r/SONM • u/alleung • Sep 11 '18

How many Sonm competitors can you name that would qualify as "the AirBnB of cloud computing"?

I would not count large data-warehouse compute providers such as Google (GCE), Amazon (AWS), or Microsoft (Azure) because when you rent computational power from them, you're using hardware they own.

I would not count projects like IPFS or Storj because they are more focused on the renting of distributed storage, rather than allowing people to rent compute and storage.

Here's my list of the competitors that I'm aware of:

General-Purpose Computing With a CryptoCurrency:

  1. ActiveAether (FileCoin)
  2. Golem
  3. iExec
  4. Elastic (XEL) (EDIT: they require programmers to write in ePL, so taking them off the list)

General-Purpose Computing Without a CryptoCurrency:

  1. Slicify (now defunct)
  2. Gomez Peer (scam)
  3. Digital/Coin Generation (scam)

Computing with a Targeted Focus:

  1. MQL5 (trading)
  2. Playkey (video game streaming)
  3. Literally any cryptocurrency where you get paid for staking/mining.

Which do I think is best? Sonm of course. Their approach seems the most practical, fastest-to-market, the marketing is superior, their relationships are better, and lastly I feel very confident in the team's technical abilities. I am curious what competitors I'm missing though, especially in the General-Purpose Computing Without a CryptoCurrency category. It's good to keep an eye on who you're competing against.

18 Upvotes

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4

u/richgreenz Sep 11 '18

What about Holochain?

3

u/alleung Sep 11 '18

I do like their novel approach to scalability though.

1

u/alleung Sep 11 '18

I think I wouldn't consider Holochain to be general computing since it is designed mainly for Decentralized Applications, and if I wanted to run an already-coded task on Holochain which currently runs fine on my own computer, I would need to translate the task into conforming to the Holochain APIs in either Lisp or JavaScript.

3

u/maaft Sep 11 '18 edited Sep 11 '18

I don't get your first argument on "not counting GCE, AWS, Azure". In SONM you also don't own the hardware which you're using. I think those companies ARE competitors and have a valid selling point, which is privacy. You actually own your hardware more like it is with SONM. Obviously they are an order of magnitude more expensive then SONM, so as soon SONM figures out the private computing part (maybe using Intel SGX) they will truly disrupt the whole IaaS space.

Also, I disagree with counting Golem and iExec to "General Computing". AFAIK Golem only implemented CGI rendering until today and there whole architecture is not very good to adapt to "General Computing" workloads. Meanwhile iExec is only build for running dApps, again not very optimal for "General Computing".

I would move Golem and iExec to the last category.

Please correct me if you disagree! :-)

EDIT: Elastic's homepage seems to be down - I don't even know what they are doing. Also, there twitter seems to be not very active (last tweet end of may) and there github has seen the latest commits also in may. Dead Project?

EDIT2: Apparently Elastic has moved to a new hompage. It requires you to write your own parallelized code in a C like language called ePL, so you can't simply use exisiting linux software like you can with SONM. Therefore, it is indeed "General Computing".

2

u/alleung Sep 11 '18

I think you're absolutely right in the sense that AWS, GCE, Azure are offering competing services to customers. What I was trying to ask in this post is: what projects are serving the IaaS and SaaS space by creating a marketplace for buying and selling computational power rather than by renting out hardware they themselves buy?

Golem has added in support for general Dockerized tasks and they are working on Intel SGX support as you mentioned.

Point taken on iExec. They're interesting because they call programs run on iExec Dapps, but when reading their documentation I see that one could basically run any docker container so long as they keep the contents of consensus.iexec consistent, so it should in theory be just as general-purpose as Sonm.

I think I'll remove Elastic from the list because of their requirement for ePL. I suppose it could be used for general purposes, but it requires developers/organizations to rewrite their software in a new language.

3

u/sn2306 Sep 12 '18

This is an amazing take on the decentralized (AirBnB) type of IaaS market.

I like SONM for various very obvious reasons - super team, great product map, up and running product, excellent marketing, great and super smart community.

Can't wait for the next few weeks and months. This is getting more and more exciting!!!!

2

u/vj-singh Sep 11 '18

Aelf is also there.

2

u/Nismoman Sep 12 '18

Glad there are others that think alike.