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Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
- wmf 14y agoSo the customer pays Gridspot and Gridspot does not pay anything to the person whose computer is actually doing the work? Great business model if you can make it work.
- malkia 14y agoreminds me of skype, but the differnce is that with skype I only want one good connection, so find the best one through the forest... but this one?
- fl3tch 14y agoThe difference is that most Skype users don't even know they are carrying traffic for the network. The client silently punches a whole in their router and makes itself a pain to close (for example by reconfiguring what the red X does) without ever explaining why it wants to keep running so badly.
- josscrowcroft 14y agoThis is completely news to me. One of those "WTF?" moments!
- Maakuth 14y agoMy understanding is that after MSFT acquisition, they don't use their customer devices as supernodes anymore [1]. For "silent hole punching" with UPnP, that is very much business as usual for any VoIP application as well as other applications, such as Windows' Teredo IPv6 thingy. [1]: Ars Technica seems to confirm: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
- malkia 14y agoNow that was news to me :) Didn't know they've changed it that way. Thanks for the article!
- malkia 14y agoreminds me of skype, but the differnce is that with skype I only want one good connection, so find the best one through the forest... but this one?
- xSwag 14y agoIronic how the website is down for me.
- jyothepro 14y agoyes the website is down for me too
- stephengillie 14y agoAs a demonstration of their capabilities, I'm underwhelmed.
- lemieux 14y agoIt was slow but it appeared at last after 5 tries.
- heretohelp 14y agoSo we're supposed to trust these people with our data?
- StavrosK 14y agoNo, it says it right on the page. It's for non-privacy-sensitive applications.
- heretohelp 14y agoPresumably you are using the results of the distributed system's work for something. Can you trust those results from people who can't keep a web server alive?
- wedtm 14y agoBoom goes the dynamite.
- haliax 14y agoThis reminds me of http://www.pluraprocessing.com/ http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
- taylorbuley 14y agoOne thing I'd like to hear is whether this is opt-in or -out and whether it's client or server side.
- sandieman 14y agoOr http://cpusage.com http://cpusage.com
- qeorge 14y agoI'm curious to see if this works. "SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost). I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point moot.
- staunch 14y agoMaybe turn it into a raffle? Every month a random VM host gets a huge prize (all the money that would have been distributed)? If the service was really successful you could be giving out n * $100k prizes every month. Just treat it like the (much cheaper) server hosting bill.
- EmmaKay 14y agoAlready being done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jjqHXsVF-0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jjqHXsVF-0
- justinsb 14y agoThis is great - it looks to have some very sensible answers to many of the questions of how a distributed cloud would work. The thing that excites me most about a distributed cloud is that it could turn the notion of elastic computing on its head. You can buy your peak compute requirement, and sell back the surplus. So you can get elastic computing not by re-engineering your own systems, but by selling excess capacity to those whose workloads are a good match.
- kno 14y agoThey could use few of those cheap instances to run their web site, its so slow.
- spullara 14y agoYay, trying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Power again.
- lost-theory 14y agoHow do they handle security? If the software they're using to virtualize these instances is exploitable, then you could break into the host machine and do whatever you like with it.
- TomatoTomato 14y agoI agree, theres a level of trust when you use hosting providers like Amazon and heroku. With this, there's no way i'd do anything remotely sensitive with one of these boxes.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 14y agoSo, how would one contribute to this?
- soupboy 14y agoFrom [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.". Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI [1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe
- adamsmith 14y agoThere's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort. And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.
- ry0ohki 14y agoYou have 100k computers running this? How come I've never heard of it and don't see a place to sign up to be a host computer?
- cycrutchfield 14y agoSeriously? Installer link is on the homepage: https://gridspot.com/ https://gridspot.com/
- ry0ohki 14y agohah, doh. Thought the article linked to the homepage, still think they should have a link from the /compute/ page, people might be interested in both using and being used for this.
- vld 14y agoWow, really, six figures? 250 results for "gridspot.com" on google, and yet you have 100000+ computers running this software? I want to hire you! I'll pay you 10 figures/month!
- marcamillion 14y agoThis is brilliant...I am glad someone finally ran with it. I wrote a blog post about this almost 2 years ago - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dollar-startup-idea http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla... There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down and take your raping. Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns. Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?
