ThreeFold’s technology does not follow the traditional IT model

The Edge internet needs a different approach. So, we started from scratch and shaped a new approach. ThreeFold’s open-source technology addresses the scalability, security, storage, energy, and operating issues by simplifying architectures and not relying on third-party software. This drives down costs and improves efficiencies.

What is ThreeFold’s Technology Toolbox?

ThreeFold’s technology is based on three primary building blocks: Stateless Computing, Self-Healing Technology, and Blockchain technology - this is the core of our “Technology Toolbox“.

• Stateless Computing: a stateless operating system, Zero-OS, enabling distributed hardware to form an Edge Internet grid generating IT storage and compute capacity
• Self-Healing Technology: controls and operates a distributed cloud and reserves, procures, and executes workloads on the grid using our Jumpscale platform. It delivers autoscaling and automation frameworks that enable self-healing and can be adapted for any kind of IT workload.
• Blockchain Technology: Via Rivine - our secure, scalable “proof of stake” blockchain, along with our identity management platform, ItsYou.online. Our blockchain technology enables user authentication, access controls, secure workloads, and heightened security.

Enabling Stateless Computing

The global decentralized internet will be composed of thousands (millions?) of nodes distributed geographically. This means the decentralized internet must be powered by a stateless operating system that can be booted via the Internet (as opposed to living on the node locally). This removes the complexity of upgrades, truck rolls, etc.

Open-source components have been developed, Zero-OS, for the deployment of bare metal machines functioning as Internet nodes and application hosts. Our Zero-OS platform runs containerized applications and software code on secure and distributed IT infrastructure. Zero-OS can be deployed on off-the-shelf hardware by anyone willing to make server and storage capacity available in their markets and within our network.

The benefits of Stateless Computing are substantial, including:

• Performance: lightweight OS without overhead for running bare-metal machines.
• Free: finds the optimal performance of server & storage nodes at no cost.
• Private: no data footprint remains while workloads move from one node to another.
• Distributed: capacity is generated without the need for data centers: At The Edge.
• High-available: easy creation of clusters while applications run in fragmented segments.
• Portability: moving software from one node to another within the grid is instant.
• Secure: open-source distributed software with transparent code. No security backdoors
• Sustainable: energy-efficient OS resulting in very low node power consumption.

Technology that is self-healing & self-driving

ThreeFold’s Jumpscale framework and ZeroBot allow the creation of blueprints to auto-deploy applications within the compute environment. The bots are constantly checking the health and uptime of the infrastructure, and runtime environments, to guarantee the performance and availability of applications at all times.

The benefits of our self-healing technology protocols include the following:

• Self-Healing: the platform regenerates when health issues that cause downtime for infrastructure and applications are detected.
• Intelligence: agents capture information from the grid and make intelligent decisions to provide an ideal and optimal host environment for software code and containerized applications.
• Lifecycle Management: the status of the infrastructure and the lifecycle of running applications are constantly checked and recorded.
• Autoscaling: the platform automatically scales to meet application and infrastructure performance.

Blockchain Technology to execute workloads and applications via smart contracts

The engineers developed new blockchain algorithms based on proof of stake for validation purposes and turned this into our Rivine open-source blockchain software.

Unlike the “proof of work” blockchains that currently dominate the space, our Rivine blockchain is scalable, green, and secure - and does not rely on huge mining resources. We run our blockchain on approximately 200 dedicated nodes and do not rely on any third-party software.

In addition to our blockchain technology, we have also developed ItsYou.Online, an identity, and access management platform. Itsyou. online uses three-factor authentication to manage access on our network and facilitate execution.

The benefits of TF blockchain technology and identity management platform include:

• Sustainable: our algorithms to reach consensus use a minimal amount of energy and electricity compared to other blockchain software and networks.
• Lowest possible cost: of transactions make it an efficient and fast payment system.
• Neutral: state of the network and applications are recorded in a transparent and immutable manner.
• Payment fulfillment: transactions are automatically paid using ThreeFold Tokens.
• Smart Contracts: fully automated execution of contracts from customers buying Internet IT capacity.
  
  All of our technology is open-source and can be accessed in the following Github Repos:
  
  

• Zero-OS: https://github.com/threefoldtech/zos
• Jumpscale: https://github.com/threefoldtech/js-ng
• BCDB : https://github.com/threefoldtech/bcdb

“This article was originally published by Andreas Hartl, a former member of ThreeFold Foundation.”

Hyperscale realities are very different from what most people think

Myth 1: Bigger data centers are more efficient

There are advantages in building larger-scale data centers, like economies of scale and sheer bulk buying power, but these are not as significant as what people think. The average cost per rack in a hyper-scale data center is $20-35K USD including all energy requirements and safety systems. The cost of hardware per rack is around the $200-300K USD mark.

What is often forgotten is that anything that is of enormous scale and highly concentrated comes with complexity and specific problems to deal with. For example. resource requirements such as investment, operational costs, knowledge, and people increase significantly with size.

In reality, keeping things simple, small, and distributed is much more cost-effective than large complex environments.

Myth 2: Big data centers can be sustainable

The carbon footprint of a big data center is enormous. To improve the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of most data center farmers have adopted wind, hydro, and/or solar power technologies, which indeed helps drop their PUE by an estimated 20%. But is this leading to more sustainability?

This 20% looks great on paper and in the farmers’ corporate social responsibility reports. However, it just represents an improvement in the cooling technology and sourcing of energy. It doesn’t actually impact the energy consumed by the equipment that runs in their data centers (servers, storage chassis, physical disks, etc.) which is the equipment responsible for the carbon footprint. PUE only refers to overhead power consumption, i.e. cooling the facility, opening, and closing doors, maintaining power security systems, etc.

Real improvement lies in deploying technologies that actually consume less power to deliver the actual Internet capacity to run workloads, real CPU chassis, physical disks, and storage cabinets. Improving on how hardware is being more effectively used can have an impact of up to a thousand percent and lead to ten times more power-efficiency.

Myth 3: Redundant systems have better uptime

A lot of us believe that systems need redundancy mechanisms to improve their operational uptime and reliability. While it may make sense to IT experts, let’s translate this for the non-IT world?

To make a car more reliable we add redundancy (as we do in IT). So for the risk of having a puncture, we add one extra tire for all the tires we use continuously. This adds 4 extra tires to the car. Then a decision needs to be made: Do we put those tires in a structure where they are always running along with the primary tires or do we choose not to have them “online” all the time, wearing and tearing in the same way as the primary tires?

Building such a system would take a large number of engineers to come up with a solution, and would change cars as we know them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to think outside the box and solve the root of the problem by making tires un-deflatable?

The IT industry has gone overboard with the concept of redundancy, having forgotten to look at the root cause issues. This has spawned a whole new industry of itself, which has a financial interest in creating complicated and expensive redundant systems.

Myth 4: Big companies optimize better

Big companies with a certain track record will know better how to optimize as they have more people and resources.

At first glance, this sounds logical, but in reality, ninety percent of the innovation within the IT space comes from startups. The giant IT companies have a heritage they hardly can overcome. They are locked in old infrastructure designs, and building outside of that infrastructure would be costly, timely, and probably put the breaks on their businesses.

Real innovation gives way to fix the core symptoms rather than taking the problem pain-killer approach.