Linux repos and ISO download sites have TONS of mirrors, sometimes contributed by companies, but also a lot of universities, government and public institutions.
Why is one of the largest core open source repositories centralized and private? Why are we so dependent on AWS, Google and others for large chunks of Internet services to be accessible?
There is a deeper question here than just the outages; but rather why they affect so many people.
Centralized infrastructure tends to be less complex and therefore cheaper. Economies of scale drive people into using a centralized monolith and then network effects do the rest.
If you want a decentralized system to sustainably compete with a centralized one, the decentralized system must provide tangible and obvious surplus value in comparison to the centralized one or otherwise it is not economical.
In reality that's often not the case. Usability is often worse or infrastructure is in favor of centralization (e.g. asymmetric broadband internet connections).
Just speculating but I think distributed systems are just inherently more complex. Serving multiple mirrors is easy, hosting across a set of providers and keeping things in sync gets harder.
It's a problem, and besides building completely open source systems that are designed to have distributed instances, I think its a pretty hard thing to fix.
> There is a deeper question here than just the outages; but rather why they affect so many people.
The answer to these seems so obvious to me perhaps I'm missing something - Outside the centralized services the solutions are fragmented (ie the decentralized solutions are used by a lot of people but are not large by definition).
I use my own Linux virtual server (as it happens, not in AWS although I have no anti-AWS beef) to host my private websites and my git repos. There are a million services that do this kind of hosting and people use all kinds of solutions like this. You will never hear about my private git repo being down because only I care when that happens.
Last night I wrote a little spreadsheet for myself showing how much time I spend doing various things. In particular, I for one do NOT need to read HN more often