- Jach 14y ago> including fighting DDOS attacks Or cheaply launching them. For a mere $100 you get 100,000 machines for an hour, that's more than enough to cause problems for a sad number of websites out there. Edit: Or not, given that all traffic goes through a centralized node.
- marcamillion 14y agoYeh....was about to say that I doubt that given the architecture. The difference is that there is a for-profit company that controls the nodes, so I doubt they would allow that. Completely different than a real botnet where the botnet owner controls everything.
- marcamillion 14y agoSomething else just occurred to me....by not paying users to get axs to their computers, it removes the business model headache of squabbling over revenue and violating ISP TOS. I believe it is against most TOS for most (if not all) ISPs for a consumer to resell their inet axs. That was another consideration that I looked at two years ago - which makes the model not as attractive. Although, I imagine that the holy grail is actually reaching a place where users are making money from their inet connection - I am sure that will drive adoption at an increasing rate.
- icehero 14y agoSo this is where the bot nets computing power go?!
- panarky 14y agoThis would be perfect for crawling with a large number of distinct IP addresses, or for fighting DDOS attacks. However: "All network traffic is proxied through a central data center we maintain." https://gridspot.com/compute/api_help https://gridspot.com/compute/api_help
- adamsmith 14y agoYeah, to be honest we're trying to avoid the business of selling wholesale access to a lot of IP addresses, hence the proxying of traffic. If there are specific, legitimate uses for a large number of IPs, for example fighting DDOS, then that might be something we should build!
- josscrowcroft 14y agoI don't know about 'legitimate', but I can think of plenty of specific ones. I say build it (just might want to incorporate it separately... possibly in Sweden..)
- slig 14y agoHow is possible to fight a DDOS attack with lots of IP addresses?
- milesokeefe 14y agoI think panarky meant flee/hide from.
- panarky 14y agoFighting fire with fire: http://phys.org/news/2011-03-horizon-victims-ddos.html http://phys.org/news/2011-03-horizon-victims-ddos.html
- donavanm 14y agoIncrease the attack surface area. With anycast the nearest nodes to the attackers "sink" all of the traffic. The rest of the nodes continue to serve other customers with no I'll effect. With this product you will have a very wide base of unicast addresses. Treat each node/address as disposable. Use fast failing health checks and an out of band control plane. As each node falls to attack remove it from your service discovery layer (DNS/http 302/etc). See "fast flux dns" for implementation ideas. The attacker will spend a disproportionate amount of resources (packets/s) attacking each of your disposable nodes. The majority of your "good" customers will continue to be served. In a traditional tiered architecture the L3->L7 routing layer (LB/Proxy) is very expensive to scale vertically. Your data store & compute end are clustered behind these choke points. Remove/minimize shared state and you can have independent units of compute. Remove those L3->L7 choke points and you can get a wider & flatter L1->L3 network fabric. Besides increased durability you get more aggregate bandwidth per $.
- Xorlev 14y agoWhy would people contribute? You're basically profiting off donated energy. I doubt that's a sustainable model.
- thegyppo 14y agoWe're about to launch a service that allows comparison of benchmarks from cloud providers (UnixBench/IO & BW), would love to run it on your plans to compare against Amazon etc. http://serverbear.com/benchmarks http://serverbear.com/benchmarks
- deno 14y agoThey’re not EC2 alternative. Benchmarking GridSpot makes absolutely no sense.
- panarky 14y agoThis seems too good to be true, but it's working great for me! With no credit card, I got an instance with 3 GB RAM running in less than 60 seconds. It costs $0.002 per hour. One glitch: Both the UI and the API say there are 2 instances running, but they both have the same IP address and port. If there really are 2 instances, how do I ssh to the second one?
- adamsmith 14y agoThat sounds like a bug! Just sent you email : )
- panarky 14y agoAnother possible bug is that the UI reports 1.56 core-hours used, but my single-core instance has only been running 24 minutes.
- adamsmith 14y agoOk!, the two instances you were seeing were duplicate listings of the same instance. That bug was introduced a few days ago by some database optimizations, and is now fixed! Thanks for reporting it. The 1.56 core-hours is mostly from inst_KGN6tZdFgoeL2C9KPKBsNA which has four physical cpus and has been running for almost an hour at this point. Thanks so much for trying this out!!!
- panarky 14y agoIt shouldn't matter how many physical CPUs there are, I only care how many my VM can use and how fast each one is. If `cat /proc/cpuinfo` or `top` only shows one CPU, I wouldn't expect to be charged for 4 of them.
