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2 weeks ago
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Yesterday hundreds of thousands of organisations around the globe lost important services because of a fault in a datacentre in Northern Virginia, US. It’s yet another reminder of just how vulnerable centralised technology solutions are to global outages. Signal, Slack and Zoom were all among the many services to go down as a part of the AWS outage.
In contrast, last week at The Matrix Conference, multiple governments and public sector organisations were presenting on how they are building on the decentralised Matrix open standard to enable digitally sovereign and highly resilient communications. Digital sovereignty is a phrase that means ‘having autonomy over the technology you use’ and, in the context of the AWS outage, resilience can be interpreted as ‘not losing your ability to operate because of something that happened in a single US datacentre.’
Getting back to the future
Back in the cold war era, US Defence-funding led to the development of ARPANET - the genesis of today’s internet - which entrusted communications to a decentralised network capable of withstanding the devastation of a nuclear strike. In a decentralised network there is no central point of control or authority, so the network doesn’t risk the type of global outage suffered by AWS, Signal, Slack and Zoom. It’s ironic that the modern day Big Tech internet, and in particular the centralised software-as-a-service products it supports, no longer offers that resilience.
Had yesterday’s AWS outage been caused by a localised disaster - an earthquake or severe flooding - it would be a clear warning that a carefully targeted physical attack could take out critical communications services for days. If the AWS outage had been a result of a rogue state sabotaging a submarine cable, there would be a huge outcry of concern.
In an increasingly volatile world, governments are rethinking their technology strategy. The notion of digital sovereignty reflects the need to rely on technology in the most challenging of circumstances, not just avoiding a third party supplier’s technology blooper. As we have already seen with Russia’s war against Ukraine, global alliances are shifting. Under pressure from its domestic government, Maxar Technologies pulled its satellite imaging services to Poland in a move designed to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. What if, in a future scenario, AWS is pressured to pull its services in the same way that Microsoft was pushed to stop or suspend its services to the International Criminal Court?
Governments’ strategic embrace of digital sovereignty reflects their need for autonomy over their technology. Governments have to protect themselves from being manipulated by a foreign power, and that means self-hosting as opposed to relying on a foreign cloud provider. Decentralisation enables self-hosting, and supports a robust and resilient network.
The resistance of a decentralised network
An individual deployment can still suffer an outage, of course, but the rest of the network is not affected. Recently matrix.org, the free of charge public server from Matrix Foundation, suffered a RAID failure taking it offline. While matrix.org is the biggest single server in the public Matrix network, those using other servers - either their own or those from other providers - were entirely unaffected.
Governments, defence organisations or other parts of the public sector either directly self-host their Matrix deployment, or use trusted (typically domestic) service providers. These large government organisations, which are themselves decentralised, then simply need to ensure their own deployments are sufficiently robust.
They build resilience by running powerful, scalable server-side solutions to create a rugged federation supported by multiple servers. Each individual deployment can build in its own High Availability assurances and redundancy. Such deployments may use Element Server Suite Pro, which is specifically designed to support large government deployments to ensure performance, efficiency and resilience. However, they can also quite deliberately use other Matrix-based server-side solutions - including building their own from open source software - to ensure there’s no over-reliance on a single vendor. After all, digital sovereignty means that a government should not end up being vendor locked, but instead choose an open standard supported by a healthy, competitive ecosystem.
Many government departments that rely on centralised communications platforms struggled yesterday. Government organisations using Matrix-based solutions simply carried on working as normal. Their embrace of digital sovereignty, and the decentralised Matrix open standard, left them unaffected. AWS is operational again now, but the lesson remains. Choose digital sovereignty, decentralisation and resilience. Choose Matrix over vulnerable centralised solutions.
