Topic: Cloudsmash.io - Decentralized VPS Cloud Open To The Public (Read 3374 times)

The summer was a pretty hectic one. In addition to developing Cloudsmash, I also run a small datacenter called JeffColo.

In 2017, we decided to reorg and expand our datacenter into a larger space. We have had significant delays getting the new facility online. Before the move I suspected there would be problems, so in July I moved all the Oregon Cloudsmash gear down to Hurricane Electric in Fremont, CA.

The migration to Fremont was an excellent test for the resiliency of the mesh. Multiple peering points were dropped, vm's were migrated to alternate sites, hardware was packed up and driven to it's new home. Once back online, we established our new peering and began to migrate vm's back. It all worked perfectly, with zero customer downtime.

The move also allowed us to test using a virtualized equipment stack. This means that we have no physcial routers, firewalls, etc. Our servers connect to simple switches and rely on virtualized routers to establish upstream peering with HE.net. We received a 10 Gbps network drop, so we now get to validate networking performance beyond the gigabit threshold. Recently we have been able to get our virtual router instances to forward at the full 10 Gbps rate despite running on Westmere hardware from 2010.


This all sounds awesome and I am overly glad that this is alive and well. As always, I will be looking forward to more information regarding the service and how it develops and scales. I still don't see any official channels or any relevant results on Google or any other search engine, but if there are any then don't hesitate to let me know. I would be very interested in following the development of any technologies related to distributed scaling of systems and yours seems to be a major step in that direction.
The previous beta round quota had been filled and I've been accepting feedback for the last several months. There have been small improvements here and there, mainly surrounding network performance and reliability.

Recently we began the process for hiring an architecture engineer. The selection process has been going well and it looks like we may have our first Cloudsmash developer coming onboard soon. I expect to have another consumer beta round in late Spring 2018 and hopefully will do a very limited alpha round for providers in mid-Summer 2018.


I had not either and was frustrated that it didn't exist. It's certainly not vaporware, at this time it's a well tested stable platform that desperately needs a good web interface to interact with consumers and providers. Cloudsmash now has 14 pop's and several hypervisor locations, the network has experienced zero downtime since I brought it up in August 2016. It's kind of a living, breathing thing.

Glad to hear that this project is still going! I thought for a bit that it was vaporware since I had not heard of any updates about it since your previous post.  Do you have any sort of general timeline for the project so as to know when we can expect it to open to the public or have an open-beta, sort of?

Do you have any sort of general timeline for the project so as to know when we can expect it to open to the public or have an open-beta, sort of?

I have honestly never thought or seen anything like this before making decentralized VPSs and would love to see how such a technology could fare in a near-production environment. I do not have any specific host services in mind, but I do wish to see what can be accomplished with it.

i want 1 VPS at Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

i will pay you via BTC

Thanks

That sounds great. The website still seems to be down, however.  Are there any official channels to obtain constant updates on this project? If not, what way could I be kept up to date on what is happening and the potential release dates as well as open services? I definitely do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to know how much work this takes or even the back-end or structure of this shared cloud, which is the main reason why I would like to know potential ETAs and milestones for the project as soon as possible.

If I understand correctly, this project is still in the conceptual design/starting implementation phase still. This means that they are nowhere close to actually delivering a finalized product for the end user/consumer (us). In the last update they said that they have plans for opening the service to the general public in the fall of 2017, but they did warn that it is possible that it will not actually be happening until later next year. Given how I still cannot find a website for them, I believe it is too early to be asking for offers. If there are any updates I am not aware of please let me know.

Well good news, it has taken forever but the Hong Kong peering point is online. The only downside is that currently we are only receiving traffic through the pop and are unable to originate traffic from there. I'm sure it will get worked out eventually. The HK peering point is connected directly to the HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange).

Additionally I expect that the Chicago and Buffalo pop's will be coming online sometime this week.

Singapore is still a work in progress.

i want 1 VPS at Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

i will pay you via BTC

Thanks

I'm hoping that we will open to the general public for VPS use sometime in the fall of 2017. It might not be until early in 2018 that we open to the general public for server contributors.

There are some "IaaS" aspects to it in terms of the seamless global networking, automated storage replication and fault tolerance. However it is mainly targeted at unmanaged services. I would expect that people would build managed services on top of it.

Is there any ETA (I assume a very rough one considering you guys are still in the beta testing phase) for when you plan to open the project for public consumption? What other cloud providers do you expect to be competing against? Is it the DigitalOcean / AWS Lightsail sort that simply provide cloud services or bigger infrastructure-as-a-service giants such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? I am talking functionality-wise rather than scale-wise, at least to begin with.

On a side note, your website seems to be down still. Is there any official way to follow the progress of this project? Are there any plans on creating a fully fledged website with the information or is it still too early for that?

I've got both the new peering points online for some testing. Assuming my tests go ok and packets don't go globe trotting, I'll bring these nodes online full time sometime within the next few days. So far things are looking good. The Frankfurt peering point is on a 10G connection straight into the DE-CIX and should be fasssst. Having access to HE.net's 100 Gbps trans-atlantic crossing is pretty bad ass.

I've just negotiated deals for two new peering points;

North Carolina, USA (AS174 - Cogent, AS7018 - AT&T, AS8175, A23336, AS8100)

Frankfurt, DE (AS33891 - DE-CIX, AS6939 - Hurricane Electric)

I'm in the process of getting another two up and running, one in Chicago, IL and one in Buffalo, NY.