- adamsmith 14y agoYou are of course absolutely right! There was a bug (now fixed) that was causing only one cpu to show up in the VMs. All instances started after now should have the proper number of cpus visible. (Note, the number of cpus might be higher than the number of physical cpus if the host cpu supports hyperthreading.)
- uvdiv 14y ago"Thus, we decided to only run computations when the outdoor temperature near the user is below a certain level (currently 16 degrees Celcius). When it's that cold outside, we assume that the computer's room is being heated anyway. All of the electricity used to do computations gets turned into heat, according to the laws of physics. So the heat generated by the computations displaces the need for heat generated by a heater, eliminating or minimizing the net elecricity usage." https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe Doesn't work in the USA. Natural gas heating in the US averages $10.80/thousand cubic feet ~= $10/gigajoule [1]. Electricity averages $0.1179/kWh ~= $33/gigajoule [1] -- more than three as expensive for raw heat. Natural gas heating is twice as common in US homes, with about 55.6 million vs. 28.4 million using electric resistance heating [2] -- not including 9.8 million electric heat pumps. In the common case, you're displacing cheap gas heating with expensive electric resistance heating; the cost "savings" on heating is small. At 100W power consumption, you're spending 1.2 cents/hour on electricity, saving 0.4 cents/hour on gas, for a net loss of 0.8 cents/hour. Meanwhile your CPU is being sold for 0.1 - 0.3 cents/hour [3] -- far less than the electricity needed to run it, apparently (?). [1] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/prices.cfm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/prices.cfm (residential retail prices, 2011) [2] (.xls) http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/xls/HC6.1%20Space%20Heating%20by%20Housing%20Unit%20Type.xls http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2009/xls/HC6... [3] https://gridspot.com/compute/ https://gridspot.com/compute/ European costs for comparison: [4] http://www.energy.eu/ http://www.energy.eu/
- humbert 14y agoBreak-even is 0.2 cents/hour per core for a 4-core system that uses 100 watts. A full i7-3770K system with integrated graphics uses 102 watts under heavy load [1], and when each of its 4 cores sells for 0.2 cents/hour, that covers the 4*0.2 = 0.8 cents/hour difference from natural gas to electricity. 0.3 cents/hour covers the entire electricity usage, providing free heat. [1] http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73770K-Ivy-Bridge-Processor-Review/?page=13 http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i73770K-Ivy-Bridge...
- uvdiv 14y ago
- mrbill 14y ago"Click below to contribute! (Windows only)". There goes the 16G RAM, quad-proc machine I had sitting idle running Linux; I'm not going to reinstall the OS just to help someone else out with free CPU time.
- rasur 14y agoSo, the only payment option is via credit-card.. And if you have no credit card what then? Am I S.O.L?
- rasur 14y agoSeriously? A down-vote because I ask a question about payment options? Unbelievable.
- superuser2 14y agoHow do you pay for everything else online? Do you mail Amazon checks or something?
- rasur 14y agoI use pay-pal or debit card, if I actually buy something online. Credit-card culture isn't so great where I live, and I personally don't have one - hence the question.
- deno 14y agoAFAIK, credit cards are just debit cards using credit instead of balance. You need to have CVV2 for online processing, that’s it.
- RaphiePS 14y agoWill you be charged for pre-credit card instances after you add a card? Also, it's very unclear as to how you end a running instance.
- adamsmith 14y agoYes, though I suppose you could just create another account. : ) You can stop a running instance by shutting down the OS. If it's something people really want we can add an API/UI mechanism to do it.
- RaphiePS 14y agoHuh, I did sudo shutdown now and it worked, but the gui says it's still running. So a button might be nice.
- jazzychad 14y agoI've also tried 'sudo shutdown now' and while it did shut down the OS, the site says they are still running and the times are still increasing. How will I know when they've actually stopped? Also +1 for an API to end instances, please.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- devmach 14y agoFrom https://gridspot.com/privacy https://gridspot.com/privacy > We have designed the Gridspot Software... Sorry if i missed but : Who are you ? Please put some information about "yourself" somewhere on your site. And if you can, please answer these questions on your page : - What is your company name and legal type ? - What is your location ? - How can i contact to you ? No, support@gridspot.com doesn't count, put some landline numbers too. - Who are your team members ? And please don't use " Whois guard" ? edit: Looks like, downvoting is easier than answering the questions. Seriously, can you explain to me : why do you trust some company which doesn't give any information about itself ?
