if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.

>if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.

I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many) unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case: bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on someone else's servers.

The only responses are either central counter measures or decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity, that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?

You should have the opposite takeaway - if you don't have redundancy in the cloud you don't actually have uptime.

Your servers also may get hit with a bomb/missle.

Why would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?

I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile defence network, you are vulnerable.

In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway. (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate, with your Patriot or whatever)

"If you don't colo your own generators you don't own anything."