In the aftermath of the AWS outage, there’s a lot of talk about how the Internet has been taken hostage by this specific provider, and how the internet is not decentralized anymore. While it doesn’t seem like this is necessarily wrong - after all, the recent outage, and all AWS outages for that matter, seem to take down a sizeable portion of the internet - it’s both misguided and ignores the deeper problems at play here.

There’s a feeling you have when you just uncover a fact so shocking, and yet so obvious, that’s hard to put into words. That’s what I felt when I saw this wonderful statistic: as far as I can tell, the only category of products that had a deflationary rate, averaging -7% a year for the past 20 years, was “Information Technology, Hardware And Services”. I had already read about this trend back in my days as an undergrad in Economics (15 years ago at this point), but to be confronted about the stark reality of these numbers ends up being a punch to the gut, and candy to my brain.

A sometimes overlooked aspect of infrastructure is how we can use different layers of the OSI model to implement features that are not typically associated with it. One example is to provide access control for applications through the network layer - while this is typically associated with and implemented at the application layer, there are simple ways to leverage level 3 solutions to very quickly and efficiently provide a similar effect. One such case is the usage of Wireguard in combination with either a firewall or a reverse proxy.

One of the things that I’ve always tried to implement on all the services I run is self-sufficiency. Now, this isn’t completely achievable, in the sense that I still depend on services and software that other people provide, but it’s still an ideal to strive for. In my particular case, all the services I run are self-hosted with no external dependencies, either from a raspberry pi I host at home, or a small VPS that I rent from a provider.

excipiō (present infinitive excipere, perfect active excēpī, supine exceptum); third conjugation iō-variant

1. to take out, extract, pull out
2. to except, exempt from, exclude
3. to rescue, release
4. to host, accommodate, welcome

Let me start by establishing some ethos here, which I think might be important: I deleted my Instagram account in 2013; my Facebook account went in 2015 (well, technically only 2016 because it turns out that I had only “deactivated” it at first, but oh well); I don’t use Spotify, Netflix, or any other streaming service; my phone, even though it’s Android, has Google Play Services disabled for 95% of the time; I run my own e-mail server, self-host my blog, don’t even use Google (or an AI) for searching anymore. Oh, and even though I’ve mentioned this in the about page, I’ve used Linux full-time on my desktop and servers for pretty much 20 years at this point - I’ve an allergic reaction to Windows.