“These nodes are intended, and designed, to be decentralized. In practice, however, they are heavily centralized. This is due to the low cost of entry and the reduced complexity of running blockchain nodes in the cloud. The advantages of public cloud to node operators are similar to the advantages to any enterprise IT department: low cost of entry, reduced complexity and pay-as-you-grow scale.
These advantages drive many node operators to the public cloud, which is dominated by a few companies globally. In its current state, the "decentralized" blockchain is often recentralized on dominant providers like AWS. For example, according to Ethernodes (via Cointelegraph), one of the most popular blockchain networks, Ethereum, had an estimated 52% of the nodes processing its ledger running in AWS as of August 2022. There is nothing decentralized about that.”