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[flagged] Show HN: ThreeFold – Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure (threefold.io)
37 points by aredirect 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments
We built it from the ground up, minimal Linux based operating system (written in go and rust), messaging system written in rust and infrastructure as code support (terraform and pulumi)

There is even a dashboard, and a playground UI to manage it (that you can even run yourself) . Beautifully decentralized, you have full control of everything, you can deploy on your own servers if the cost of the cloud is too much. You can even run the whole system yourself if you want to.

Here is a link to documentation https://manual.grid.tf/

Also, we are honored if it piqued your interest, and would love to support your testing journey free of charge.




Sounds cool, my question is: why ruin it with a token? It just makes your project seems unnecessarily scammy. There have been so many projects with big promises that ultimately just ended up being a scam this way.


Thank you! I 100% agree. We are exploring other options (and with the current crypto scene, it's more pressing e.g direct support of fiat, some of business built on top of the current infrastructure uses fiat e.g https://www.zonaris.io/

And main thing that separates us from all of these crypto projects, is we actually delivered the infrastructure, reproducible, that works :)


I appreciate it. Good luck.


How does reliability work? How do I know that what I store today will still be there tomorrow? What guarantees do I have that a machine executing a task will exist until completion of that task?

How are you handing security? What controls are in place to make sure hardware owners can’t access data being hosted or processed?


The reliability varies, given that not all hosts are the same, but we provide statistics on the nodes and depend on the workload you should use the provider with the best SLA conditions for you


This looks like a cloud run by randos, not decentralization which would mean local apps that talk to each other.

I don’t want a cloud run by randos. If I’m gonna run in a cloud I want to know who runs it and see their ToS and privacy policy etc.

If this took off the first thing you’d see happen is people running infrastructure to steal data from people who host on it.


Hello, you are 100% in control of where to host your data and the beauty of the system is that you can completely replicate it yourself. I'd say the experience is more streamlined than building on-premise openstack cloud.

You can find the terms and conditions here https://library.threefold.me/info/legal/#/

and everyone is also welcome to run the current cloud or replicate their own :)


There is a huge untapped market for a turn key DIY cloud, and this is something people would pay for. By cloud I mean with higher level stuff like serverless, Kubernetes, managed HA Postgres, etc., not just a VM manager like Proxmox.

If this is that, then great. Problem is that as soon as I see a reference to cryptocurrency I assume it’s either a scam or a platform for scams.

The term decentralized makes me think it’s a platform for local apps that talk to each other. That is also great but does not appear to be what this is.

So I think there’s a huge problem with how this is being presented.


Thank you for taking the time, very appreciated. We are actually aiming to build everything! crazy right? :) we have a working infrastructure that provides Virtual Machines and Kubernetes clusters, we are also targetting managed services as well (we are a quite small team, that's why we try to be a bit pragmatic deciding on solutions that we work on)

We are also planning to provide a cloud for systems like gitea, fossil, in a non-aggressive way to these respective projects.

Actually there's also another untold story, which is called a 3bot that's completely decentralized standalone working as your digital assistant, but we didn't get there yet :)

I fully agree that crypto world is making it harder for projects with good intentions specially those who delivered! (We are planning to be not linked with crypto at all soonish and allow more of fiat adoption)

Again, Thank you for taking the time!


This looks really cool as a concept. I am into the idea of something like this for tech nerds to share resources.

As a in real life technological solution it is a trainwreck waiting to happen. sort of like an incidental botnet or worse.


I'm glad you're liking it! It's the idea from the beginning indeed to allow that level of freedom to people. I would also love to help you to know more / test the project (not strings attached and no money to pay) :)


I don't know how to edit the main text:

To open-source projects, We would love to provide you with resources for as long as your project needs e.g in terms of virtual machines, kubernetes clusters to develop/test, run you workflows. All free of charge. No strings attached.

And this also the link for legal information https://manual.grid.tf/legal/legal.html as well


Big potential. My biggest question is how do I vet the nodes for safety? I assume that a malicious node runner could just read whatever data I put in there.


Thank you! glad you're liking it. It's definitely a concern the incentives to provide a stable, secure service are certainly greater than incentives to steal your application's data. That being considered, you can choose the capacity provider you trust, or even run your own nodes to host your workloads (or plan the system with services like https://github.com/threefoldtech/0-stor_v2)


I see. Having to vet and pick a provider seems to diminish the decentralization aspect somewhat. The upside is of course no provider lock in.

