Vulcan: Volentix Decentralized Cloud
Vulcan is the Roman god of fire and forge. The Roman concept of the god seems to associate him to both the destructive and the fertilizing powers of fire. In the former, fire burns and is destructive, in the later, the fire has been tamed to the will of man.
Vulcan, as it is fire, is also the god of the forge.. Wikipedia defines a forge as: ‘The forge is used by the smith to heat a piece of metal to a temperature where it becomes easier to shape by forging, or to the point where work hardening no longer occurs.‘ Consider this our metaphor for Vulcan. Only our forge is the global compute infrastructure, the smith is the developer, and the metal being forged are the Dapps they are developing. Vulcan does the rest.
Today we have three players in the cloud space. Three, for an industry that is still in its infancy. Three is not a lot of choices. Three feel centralized and constrained. Three is a problem. Three concentrates power on a network that is designed to be decentralized and open. Three is a threat and we should consider it very seriously.
On the other hand, Vulcan is designed to be a decentralized cloud platform that extends the cloud services marketplace to any and all who wish to monetize on their computers. To be clear, you can deploy Vulcan onto your laptop or into a datacenter with thousands of computers.
In addition, to open up the cloud marketplace, Vulcan lowers the barriers of entry for DApp developers. Vulcan will manage the deployment, scalability, replication, security, and remuneration so that developers can spend their time developing rather than infrastructure, licensing, billing, versioning, and all the other odds and ends that are wasteful.
I don’t want to get too deep into the technology, but I feel it’s important to provide a little more details that some may wish to skip. The other reason is to ‘shout out’ the primary technology we are using.
Kubernetes is the new cloud. We chose it for a million technical reasons, but most importantly we chose it for the reasons:
The community is massive, responsive, professional, and world class
Its tenets of design are laser focused. Basically, Kubernetes knows what kubernetes is.
It's part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Architecture features required for Vulcan are already native in the platform.
Vulcans primary requirement is the need to ensure security. Data center operators need to know that whatever is being deployed into their data center is isolated and controlled. DApp developers need to know that their DApps cannot change and cannot be stolen. Consumers need to know that the DApps they are using to protect their best interests and adhere to the Volentix principles.
With Kubernetes, we are able to manage security all the way through the network stack as well as isolating processes. Additionally, third parties may also create security DApps that will harden the system even more. Finally, container technology continues to improve frequently. Kubernetes, and as a result Vulcan, is already built to accommodate this! For example, VDex will not be using Docker as its container due to security issues and will be using a library operating system instead. All the technical dodads such as ingress controllers, unikernels, P2P encryption, service isolation, and flurry of other options, found deep down in the recesses of Kubernetes and its ecosystem, will automatically be deployed and managed for you…This is pretty nerdy stuff indeed…
Vulcans UI will be a ‘pluggable’ service in Verto that provides tooling to enable Vulcan operators the ability to monitor and manage the Vulcan compute instance. The tooling will support both novice and expert level operational best practices and services. In the most basic example, an operator will need to manage, when to update Vulcan (or one of its DApps) as well as,how much VTX they are getting rewarded for participating on the network. In an advanced case, the operator will require management of Vulcan at a much lower level. At this level, operators are able to, but not limited to:
View/sort/filter system logs and metrics
Whitelist/blacklist services
Note that the UI is a ‘pluggable’ service inside Verto. In this way, other services are able to create Verto UI’s for their services as well. The service provider is able to use Vertos advanced features, such as data management, and user management, to create interfaces without the need for backend services to support them. As a result, additional barriers to entry are removed from the DApp developers.
VDex is the first DApp that will be developed for Vulcan. The reasoning is simple. We need our VDex operators to have a safe, and secure environment that is easy to use and provides them with sufficient tooling to manage their environment.
As Vulcan is deployable on a single computer all the way up to thousands of computers, so to is VDex. Things like scalability, replication, failover, throttling, and upgrading are managed by Vulcan for you. In this way, operators are able to scale their facilities easily as the network grows.
Additionally, being that Verto is ‘pluggable’, a rich UI for traders and researchers will be made available. This Verto service will provide access to the backend VDex application as well as leverage the data management in Verto.
What the Future Looks Like
The future of Vulcan is envisioned to be a complex ecosystem off DApps working in concert with each other on a decentralized cloud computing infrastructure. A global computer infrastructure in which we have decoupled ourselves from any one vendor, through decentralization, in a way that enables the democratization of the cloud.
A democratized cloud is one that supports the smallest computer needs all the way to the most advanced. A cloud in which reward is distributed fairly and more broadly. A cloud where providers can compete and users are rewarded with more and better options than they can today.
This democratized cloud, Vulcan, will also provide the ways in which contributors choose to be rewarded for their contributions. These contributors are considered to be:
Vulcan Operator: These operators will remuneration for the compute resources they provide. Once the system develops, these operators will be able to set prices and define services. For example, a desktop instance of Vulcan may be cheap since the operator provides no guarantees other than the defaults of Vulcan. In another example, the operator is managing multiple regions with multiple centers each with thousands of computers. These centers have physical security and are compliant in each region they serve. For good reason, this operator will be able to charge more for their services than the desktop operator. Regardless, both have their place in the ecosystem and both can be rewarded for their contribution to the community.
Open Source Developer: Developers should be contributed for their contributions easily using the tooling that they are familiar with already. Vulcan, through its licensing management services, which has not yet been mentioned but will be covered in another post, can attest the developers has been used somewhere, for something, on Vulcan. This means that, not only will DApp developers, or service providers, be rewarded when others use their service, the underlying open source framework developers could also gain reward. In this way, Vulcan has decentralized the development of applications while attesting to remuneration and compliance to anyone parties needs.
DApp Provider: Up until now, we have talked about the DApp developer, however, what we mean is DApp Provider. In many cases, the DApp being designed, tested, and built requires an entire team to manage. In Vulcan, DApp providers set the terms and conditions of their application to whatever meets their business model. For example, a DApp provider may have a free model and a paid model. They may have 24-hour support with an SLA, or they may have none. In short, DApp providers set the reward they want and Vulcan manages everything in between.
Vulcan is tooling that is designed to be a decentralized cloud in which Dapps can reside
Read More->https://volentix.io/en/vulcan-volentix-decentralized-cloud/
