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Like an amoeba the public cloud is extending fingerlike projections to the edge in a new kind of architecture that creates a world spanning distributed infrastructure under one centralized management, billing, and security domain.
This issue—the deep nature of centralization—came up as a comment on my article What Do You Believe Now That You Didn't Five Years Ago? Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses.
Centralization can refer to the locus of computation, but it also refers to a boundary, to a domain of control.
Facebook, Netflix, and Google are all distributed across much of the world, but they are still centralized services because control is centralized. You know this because in a browser, no matter where you are in the world, you navigate to facebook.com, netflix.com, or google.com, you never enter the URL for independent shards, yet all your data and services magically follow you around like a hyperactive puppy.
That's the world we've come to expect. That's how services built on a cloud work.
In an unexpected development, the public cloud is expanding control out to the edge. As I wrote in Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 27th, 2018:
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