A local supplier is not necessarily faster, even with shipping from overseas factored in.

Two suppliers are more resilient so, you always have a fall back. Suppliers run into trouble all the time, single sources screw you in that case. Cluster risks are always bad.

You can also play the suppliers off each other. My dad's employer did a lot of data processing. They had two computer vendors they liked to keep near a 50-50 split when they weren't punishing one of them for some perceived slight.

I learned much later that the only way to get IBM and some other big vendors to do anything at all for you is to move your checkbook. That is, if the checkbook might be coming out of your pocket, they're interested. If you threaten to put it away, they are very interested. The rest of the time? Fuck you, we have other checkbooks to worry about.

Unfortunately you can't just spin supplies up as if they are in AWS EC2 zone. It takes years to built if they weren't already there. The more apprioriate comparison would be to have a home-hosted server cluster in addition to EC2 cluster which most companies simply don't do. It's just too expensive.

Sure, if companies start thinking about their supplier base just now, well that's just too late. I can only comment on physical supply chains, so. But even there building up suppliers takes time and money. Personally, I would love to see the risk of single sources be valued higher in the equations. One can dream, right?

Edit: Now I got the cluster thing. I meant cluster in the sense of risk, meaning you have a single point of failure and high degree of risk concentration. But your point is really interesting, I never thought about these aspects of cloud computing.