The latest Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 has sparked a conversation about distributed alternatives and resilient hybrid strategies.
The outage lasted several hours and disrupted major websites and apps, including Robinhood. Experts say this highlights the vulnerabilities of today’s internet, which is dominated by a small number of centralized cloud providers. According to Statista, AWS accounts for 30% of the global cloud market, ahead of Microsoft Azure’s 21% and Google Cloud’s 12%, with the three companies accounting for more than 60% of the total cloud share.
“The vast majority of the data that makes up the websites we use every day is stored in data warehouses owned by just three companies, and we have repeatedly seen these companies suffer power outages that bring vast swaths of the web down for hours,” Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation, said in comments shared with The Defiant. “This AWS outage is just another example of the single point of failure problem.”
The incident has renewed interest in alternatives to centralized infrastructure, including blockchain-based decentralized networks such as Filecoin and Akash, Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann told The Defiant.
“Every time AWS goes down, it’s a reminder to not only[decentralized finance]but the entire technology industry that the internet still operates with a single point of failure,” he said. “The irony is that many ‘decentralized’ projects still rely on centralized cloud infrastructure, and even those that don’t are still running on an ISP or some kind of centralized technical infrastructure. That’s the weakest link.”
file coin
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network with a total value locked (TVL) of $21 million that uses cryptographic proofs to ensure that your data is securely stored and continuously accessible across a network of independent providers.
Belcher explained that this approach reduces dependence on a single company or server and allows websites and applications to remain online even if some nodes fail.
“Filecoin is all about creating a robust, decentralized alternative for the next generation web so that we are not dependent on just one company,” she told The Defiant. “This includes Web3 projects. If a Web3 project is out of service due to an AWS outage, it highlights the need to use distributed storage for those projects as well.”
According to a recent Messari report commissioned by the Filecoin Foundation, the network includes tools such as Akave, Storacha, and Basin for integration and search networks such as Titan and FilCDN to improve speed and reliability.
Akash
Another alternative that experts point to is Akash, a decentralized cloud platform that allows developers to rent computing resources from a decentralized network instead of relying on a centralized provider. Manage allocations, payments, and validation using blockchain-based smart contracts.
“When it comes to compute, Akash (distributed GPU/CPU marketplace), Valdi, and Flux (distributed app/compute fabric) are the main options that developers are actually deploying right now,” Storj CTO Jacob Willoughby told The Defiant.
Willoughby explained that the benefits of using such a platform include reduced risk of a single cloud, increased censorship resistance, increased data durability, and reduced vendor lock-in. He added that a practical approach for many companies is a hybrid multicloud strategy.
Using tools like Kubernetes and other compute coordination systems, companies can move data-intensive processes to distributed networks while running core workloads on AWS or GCP, he said. This allows resources to automatically scale based on demand, reducing the chance of downtime caused by a single provider.
“This requires companies that are willing to focus on the long term and prioritize efforts to deploy this and test it for failure,” he said. “The long-term alternative is to try to get an answer to ‘What if the economy goes down?'”
trade off
Still, as companies look beyond traditional cloud providers, they face trade-offs. A centralized cloud is easy to use, but an outage can cause major problems. Distributed systems are difficult to manage, Stadelman said, but they can continue to operate even if a component fails.
He explained that the trade-offs are complex and concluded that “with every AWS outage, more teams realize which is actually more important.”
Meanwhile, StatusCake CEO and founder James Barnes offered a different perspective. As an infrastructure monitoring service, his team has seen firsthand how cloud providers like AWS run into problems and incident events can spike dramatically in seconds.
Barnes pointed out that while there is a growing interest in “cloud decentralization,” the Internet is already a distributed system with built-in redundancy and global routing. Leading providers also provide predictability and reliability for security for large organizations.
“Replacing the internet with crypto nodes doesn’t inherently make things more resilient, given that the internet is already decentralized,” he said. “In fact, it will almost certainly result in volatility, inconsistent performance, and a lack of clear accountability when something goes wrong.”
Instead, he suggested viewing distributed solutions as a backup tool for redundancy rather than a complete replacement for traditional cloud infrastructure.
“Intelligent diversification”
Nokkvi Dan Ellidason, CEO of GAIMIN, offered a third perspective, highlighting how distributed systems can be used strategically.
“This is not about replacement, this is about maturing critical internet infrastructure.
“For serious companies, a complete transition to a purely decentralized model today would be irresponsible. The real strategy is intelligent diversification,” he said.
Ellidason explained that platforms need to decouple the cloud and leverage the strengths of new infrastructure layers where it makes the most sense.
“For workloads where resiliency and extreme cost efficiency are paramount, such as archival storage, content delivery networks, and certain stateless computing tasks, DePIN offers an almost unbeatable value proposition,” he explained. “So it’s about breaking it down and making sure you don’t get locked into a system that doesn’t serve you.”
He praised projects like Filecoin for decentralized storage and Render for reimagining the economics of GPU rendering. “They’ve proven that this model works at scale, and we’re learning a tremendous amount from that,” Elidason said. “So the point is not to abandon hyperscalers; it is to ramp up hyperscalers, reduce the risk of hyperscaler dependence, and build a more complete, resilient, and economically efficient Internet through distributed systems.”
