In what way is the cloud decentralized

Question

In unit 3 of 7 it quotes

With a decentralized design, the cloud enables you to have resources deployed in regions around the world.

I am failing to understand how this decentralized if it is all under one corporations computers.

Answer 1

@Xavier Ostrowski

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A, thank you for posting your question here!

Your question is how this "Azure cloud" decentralized, if it is all under one corporation's computers.

First of all, let's look to a basic definition of "decentralized" design. Decentralized simply means the design is controlled or can be controlled by several local offices or authorities rather than one single one.

So, Azure cloud "decentralized" design have many services such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS which are flexible enough to use as a service and also allow you to manage any of these services. While Microsoft Partners or Managed Service Provider (MSP) or Microsoft corporation or "YOU" can also take control of.

You have your roles to play, the host have their roles to play. This makes sense in decentralization, and you can also take some percentages of ownership of your Azure Cloud Services.

Hope this helps!

Kindly let me know if the above helps or you need further assistance or explanation on this issue.

Best Regards,

Sina

Answer 2

What it means by decentralized is that the infrastructure and systems to support it are not centralized in one location but scattered around the world. A failure at any one location (or several) will not bring down the system and, hopefully, won't negatively impact performance. It is all about disaster recovery (DR). If a location loses power, is hit by an attack or otherwise goes offline then the remaining system will continue running normally.

Note that this is the classic definition of a decentralized system as defined here and here. A decentralized system has nothing to do with who owns things but rather the ability for components in the system to continue working even in the face of other components failing. Of course this assumes that you have multiple components doing the same work. This is the same concept used for replication in database systems, how DNS works on the Internet, even the INet backbone itself, and how most larger companies set up their domain environment. A catastrophic failure at one location shouldn't bring down the entire system, hence decentralized.

Answer 3

Hello Xavier,

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You raise a good point. While cloud computing may be distributed across multiple regions, it is still operated by a centralized provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Therefore, the term "decentralized" may not be entirely accurate.

However, it is important to note that cloud computing providers typically have multiple data centers in different geographic locations. This allows customers to choose where to deploy their resources and take advantage of lower latency, higher availability, and compliance with local regulations. Moreover, cloud providers often use sophisticated networking and load balancing technologies to distribute traffic across their data centers, which can provide additional redundancy and resilience.

So while cloud computing is not truly decentralized in the strict sense of the term, it does offer some degree of geographic distribution and redundancy, which can help mitigate the risks of downtime, data loss, or regulatory non-compliance.