At first glance I had the impression of a decentralized crypto funded cloud and my mind goes directly to a homogeneous cloud of crypto miner like entities that are providing the capacity. But this system isn't trust free so that Idea can't work. Now I understand the core aspect of the product to be a open framework that horizontally scalable cloud infrastructure can be built on. I'm not sure what the best path is but judging by this comment section, the crypto funded capacity seems to be a somewhat unhappy marriage with the core product, at least in the current post crypto boom landscape.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with this project.


From a strategic perspective, wouldn't you want your cloud to be centrally managable (with redundancy) and supportable in case of issues?


Hi! Thanks for taking the time!

The idea is very flexible it can be converted to different kind of models

- Model 1: Global grid of resources where you choose (entrusted person, could be even yourself) to deploy your workload on their servers, and that's what a capacity provider offers with their SLAs - Model 2: You can replicate the whole infrastructure yourself (region level e.g gov) so you can build e.g for your own company (there you have full control)

So the way I see it, as administrator, I plan my deployments to be hosted on some reliable servers and I plan everything around redundancy (here's an example to host nextcloud https://forum.threefold.io/t/threefold-guide-nextcloud-redun... )

and there's a space for services that does such planning for the users :) I counted from 1, excuse that honest mistake :)


What are your service SLAs?


It varies between capacity providers so you can find people who do 80% to 99% uptime


I'd love it... if it didn't use a crappy crypto token


Hey! Thank you!

Your feedback is very appreciated, and definitely we don't want to be seen as a crypto project. While in this current iteration we have that utilization token, I understand cryptocurrencies doesn't resonate well with too many scams. We are seeking a way out of that situation to be honest.


> I understand cryptocurrencies doesn't resonate well with too many scams

Not just that, the whole process of obtaining and using crypto is also why I don't like it, especially when it's very obscure tokens

If I ignore the crypto part of this, I really do like it.


> We are seeking a way out of that situation to be honest.

You can fold the current company, start a new, cryptoless one, and then share a post about it on HN. I'd bet all of my coins that will get a lot more love here and in the wild


Congratulation for the launch! Where is the price list?


https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/threefold/


Thank you! we would love to hear from you! Our token price is quite low at the moment. https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/threefold

I have to say we have tons of resources ready to be used! and would love to help our wherever fits :)


What is a "token price"?

... What even is a "token"?

I want to buy compute to execute XYZ functions at Tk TPS - how do I predict the monthly operating cost? (in dollars, obviously)


My bad, was confused by the previous comment

Here's a list of the current pricing https://manual.grid.tf/cloud/cloudunits_pricing.html?highlig...

Of course, there're other projects building on top of us to even drive the prices lower, and even as a token of appreciation I'd love to provide you with whatever necessary to be able to test the platform for as much as you need.


It looks open source.


100% https://github.com/threefoldtech


Scrolled the homepage until I saw "...earn a new digital currency" - then immediately closed the tab. Dead on arrival.


One of the biggest things I hate about crypto is how it sucked all the air out of “decentralization.” Now people hear that and think “oh another scam coin.”

“Local first” and “federated” are perhaps more accurate anyway.


Indeed, crypto made the world a harder place for projects with good intention. We aim to build a truly decentralized, peer to peer cloud infrastructure that you can connect to or even replicate on your own terms, and yet familiar to developers and system admins by providing the tools they love for provisioning and managing their workloads.

The whole system is 100% opensource, you can run it on your own terms (we would be happy if other people based on our work and expanded further)


We are moving to support fiat as well, as well. You can literally build anything (we recently built a students platform to deploy their workloads without concerns about tokenomics)

Tokenomics aside, I'm sure https://manual.grid.tf will show very interesting bit, And please keep in mind that the system works .. quite well actually (and it's opensource if you like the idea, and don't like the execution :)


Repost this to HN when a more normal fiat based pricing model exists or … not a new token but at least, at least, satoshis or something like bits of btc.


Is that part mandatory?

Developers: https://manual.grid.tf/developers/developers.html

Sysadmins: https://manual.grid.tf/system_administrators/system_administ...

Edit: added sysadmin and..

