I. Interview mit Igor Lebedev, CTO SONM
Which potential do you see in providing a decentralized approach for computational services?
Decentralization is not the value on its own. We need to understand what do we get along with it and what we pay for it. In our case, a decentralized base brings up yet unreachable resources from around the network, from a global pool. Now, not only in datacenters, but from everywhere. A big army of resources stands ready to handle more computing load that was yet imaginable. This is what is decentralization potential is about.
Which impact to the cloud computing market do you expect considering the potential of your solution?
Our solution indeed may impact cloud market in a way, that it will pull SOME Customers from cloud paradigm onto the Fog. Mission critical consistent databases will stay in the cloud, while intensive auxilary payloads will look for other solutions with better global scalability, on-places availability and more efficient price. So cloud market will split into cloud and fog.
What is the linkage between Sonm and fog computing, from your point of view?
There are some links: Sonm is itself an example of Fog computing application. Sonm runs on many devices around, this is foggy. At the same time Sonm provides a platform for other applications to run fog computing.
What are the biggest challenges for your platform to be successful?
The biggest challenges are in business - the adoption by Customers. In technology data privacy and computation verification/validity. Here we have intensive research and development and see some solutions possible.
Why do you think providers and consumers should use your marketplace?
The marketplace itself is not a value for customers, I don’t think they care about whether this is a marketplace, an exchange or a centralized shop. What they may be interested in, is the product itself: the computing foundation, the IaaS. As benefits we bring: Times lower price, global availability and a large pool of GPUs for compute-intensive tasks.
Which actions will be necessary to convince providers and customers to switch to your platform?
I think we need to show successful examples - show cases, use cases. We work to help first Sonm adopters to launch and adopt their software. Then we want to show case them and help others. I think examples and help is a way to go - to start the disruptive wave.
Igor, thanks for taking your time and sharing your thoughts.
II. Interview mit Oleg Lyubimov, früher CEO Selectel, heute COO of SOMN
Oleg, thanks for having me. Could you describe what Selectel aims at regarding the announced partnership with Sonm?
Hello! The idea of partnership between Selectel and Sonm is pretty straightforward. We are going to use decentralized Sonm resources as a backend for our existing and future cloud services. At the first stage we plan to make storage solutions: object storage and file storage. According to our vision, such solution can be really cost-effective and not hard to implement and maintain. At the second stage we plan to research the possible computing solutions based on Sonm.
Do you think the cost reduction will be worth it? What are the next steps?
Yes, we believe Selectel services based on Sonm can be few times cheaper compared to AWS prices. As for the roadmap, first storage solutions are easy to implement – we can encrypt everything on our side and provide fault tolerance by erasue coding and multi-replication. Computing solutions require more research regarding privacy. Selectel team will not be involved in Sonm development directly, but we will develop our services with option to use Sonm resources as a backend instead of servers in data centers. Our goal is to integrate Sonm resources in such a way that it is not noticeable for the end customer if he uses data center service or Sonm network service.
Oleg, thanks for taking your time and sharing your thoughts.
Literatur
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