- uvdiv 14y agoI think it's Adam Smith of Xobni, he's the guy (adamsmith) who submitted this link. http://blog.adamsmith.cc/about-adam-smith.html http://blog.adamsmith.cc/about-adam-smith.html
- devmach 14y agoThanks. But that's an assumption. He / they should write relevant company informations on gridspot.com.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoNo, it's Adam but you're right that he should write something about himself within the company website. In the meantime, you can see him answering feedback in the comments of this discussion. Here's one of them http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226286 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226286
- uvdiv 14y agoI agree, it's bizarre to have a commercial website with no contacts, legal information, and a disguised whois registration.
- dfischer 14y agoThis would be more cool if the portion of profits went to those who contributed cycles.
- freshhawk 14y agoWouldn't work. As soon as you move the incentive to the world of financial norms people start wondering why they are bothering for a couple bucks a year. They will get more people doing it to be part of a community if they can keep that community seeming "cool" in some way.
- larrys 14y agoExactly low pay (generally) provides more of a disincentive than no pay. OTOH if you say "we will donate to charity $x" that might work.
- TomatoTomato 14y agoOr at least purchase carbon offsets...
- EmmaKay 14y agoIt does work, and it's being done: www.charityengine.com
- ricardobeat 14y agoIs this related to last year's node knockout entry for a distributed chess AI?
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoAs someone that's done some work on parallel chess, I don't see how this could have anything to do with the subject.
- jasonzemos 14y agoI work in the field too. These are exactly my thoughts on the matter, and I'm sorely disappointed with the comments in this thread hinting as such so far.
- timClicks 14y agoWindows only for contributions? That seems weird, given that jobs are running within a VM.
- jasonzemos 14y agoWhat happens when the contributor abruptly cuts out?
- infinii 14y agoI'm also curious, what happens if all your host contributors decided to stop?
- deno 14y agoHave fallback to EC2 if GridSpot can’t provide capacity you need at the moment. The same is true for any other cloud service, actually. E.g. Amazon was having problems issuing new instances in some regions following the most recent power outage. In theory you should try falling back to other regions/other clouds. It remains to be seen how much of a problem this will be in practice.
- deno 14y agoSame thing as with Spot Instances on Amazon. Save your work often, reschedule eagerly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPNnUo60pc&feature=play...
- jasonzemos 14y agoYes but Amazon operates out of a datacenter that will /strive/ to be online for all but a few minutes of each year. Transient machines spread over the internet on home or office PC's /do not/ have the same operational parameter. At this point I'm somewhat unsure of their actual business model. Are they reselling VPS instances from real providers or are they sourcing computational power from home/office PC's? This seems entirely unclear based on the reactions of this thread and the mostly ambiguous stuff written on their website. If they are sourcing computational power SETI@home style my question remains, and I encourage it to be upvoted and answered on such a technically competent site such as this. Marketing hype is cool, but I'm still an engineer when it comes to making choices.
- 14y ago
- cycrutchfield 14y agoThis is incredible and the pricing could be a game-changer for distributed compute
- deno 14y agoThe applications are very limited, but it’s nevertheless incredibly awesome for a particular niche.
- larrys 14y ago"While we allow Internet traffic from software doing compuations on our platform, it is all proxied seamlessly through a small set of computers operated by Gridspot." Seems that that small set of computers and IP addresses could be used to do the ill deeds of a bad actor. "Run anything" "Get SSH root access to each Linux instance." So exactly what is to prevent someone from spamming here and how would gridspot even know that was happening? To mention only one possibility.
- justinsb 14y agoBased on my understanding, there's a tightly-locked down outbound firewall: you only get HTTP,HTTPS and SSH ports. So sending mail over SMTP (spamming) can't happen. If someone is doing something evil over e.g. HTTP, presumably GridSpot can also block that and/or ban them from the system. If you're sending spam over e.g. Gmail via HTTPS, Gmail will shut you down. The people running the nodes don't need to worry about e.g. someone downloading illegal content and getting them in trouble, because it is proxied through GridSpot. I think it's a clever solution.
