Thread by @swardley

X : What is the argument against national cloud?
Me : See Texas. End of story.

X : Explain?
Me : You attempt to localise services for reasons of "sovereignty" without understanding the wider landscape then you expose yourself to new threats and weakness. Co-operation and distribution are your friends for any infrastructural service.

X : Infrastructural?
Me : Any commodity or utility component that are consumed by other components in a chain whether compute, water, electricity or transport components like road, rail etc.

X : Distribution?
Me : Of provision, not authority over i.e. a well regulated single provider with distributed provision or a well regulated market or nationalised service are all viable options.

However with the options you must consider distribution of provision and seperate that from authority over (which can be centralised). A national grid which is connected via standards to other national grids is one path, equally you could have regulatory control over a market.

What you want to avoid is reducing distribution in order to gain some notion of "control" i.e. building a home grown national cloud in a market of distributed cloud would be ... foolish.

X : I thought you were in favour of nationalising AWS?
Me : I am, in the West.
X : But how would that work. No single country could.
Me : Who said anything about single country? AWS is an archteype distributed service that provides common infrastructural components ...

... excluding a lack of imagination and co-operation then there is nothing stopping Western Govs (from the US to EU) acquiring a controlling stake in Amazon / AWS by working in concert and then declaring it as a common infrastructural good.

X : Could that happen?
Me : In the West? Not likely ... lack of imagination and co-operation. In other regions like China, then yes - see Alibaba. Nowt wrong with exerting authority over a distributed service, a lot wrong with localising for reasons of "sovereignty".

X : I thought you were in favour of brexit?
Me : I am. See global trading nation. If you start localising for reasons of "sovereignty" then you are missing the entire point. There is a power shift from West to East, we should be bridging, expanding horizons and not restricting.

X : Explain?
Me : When we talk about distribution, there are two parts - provision and authority over. "Localisation" is about the provision i.e. make it local. "Sovereignty" is about exerting influence over, the act of authority. Don't mix the two up.

X : "Local services for local people"
Me : Lol, the dull stereotype to describe brexit popularised by particular individuals. It says more about the people saying it than it does about brexit.

If you want "local services for local people" then you want to talk about EU cloud concepts. That's an awesome example of people mixing up concepts of localisation with sovereignty ... misguided, almost child like and worthy of the playground.

X : Doesn't sovereignty require localisation?
Me : No. If you think about physical spaces then we exert our authority, our sovereignty beyond our borders through various mechanisms including soft power.

This is no different with digital sovereignty except the slight problem that in the digital field then the West is dominated by blah, blah story telling, we have no maps and because of this we have no idea where our borders are nor what should we be influencing

which is how you end up with these ridiculous ideas that we should build our own "national" cloud etc. It's political gameplay of the simple minded or "local services for local people" etc. It's not a brexit thing.

It's more a "we don't know what we're doing because we have no situational awareness or understanding of the landscape" thing.

X : Do you have any maps you could share?
Me : Of what?
X : Of industry?
Me : And what are you going to do with those? Apply strategy?
X : Is there a problem?
Me : If you can't map the space, you don't stand a hope in hell of applying strategy to it ...

... it's like the chess player who doesn't understand the board or peices but wants to add strategy to the game. I'm afraid mapping is a journey and you start by learning to map and not jumping to strategy or scenario planning or anticipation or anything else.

If you want help to get started, try here -

https://twitter.com/HiredThought/status/1362038495548702725

... @HiredThought is an excellent teacher.

X : I'm not sure I agree.
Me : That you can't apply strategy if you don't understand the board and the pieces i.e. the rules of the game.
X : Yes
Me : Ok, what's my strategy?

X : What game is that?
Me : I'm not telling you. Nor am I going to tell you how the pieces move, how to remove pieces, whether you should or not, what the pieces are or how to win. Now give me strategy.

X : But I can see the "map" which clearly show that it is not enough.
Me : Which is my point. It's why you need to learn to map, you need to learn to play. Try it without even a map ... what's my strategy in this game?