Cloud Decentralization

“80% of the capacity sitting in data centers today is unused. So by connecting this latent capacity with the users that want to access this, we can reduce the cost of compute significantly anywhere from one half to one fifth.” — 00:07:36

“Cloud provides compute, raw compute, bandwidth, memory, CPU, whatnot, and storage. On top of that, they provide value-add services. And the revenue model is basically burgers and fries. You got to sell burgers and not sell fries. But you make money on fries.” — 00:25:43

“We’re calling it Photon, right, for now, but Photon’s mandate is to solve the cost of cloud computing anywhere from one-fifth to one-half.” — 00:15:17

“There’s that innovation being stifled here. And it’s so many things that are wrong with centralization of the cloud. And considering compute is a very, very important, you know, foundational element of our society, we should, as people, have responsibility to take it back.” — 00:28:01

“In two years, majority of the internet traffic will come from cloud infrastructure providers, out of which three companies are going to have 80% market share. So, majority of the internet is going to come from three companies. That’s one problem.” — 00:24:08

“I’m just gonna go ahead and say this: I think centralized cloud is the biggest threat to the future of our society… I want to make sure you do [agree] by the end of the talk.” — 00:01:34

“If you have capacity — data centers that are being utilized only 15 percent of the time — the majority [of] the global compute power is sitting there… Why don’t we bring that capacity to the market? This is fundamentally wrong.” — 00:06:40

“They follow a model called burgers and fries model: they give you compute cheap [and] charge you for other things that are not compute… Majority [of] the revenues for [Google] comes [from] value-added services… Google Dataproc, which is essentially Databricks’ Spark… Databricks does not make anything [like] what Google makes on that product. Similarly you see [it with] Redis, with Amazon ElastiCache.” — 00:03:47

“In the 60s the model was centralized — the mainframe had all the power… in the 80s we saw the rise of PCs, which… distributed power… then we saw the rise of the public cloud with the evolution of mobile phones — the mobile phone was a very thin access layer to the centralized thing called a cloud. And now you’re seeing a model going back to the decentralized model with projects like ours… Filecoin, it’s storage… we took an approach of addressing the entire generic workload model.” — 00:14:02

“Two years from now, majority [of] the internet will come from cloud — cloud infrastructure, to be specific. About 53 percent of global data center traffic will be from three major providers, and the market is amazing — 71 billion dollars… So cloud is here to stay, cloud is here to take over, and three companies are going to control… [the] internet.” — 00:03:02

“Connecting data centers around the world, underutilized server capacity in data centers around the world — and there’re about 500,000 data centers which have about 85 percent of underutilization… the reason for this underutilization is primarily because of planning for peak.” — 00:01:27

“Akash is a decentralized and open marketplace for cloud computing resources, and the value proposition to the customer is to 80% cost reduction than what you would pay for the cloud today.” — 00:00:45

“Google effectively took what is open source and white-labeled and called their own, and a company that actually developed Spark doesn’t get to take the market… I have friends of mine whose companies were shut down — open source companies — because cloud copied this offer.” — 00:03:40

“Effectively in two years majority the internet traffic will come from three providers, and they happen to be Amazon, Google, Microsoft — and this is effectively very threatening to our society because we all know what happens when you have oligarchs control the foundational elements.” — 00:02:12

“For us, we’re a decentralized cloud infrastructure marketplace… Akash is where you procure your infrastructure and deploy and you settle — so that’s three pieces of the puzzle: procurement, deployment, and settlement. We use blockchain for procurement as an open marketplace… whereas deployment is off chain; we can’t really use blockchain per se because of performance, security… reasons.” — 00:05:07

“Well, security and ownership — we all know what happens when your data [is] centralized, with Facebook there’s no auditability, there’s nothing going on but your data. So I think decentralization is key here for future society.” — 00:04:25