- FiloSottile 14y agoIt is obviously a VM, so the virtual network interface that you get will be proxified. The fun thing will be to see if someone can do some VM escaping and own 100k machines for free.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoHere's how you sustain this model: package the VM with free software just like the toolbar guys do. You pay the software guys a cut of the profit for every setup they have running (referral fee) and users get a new way to "pay" for software. I like this idea much better than all the spyware/crapware software vendors have to package into their product to earn a living. Consumers don't care about $2/month but a business would care about getting paid $2/month thousands of times. Edit: If a VM is too big to download all at once with a freeware product, you just install the seed software. Then, over the next few days, the seed software downloads the VM and slowly sets it up so there's no disruption to the customer's activity on the computer. I would also suggest you reserve the space needed on the disk with an empty file, roughly the size of the VM file. This way it's clear just how much space this newly installed software is taking on the customer's computer. This is all based on the idea that the customer agreed to this during the installation. To what extent "agreed" is left up to you to decide. I'd suggest a dedicated page during the installation with a prechecked box that explains what this is and what it's about to do.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI disagree. I don't think many companies that have 1000 computers would do this for $2/mo per node. That's like $22,000, also known as a rounding error for those kinds of companies. Besides, those companies tend to frown on these suspect applications.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoNo, I don't mean for companies to run it on their own servers, I mean for them to bundle the software with freeware software. The kind you find on download.com. Often, freeware software developers bundle toolbars and other spyware/crapware with their software to make money. My suggestion would be to allow them to include the VM with their software instead of spyware/crapware toolbars. These freeware authors would earn a commission for every VM install that makes money. Freeware developers need to earn money but their main option is to bundle their code with crapware now. This would be a nice alternative to that awful option.
- fsckin 14y agoIt'd be really sweet if they offered VMs with a video card as well... for science.
- purplezky 14y agoyou mean like 'bitcoin mining science' ;)
- zxcvvcxz 14y agoCan somebody explain to me how this works? Gridspot doesn't use a server farm like Amazon? I don't get it. Looks like a pretty sweet service though.
- damian2000 14y agoIf I understand it right, the 'cloud' VM you get is running whole or in part on desktop user's machines out there somewhere in the world (and connected to the internet) who have donated their machine's spare CPU power to GridSpot.
- mmsear 14y agoAre you guys using EC2 like Engineyard? Edit: I just checked the ip 107.20.186.94, and it does look like it's hosted on Amazon.
- TomatoTomato 14y agoWhat about the node-owner being able to look inside your box and see what you are doing?
- marcamillion 14y agoThere is a typo on the 'Gridspot Safe' page. Network proxying While we allow Internet traffic from software doing compuations on our platform, Should be 'computations'.
- panarky 14y agoIf VMs are running on hardware Gridspot doesn't control, and if the filesystem isn't encrypted, how is my data secured? At $0.002 per hour I'm actually OK with zero security, but it will limit the types of jobs that I'll use Gridspot for.
- repsilat 14y agoThis is explicitly part of their pitch to users. From TFA: > Gridspot is perfect for jobs that: > • ... > • Aren't privacy sensitive
- deno 14y agoIf the data is not confidential, but you’re worried about someone messing with your computations, it still might be worthwhile to use defensive strategy and just run the same task multiple times on separate instances and compare results before accepting output. Since the task can be scheduled in parallel, there’s no significant overhead and it’s still way cheaper than Amazon/Google. It’s not exactly replacement for EC2, but there’s a lot of applications that would fit Gridspot just fine. But I guess one has to be much more aware of all the security issues when writing for a platform like this. The Gridspot folks should perhaps consider creating solid list of best-practice guidelines. Now can someone also create Gridspot for storage? :)
- alexkcd 14y agoSame here. It would be great to get end-to-end encryption, but I don't think that this is currently practical. Some recent research [1] has shown that it's theoretically possible to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. But from what I remember, in practice the computation becomes orders of magnitude slower than on the unencrypted counterpart. [1] http://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/easy-fhe.pdf http://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/easy-fhe.pdf
- defilade 14y agoI can't believe anyone would install their software without having any idea who this guy is.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- omarchowdhury 14y agoYour customer service phone number is returning busy.
- stephen272 14y agoso this is basically BOINC but also allows for-profit/non-research companies to tap its resources
- jasonzemos 14y agoIt doesn't look like that at all.
