This seems to miss the fact that the cloud providers basic service is a highly discoverable highly available way of advertising endpoints and managing highly du

This seems to miss the fact that the cloud providers basic service is a highly discoverable highly available way of advertising endpoints and managing highly durable and resilient state in a distributed system. Yes you can do that locally. It’s just really fragile and difficult. The ability to collaborate between two local machines by using a well known service remotely that’s always available means even when the neighboring laptops lid is shut and reopened things work because the only real dependency that laptop has was its tcp stack. The other laptop doesn’t have to deal with the interruption, try to figure out when it’s come back online, renegotiate connectivity, figure out any state drift and reconcile state, etc etc. Bonus is it works the same when you take your laptop to the bathroom to take a crap as it did when it was 2ft away. I’m not even going to go into the pitiful state of adhoc local protocols and hardware stacks.