Huh? Historically, almost all content on the internet has had a single point of failure. Moving "into the cloud" is moving to a distributed model, and generally

Huh? Historically, almost all content on the internet has had a single point of failure. Moving "into the cloud" is moving to a distributed model, and generally app engine will protect you from single points of failure. As others have noted, if you distribute your own self-managed servers across the globe, you end up with a very similar system, but now you have to manage it. What appears to be happening here is that you're still vulnerable because the C&C infrastructure ultimately has a single command source, and so can be vulnerable if some code is pushed that affects the whole system. Your homegrown cloud will suffer from the same vulnerability, it may just be more or less easy to manage depending on how specialized your needs are compared to the more general requirements of GAE. Edit: actually, maybe I missed what you're advocating with "local direct connections". This might make more sense from a user's perspective: if everyone ran their own little cloud, a failure may bring down reddit, but not reddit, heroku, pinterest, etc simultaneously. That's actually an interesting point, but I'm not sure if it really matters if they sync up their downtimes (since they would still have downtime, and maybe more or less of it depending on how much they could afford to invest into managing their distributed solution). I'm also not sure if that really solves the problem, since there are other concentrations in the network, just less visible ones (there are a fairly small number of major datacenters around the world, for instance, and managing your own colocated server doesn't matter if the whole building goes dark). I do agree that at the very least we need to maintain an ecosystem of "cloud" providers, however.