- UK-AL 14y agoCan't someone create market-exchange type service, where price is set by supply and demand. People get paid for idle compute time, and other people buy it. The price will go As high it needs to, for suppliers to think it's worth while. It would interesting to see what the resting price is. I.e what suppliers think is worth while. It will probably be at max slightly higher than amazon, because people will do arbitrage with amazon.
- nmridul 14y agoIs it possible for someone to lend the idle time of their VPS / dedicated web Servers in return for cash ? People could run their websites without issue as most of the time, they may not be using it to full capacity. And you will get better connection (better than DSL speed) and better performance machines (server grade). Could be a win win for everyone.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoI bet web hosts would put in a clause that won't allow you to sublet in this manner.
- schiptsov 14y agoSomeone are trying to monetize bot-net technology? Nice.)
- EmmaKay 14y agoSounds familiar... http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17995888
- _j_ 14y agoThere's a typo on https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe second to last word of the first section. Electricity.
- donavanm 14y agoFacilities management is the worst part of "cloud" services. Getting this outsourced for low/no cost is brilliant. Check out the OnAPP CDN implementation. Please provide a standardish xen/kvm/vmware/vagrent client image. Being win32 exe only is probably costing you a lot of resource provides (like me). Clients running xen/kvm/vmware are also more likely to be providing higher value resources, like a colo'd host. Move your API to a different (sub)domain ASAP. At some point you'll need to change your DNS architecture. Having your API tied to your zone apex is going to cause no end of grief. If it's in a (sub)domain you can easily delegate control to another authoritative name server. You might want to use a directional DNS product, CNAME to another resource, add another product api, add another API endpoint, etc. Provide some sort of initialization hook. Every node I launch should be able to auto configure my stack without a "push" action, ssh or otherwise. I much prefer when each node can bootstrap and poll my instance/config management stack. For example EC2 provides this functionality through the UserData param of RunInstances. "Sign in" doesn't have an option or link to "Sign up". From the docs I had to go back to the home page to find the sign up. Support payment other than credit card. Paypal etc is nice in that I can create a balance without extending as much trust to an unknown party. Don't get suckered in to providing 1:1 IPv4 with your proxy model. If the product's successful you'll quickly discover that even a /16 is expensive/unpossible. A 1:1 mapping with IPv6 is operationally plausible. As a bonus you'll get PR for a "shiny" feature. Stay away domU egressing through the dom0 IPv4 for now. I guarantee you'll attract bad actors. A chinese gambling/porn site hosted on those domUs is going get DDOS'd all the little long day. If that takes out the dom0 internet connectivity you'll have a revenue generating customer who's upset. Terminate long running domU instances. You can use this to shape customer expectations about the ephemeral nature of your product. Expose this to the instance owner the same way as a dom0 going offline. Try something like max(mean dom0 availability || 12 hours) + weighted random to get each domUs lifetime. Provide a way to request & inspect network locality or latency. Three use case here I think. 1) Launch instances near $foo. Get decreased latency to a centralized endpoint, like a scheduler. 2) What is the location of $instance. I can determine the nearest S3 region for faster GET/PUTs. 3) Launch instances within $n ms of each other. If instances have shared state or messages during compute phase this can increase throughput
- deno 14y ago
- antman 14y agoAs an incentive for the nodes you could increase the price a bit and give back CPUtime credits to the nodes.
- PeterisP 14y agoMaybe they are just renting out a botnet while it's not used for spam?
- podperson 14y agoMy immediate response was "surely this is less than the cost of the electricity to run the CPUs" but it turns out it's equal to the marginal cost of heating a room with CPUs relative to conventional heating (natural gas or electricity) -- which is pretty genius. In the long run you would expect this would drive up the bidding for idle CPU time, meaning that having a couple of idle computers in your house would generate you a small amount of positive revenue, in much the same way that contributing electricity back to the grid using solar cells could. Of course, most people have no use for solar cells (which are expensive), whereas a lot of us have use for local CPU.
- EmmaKay 14y agoThey're not the first to do this: http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-all http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/greenest-volunteer-grid-them-...
- gyom 14y agoWhat kind of tools are on the VM ? Do I get gcc and some python installation, for example ? I would imagine that I would have to reinstall my tools whenever a new instance starts.
- deno 14y agoIt seems to be vanilla Ubuntu 11.10 server. And yes, you’d use something like puppet[1]. [1] http://puppetlabs.com/ http://puppetlabs.com/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]