[zevv]

Not distributed per se, but diversity makes a huge difference in resilience.

When everybody is using the exact same tech, the fall out of an incident can be huge because it will affect everybody everywhere at the same time. Superficially it might seem efficient and smart, but the end result is fragility.

Diversity of species is what nature ended up with as the ultimate solution: the individual species do not matter, but life as a whole will be able to flourish. With technology, we're now moving the other way: every single thing gets concentrated into one of the few cloud providers. Resilience decreases, fragility increases.

[salawat]

I prefer heterogeneity rather than diversity. Different implementations of similar processes fenerally make different tradeoffs, incurring different bottlenecks, and resulting in an ecosystem with a higher statistical probability that one relative Black Swan won't wipe out a key structural function in it's totality.

It's actually a hallmark of building fault tolerant systems and ecosystems. Pity the economists and MBA's can't be convinced of it. Otherwise there'd be less push to create TBTF institutions.