One more problem with centralization
I just received a message from Shopify which powers my Secrets of Organ Playing Store saying that they suffered interruption of service yesterday:
On June 2, Shopify experienced an interruption of service by Google Cloud that made all stores inaccessible for approximately 5 hours. We’re writing to let you know that all stores have now recovered.
I don't know if any of my customers noticed this since in the afternoon there was one sale but if all merchants who are selling something through Shopify couldn't do this for 5 straight hours, it is kind of a big deal.
Shopify is a centralized company and Google is centralized company also. Shopify's service was interrupted because Google Cloud's service was interrupted.
So potentially every company which uses Google Cloud might be vulnerable too. This could be thousands or even millions. I don't know for sure. Techcrunch reported Google Cloud affecting numerous applications and services, including Discord, YouTube, Vimeo, Gmail, Snap and many others. I have noticed some disruption with my website which runs on Weebly too.
We know the problems with centralized companies - they lack transparency about people's the data they are using. They censor certain opinions they don't like. And they might be more vulnerable than decentralized networks because they have a single point of failure.
With the blockchain such as Steem which is decentralized all those problems can go away. Every transaction is transparent, there isn't really any censorship and as long as there are multiple witnesses running the nodes, there isn't any single point of failure.
I hope the world will start to understand this as we go into the future and we are more and more dependent on technology in our lives.
The way I see it this outage is one more problem with centralization which is one more reason for decentralized Steem blockchain push for wider adoption.
I guess that is one of the problem of centralization. Lack of transparency with the user
Yes and a single point of failure...
You are absolutely right, with the Steem blockchain which decentralized such problems as outages are reduced to absolute zero!
Yes and it works smoothly as long as there is one witness verifying transactions. And we have hundreds of witnesses.
No. Most apps -including Steem clients- are using the same API node to access the blockchain, so it even more centralized than Drive or Amazon S3. There are alternative API endpoints -like the one from Anyx or the one from MinnowSupportProject-, but most developers and extension users are leaving the default value untouched.
EDIT: The API node was incorrectly assigned to MinnowBooster while it was from MinnowSupportProject, as it is listed on the Steem Keychain preferences
But wouldn’t we need a secondary ‘Earth’ as further redundancy? It all depends on which way you look at it. I work a lot with AWS (Google Cloud competition) and I assume there would be some form of redundancy in terms of availability zones and regions. Perhaps Shopify does not utilise other regions in case of interruptions like this. Of course, I’m just speculating as I haven’t looked or read into their specific issue.
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Shopify says they are investigating how much their stores were affected. I think at some point Steemit images were hosted by AWS. Not sure how it is now. Maybe people would need to look into other planets for additional redundancy? Comets, meteors? Deep space? Is this what Inter Planetary File System stands for?
The curent problem with IPFS is that most people likes decentralized platforms and many even only use those who say they are decentralized. However most of them are only willing to use platforms who are decentralized but no willing to run them in a real decentralized way.
People likes services which tell they are using IPFS but don't want to run their own IPFS nodes, which is the way IPFS is supposed to be used.
Part of the problem are the decentralized platforms themselves, which advertise as being using IPFS and avoiding tell people to participate on the decentralization, making those platforms costs going lower. Then they have to shutdown, of course, as they cannot afford to maintain the data volume they are in need to offer what their users are used to be served.
I would presume running your own node would solve data storage problem from DSound and DTube? Right now they take them down after a couple of weeks. Am I right? How expensive or difficult is it to run your own IPFS node?
The essence of IPFS is that every single person who access a content will make the next one who access it get faster that content, as there will be one more place to download from. Also, next time you try to consume that content it will be retrieved much much more faster, as it will be accessed from your own computer.
Also, other very important fact about IPFS is that you are going to get exactly what you are expecting to get. In theory, you could be accessing a video from DTube for the first time or a second time, and you will get exatly the same content. For sure.
The "problem" is that DTube is using IPFS as a internal way to store content, and that spoils all the beneficies I have just said.
In theory you could tell DTube that the video you want to upload is in fact certain hash stored on your own IPFS node. It is one of the fields available on the Upload feature of their interface. However, it is not working as it should be. When you upload a video directly to DTube, they process it to allow for other video resolutions to be watched. Once they have processed them, they add it to their IPFS node. But you won't be accessing the video you uploaded, but a new hash created during the process and a few videos which where the result of that process. Then DTube selects which hashed content to stream to viewers.
There is nothing wrong on that reprocessing. But you are accessing a different content that you would expect. It destroys all the greatness of using IPFS.
Do you want to check it? Install IPFS Companion after installing IPFS from ipfs.io in one desktop -or laptop- computer. Then browse to DTube. Page will load, but most miniatures don't. Videos will not load neither, very often ending in an error message.
IPFS Companion tries to redirect any IPFS content query to your local node. But it has problems on DTube.
If adding a IPFS normal node could help improving the performance or lowering cost for them, they would have already suggest people to run their own IPFS nodes. However, what they are doing instead is providing a software that can be run on your computer which will add a DTube content hosting node, which uses IPFS but is still not building on IPFS. I was not able to found the link to it, but as far as I can remember, your node had to comply with certain uptime requirements in order for it to be added as an official DTube node. Take notice, however, that it is still not the way IPFS is supposed to work. IPFS is about downloading the content to your computer, consuming from it -sometimes even in real-time- and at tle same time streaming it to whoever else wanted to also consume it. Quite similar to Torrent protocol.
It is a problem on how they architected their app
For a time they allowed people to use their own IPFS node. It was available on the options popup menu. But they removed it. At least it has to be said that DTube performance has been greatly improved.
I think your in depth comment is worthy of being a separate post. What would it take for DTube or DSound to store the content indefinitely?
Disk space. That's what it would cost to them. But notice that storing the videos on their side makes DTube a copycat of YouTube instead of a decentralized alternative with rewards for users.
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I see. Thank you!
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