“User interfaces in decentralized systems, they’re hard because you’re writing and reading from the chain, [and] depending on what chain, it’s really slow. So I think it’s gonna be a combination of centralized systems and decentralized systems — you look at Coinbase, centralized, whereas Bitcoin is not… we can do much better, but it’s really really hard. I think that’s gonna be a big huge topic for the next few years.” — 00:14:27

“Oh, it’s happening right now… I think five, ten years is a long, long view. Especially with the rate at which the innovation is catching up… when multiple people are thinking of this problem, that validates the problem. And one of them will win. I mean, I’m saying we might, but someone else will win.” — 00:11:10

“What’s happening today is the price is increasing because the amount of data we are processing is doubling every two years… by 2020, we’ll have 44 trillion gigabytes or something like that… that’s more than the stars in the known universe… But the cloud is not catching up. The infrastructure side of things are not catching up. And increasingly, the entire industry is becoming an oligopoly controlled by three major companies.” — 00:04:51

“Oligopolization leads to verticalization. Verticalization leads to price [gouging], innovation stifling… we have to claim the foundational element of the Internet. The society has to claim it back. And the only way that’s possible is through decentralization, taking the power back from the elites and spreading [it] across. And that’s the mission of Akash Network.” — 00:06:25

“The majority of the revenue that comes to the centralized cloud providers happen to be from these value-added services. It’s like burgers and fries model. Give you cheap compute, but we make money on the value-added services. And these value-added services are usually white-labeled open-source projects.” — 00:14:07

“Amazon is great. I love Amazon and Google as well. The way the system is set up right now with the centralized model, it’s not Amazon’s fault or Google’s fault per se… with the current market share that’s being gained by these three providers, effectively creates a logopoly.” — 00:02:19

“I think the problem definitely exists. And I think the future we’re going to see protocols working with other protocols, like what you guys are doing, each one focusing on different markets… I think that’s the only way we can take on a centralized system there is today, which is oligopoly.” — 00:38:54

“85% of server capacity sitting in corporate data centers remains unused. An extreme example: Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — on a tax day they run at 97 percent utilization; come next day it drops… nine months of the year they run at almost three percent utilization… on one hand you have this massive scalability problem, on the other hand you have this massive [unused] supply.” — 00:05:49

“[I’m] working on a decentralized cloud infrastructure network that aggregates computing power from disparate sources and creates a new supercloud.” — 00:00:48

“This is the first decentralized cloud that can run a fully functioning web application — be [it] Ruby, Python, Node, doesn’t really matter.” — 00:16:35

“For me it’s about censorship resistance and fault resilience — the idea that I can push a job or a function and forget about it; it will run no matter what, as long as I have tokens to pay for it. That is the essence of a decentralized system: there’s no single point of failure and there’s nobody that can take you down.” — 00:10:08

“The amount of data [and] data processing needs are doubling every two years [but] the processing power hasn’t been catching up… access to modern infrastructure is safeguarded by the cloud infrastructure providers… about twenty-one hyperscale providers, out of which three providers have a majority of the market share… they are being gatekeepers — they are not allowing the cloud to scale.” — 00:04:22

“The reason we’re building this is to create a network, or a cloud infrastructure, that is not owned by anyone but open to everyone… an individual standing up cannot take on Goliath — we’re talking about Amazon, Google, Microsoft. The only way we can do this is together.” — 00:28:08

“If you look at evolution of computing, in the beginning you had mainframes — it was a very centralized model… then the client-server came along and clients were equally as powerful as servers, so you had a way more distributed model. Then went back to the cloud, where cloud became the centralized entity… Now we’re seeing more decentralized, distributed architectures… you’re gonna see, as we move more into the decentralized distributed cloud, serverless will play a huge role.” — 00:18:16

“It’s a cloud tax — we all pay the cloud tax, we all pay the Amazon tax. More importantly, the direction cloud infrastructure is going today is scary, considering three companies will control 80% of market share in two years. When three companies, oligarchs, control foundational elements of the internet, it’s a very scary situation.” — 00:23:21