As an alternative to the “consolidate secrets, trust and agency into an IP, NDA, and legally protected company”, decentralisation provides an opportunity for communities and cooperatives to scale their operations and infrastructure to the capacity of companies, without the exclusionary walls/borders of companies and sacrificed agency of members.
Currently HashiCorp products seem targeted for a self-hosted cloud, or a delegated cloud, e.g. deploying the HashiCorp products to infrastructure that I alone as the consolidated entity trust or have legal contracts that I alone as the consolidated entity can rely upon if trust breaks.
However, communities and cooperatives delegate such trust and finances and infrastructure to each other rather than consolidate it into a single individual/collective entity. This has worked well for communities and cooperatives for everything so far that isn’t the cloud, such as cash and the physical world. In the cloud, a lot of innovation is still occurring to claim back one’s own governance, through cryptography (end to end encryption, digital signatures and verification), cryptocurrencies (be your own bank, just like cash), compute (smart contracts, reproducible builds), and data (blockchains, distributed hash tables, p2p).
To enable this for cloud services, rather than constraining compute to that enabled through blockchains, could one build a federated network using hashicorp products? e.g. instead of a consolidated entity buying more servers, instead individual members of the community can buy pre-configured (or self-configured via tutorials and/or scripts and with verifiable/reproducible builds) raspberry pis (or just a vm on their laptop/desktop) running the hashicorp products and the web services to expand the capacity of the decentralised/federated network.
Challenges to this I assume is ensuring the virtual machine (virtualbox/docker/podman/isolate) that is running the hashicorp products and the web services, are contained in a secured virtual environment free from tampering, to prevent bad actors from modifying the federated service.
Could such securely-contained crowd-sourced server infrastructure be possible? Or is the only hope to completely rewrite one’s digital services to an entirely ground-up decentralised technology stack.