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There are some neat ideas here -- building a PAAS off of p2p technologies to enable network autodiscovery, automated load-balancing, distributed storage, Webass

by hosh 2y ago

There are some neat ideas here -- building a PAAS off of p2p technologies to enable network autodiscovery, automated load-balancing, distributed storage, Webassembly-native, etc. Having put stuff through production though, I'm a bit skeptical about how well it works out in the wild, though I am interested in learning how well it does and what its failure modes are. If it works well-enough, it has the potential for democratizing production apps. I'm not sure how they are going to make money with their enterprise offering though.

dsamy 2y ago
Scaling using p2p is something that some of the big Silicon Valley giants use internally. It scales very well. Tau uses a combination of techniques on top of the DHT to ensure response time is quick. Unfortunately, our documentation is not that great (working on it), but we have three services that accelerate discovery and routing: Seer (keeps tabs on nodes' health and offers a DNS interface as well), Gateway (a load balancer that forwards traffic to nodes it keeps tunnels with), and TNS (a replicated registry of resources: what is what). Between Seer and Gateway, the system handles resiliency. Internally, CRDT is used for replication, which: * allows nodes to still work offline or if the network gets partitioned * prevents split-brain The cons of CRDT are when it comes to orchestrating services like databases; we could end up with multiple instances of a master node, for example. This is why we plan to add a cluster mechanism that will allow the formation of dynamic clusters to facilitate the orchestration of stateful containers and VMs. For the money part, we have a managed offering, enterprise support, a web console, and are building more.