Haven’t finished reading yet, but generally the internet is never free and always costs some one. I’d be concerned how it would be paid for.


The system is completely opensource, the team would be even more the willing to help you to build your own clouds separate from the current main one, and even can guide you if you ever wanted to change how the payment works. We are already at the point of designing the 4th iteration of the system. Too many believed in our vision and connected their capacity to make it reality.

There're various definitions of free, e.g it will cost power and bandwidth for sure, but free as in totally decentralized as owned by the people? they get to decide how and where their workloads are hosted :) you can connect a server in your basement and I deploy my workloads on it or you can even host your website (trusting other human beings on your own terms :) )


Same thing. Came to comment “we are so back”

No offense to the creators, I appreciate anyone shipping something new, but this has been tried many times without success. HNT being the largest example.

Also, isn’t ICP be the same concept?


Yeah ICP/Dfinity was one of the originals to target cloud computing on a blockchain platform, with one of the biggest budgets, highest profile backers (A16Z), and strongest engineering teams in the business (they poached IBM Zurich’s research lab). But it’s not taking off. The concept seems either not viable for reasons, or its too ahead of its time. Anyone attempting a new version needs a clear value proposition that’s different from prior attempts.


It's not taking off because their marketing is incredibly deceptive and there was a report showing that there was probably a planned retail dump shortly after launch allowing lots of backers to pull out. It's not really decentralized in any meaningful sense and they misuse terminology (like what the term "node" means, among other things) in order to give the appearance otherwise.


Hi! Thank you for taking the time I'm actually not aware of any project that was more complete, delivering on such scale like threefold.

I'm not sure I know ICP, it'd be great if you could link, It's always good opportunity to understand more


Internet Computer, should come up on Google


Exactly this. DOA for me too.


[flagged]


I'm very sorry you're feeling that way. Nothing fishy is going on. I was just happy to post about a product I've been building for years that's under utilized and can solve too many things for people. We don't want to be attached to anything crypto and we are working on supporting fiat.

The system is there, usable -unlike so many web3 projects- :)


> We don't want to be attached to anything crypto

Another comment of yours...

> Our token price is quite low at the moment.

Which is it? These statements taken together do create suspicion

Probably a security and not a token if you or anyone else are talking about price and the potential increase


I only mentioned that because of a parent comment linking to the token price on coinmarketcap. Definitely, we don't want to be seen as a crypto project (the reputation for crypto is horrible). And would love to help/promote using fiat too

And we are as, I mentioned, in other comments building fiat-based solutions, and some of our users built platforms based on fiat.


So are you going to get rid of the token completely or just offer fiat as an alternative?

You'll never not be a crypto project as long as you keep the tokenomics


We mainly use this token as a utilization token (credit points if you want to say) just to feed the too many transactions


That is a non-answer, I'll assume you will be keeping the crypto and staying a crypto company


I'm saying in the current system we need to represent the usage of storage units and compute units per second to a fixed number you can call it tokens or points that in the system it moves around I don't think we can do dollar billing per hour right? we need a fraction of that

Let me rephrase, and please excuse my English as it's not my first language: goal is I buy capacity on the system e.g 5$ allows me on the system to use X amount of compute and Y amount of storage, this value should be converted to more lower number to represent concrete number -could be milli Dollars or micro Dollar- or something (as a way to represent that usage per second as we currently bill every 1hr. I'd rather indeed to use that notion instead of introducing a cryptocurrency :)


You should look at the big cloud pricing, it's exactly as you describe without cryptocurrency. Priced in fractionals of the local fiat, per second billing based on the resource.

Can you explain why you need a blockchain to have a distributed cloud? To me they seem tangential


same here it's got like urbit vibes

yawn


I'm not familiar with urbit, however, we built a system that works you can deploy Virtual machines, kubernetes clusters in less than 1 minute. And you can fully run / replicate that system on your own terms

https://manual.grid.tf/playground/vm_intro.html https://manual.grid.tf/playground/k8s.html

Also, we spent lots of times to bring developer's favorite tools like terraform, pulumi, typescript libraries to make everything familiar.


You say that HPE trusts your project. Digging a bit:

HP Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE wants to help ThreeFold to offer hardware and IT services to the community.

Are you building a centralized datacenter with HPE or are you selling HPE to the community?




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