control over the use of your services.

Greater portability

Something I do frequently when designing Cloud architectures is do a portability cost analysis, that is, how easy or difficult it will be to migrate from the selected provider to another, and generally centralized services are not very good in this matter, because the incentive is to retain customers at any cost, and the strongest is with their services that are not similar in other providers, which forces you to stay tied to that provider (think for example of Power BI Cloud, if you want to migrate your reports you will have to do them manually in the other provider).

Decentralized clouds are built on open-source technologies, so the cost of portability is greatly reduced (it is not zero, but it is a lower impact effort than doing it in Azure or AWS, for example).

Final words

In this article, the idea was to explain, based on experience and in a simple way, how we can make a difference when we want to sell decentralized platforms in the cloud services space, where small and large companies require their use for their own needs, and how we should focus on less technical areas. One example that is making a difference in this space is Aleph Cloud, where you can deploy your applications using decentralized storage and computing, and even host your applications in a better and more secure way.

Links

• Aleph Cloud: https://aleph.im/
• About myself: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nescampos/