Cloudmos Funding Proposal

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Akash Network - Cloudmos Funding Proposal

Summary

Hello Akash community! We are excited to present our proposal for funding of 300k USD in $AKT from the community pool as a partial retroactive of our past efforts and going forward, to continue developing and building new tools that will facilitate the adoption of the Akash Network. Ideally, while 400K would give us increased runway and flexibility, we believe given current market conditions, we can accomplish the same deliverables with 300K in funding. Although we previously requested funding for a similar amount nearly a year ago, our proposal was denied due to unfavorable market conditions. Despite this setback, we have remained committed to our mission and continued to develop our free products, which have already been instrumental in supporting the growth and adoption of the Akash Network. We were fortunate to receive a small grant worth ~60k USD a few months later, but we believe that this amount is insufficient to cover our expenses and to fully realize our vision. We’re passionate about enhancing the user experience of blockchain and decentralized cloud technologies. With your support, we’re confident that we can take our work to the next level and significantly impact the Akash ecosystem. Thank you for your consideration!

Achievements and Past Contributions

Over the past two years, our team has made significant contributions to the Akash Network, including the development of Cloudmos Deploy, the top GUI deployment tool, Cloudmos Explorer, the primary analytics hub for real-time Akash adoption metrics, and Cloudmos Alerts, a customizable alerts system for deployment balance monitoring and other custom alerts. Additionally, we created SDL Builder, which enables easy custom SDL creation and saving, as well as a price comparison tool for comparing Akash’s cost savings vs. legacy platforms like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. Our efforts have facilitated onboarding for many new users on the network, with impressive results:

From January 2022 to today:

  • Deployments
    • 29.5k Leases (50.2k total created on the network so ~58% of all leases on the Akash network were created using Cloudmos Deploy)
    • 5k Users
    • 144k Transactions
    • 42.4k Deployments
    • 3.1k Wallets created
  • Explorer
    • 18k Users
    • 180k Views

Our team’s deep understanding of the challenges facing the Akash Network, coupled with our development of critical tools and technologies for cloud parity, positions us perfectly to execute this proposal. We’re confident that our past contributions and expertise makes us the ideal team to lead the way forward. With the rise of GPUs and AI, now is the perfect time to invest in the right tools to support future adoption. Our record speaks for itself.

Problems and Proposed Solutions

Here’s a list of issues we’ve identified and solutions we’re proposing to implement:

  • Trust. It’s difficult to trust providers without sufficient information of their operations and reputation.

    Solutions

  • To be able to obtain cloud parity and to build trust towards developers, Akash needs to have active monitoring of providers and a platform to provide that information to users

  • A reputation system with provider reviews

  • Provider profiles

    • What is their hardware?
    • What Akash features do they support? (Persistent storage, IP leases, GPU, etc)
    • Logo
    • Company
    • What is your hardware best for? Gaming? Mining? Etc.
    • Terms of services and Service-Level agreements

    Remarks

  • With our custom built indexer and infrastructure, we already keep track of providers but only have minimal information. It will be easy for us to extend that functionality to track more information on the providers and provide an API for others to consume.

  • With our user accounts, we can make it possible for providers to create a custom profile and have that information displayed throughout the deployment process and be used to automate some processes based on their reputation. We can also make a user review process with those same user accounts.

  • With these systems in place, we believe that users deploying on the Akash providers will have a better sense of trust when choosing providers to run their workload and also other clients who want to use our API will benefit from this system.

  • There are no systems like this currently available.

  • No SLA. There is no SLA or uptime system to make sure your deployments stay online 24/7. Currently, if your provider suddenly goes offline, your lease dies and the user has to make sure to keep track and re-deploy when that happens. Most users don’t want to take care of this themselves. Comparatively speaking, when people deploy on web2 platforms like DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, and Azure, they are paying for the SLA, and the reassurance of stability. We intend to bring this feature to the Akash Network.

    Solutions

  • Implementing various automatisation tools using Authz

    • Auto redeploy when provider is down
      • The balancer could also auto-scale based on demand
    • Auto re-negotiation redeploy on providers when a better lease is available for the current AKT price, before a solution is implemented with the proposal Akash economics 2.0
    • Auto refill when deployment balance is low

  • Help build tools for the community to address common issues with deployments

    • Automated backup solutions
    • HTTPS tooling (Let’s Encrypt)

  • Alerts

    • Provider uptime monitoring alerts
    • Deployment status alerts

    Remarks

  • There are some limitations when automatically redeploying a container in terms of state transfer. It could be very useful for stateless applications like web app frontends. There may be some solutions to explore to counter the limitations.

  • There are no systems like this currently available.

  • Lack of technical knowledge. Akash currently has many technical walls. The SDL is complex to learn for new users. Docker is amazing but if you’re not familiar with it, it can be challenging to learn and to get started with. Crypto is easy once you get the hang of it, but it’s a very steep learning curve. As Alani Kuye always says “You can’t scale what you can’t simplify”. We intend to lower the cognitive load, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for both crypto natives and non crypto native users.

    Solutions

  • Template marketplace

    • User generated and curated template marketplace
    • We have already made some progress in that solution, with our user accounts, users can already save templates. However, there’s no marketplace and we believe this will greatly reduce some of the friction for new users if they can rely on pre-made templates and solutions made from the community.

  • SDL abstraction with SDL Builder baked in the deployment process

    • The SDL is great and flexible, but the users shouldn’t have to learn how it works to deploy simple or complex workloads on the network.

  • Docker abstraction

    • We want to explore implementing an easy to use solution to deploy simple web apps or servers without needing any docker experience.

  • Integrate token on-ramp solutions like Kado Money in Cloudmos

    • One of the solutions to reduce the friction to acquire AKT is to integrate solutions on ramp apps like Kado or Transak (used by Osmosis)

  • Faucet (Free trial)

    • We plan on building an AuthZ manager to provide an interface to manage authorizations to deploy on other wallets, reducing the need for new users wanting to try out Akash to acquire tokens.

  • Vercel like deployment experience

    • One click deploy to abstract the SDL process and bid selection

  • Create simplified educational content for easier user onboarding with a focus on;

    • Deployments
    • Templates
    • Payments
    • And more

  • Lack of business features. There are currently no platforms that offer features that would support usual business needs, like knowing how much you’ve spent over a period of time or managing team members. One of the biggest advantages of using Akash is the cost reduction and it’s a shame that businesses are not taking advantage of it.

    Solutions

  • Billing module. Like all the other cloud providers out there, businesses/users need to get a better understanding of their costs and savings on cloud resources. Spending on cloud resources counts as a business expense and is technically deductible from your business income

    • Monthly expense reports
    • Forecasting
    • Export to excel or csv

  • Team manager

    • With the AuthZ manager, it will enable a single wallet to authorize or revoke access to other team members to deploy without sharing a single private key.

Overall, the proposed solutions aim to improve Akash’s transparency, reliability, user-friendliness, and functionality to attract and retain more users.

Milestones and Projects

The problems and solutions mentioned above wouldn’t necessarily be implemented in the order that they’re mentioned. We plan to execute this plan in roughly 12 months. Here’s the roadmap of how we plan on building and releasing:

Q2 2023

  • Add more analytics on providers, since data about provider resources and uptime status isn’t on chain, it’s important to start monitoring as soon as possible
  • Merge Cloudmos Explorer with Cloudmos Deploy to provide a single platform with user accounts
    • A re-design of the application and user experience is also in the plans and we want to include Design DAO as part of the proposal to help do so.
  • Organize and open source our private repositories that contain the indexer, explorer and deploy interfaces.
  • Implement provider profiles and reputation system
  • AuthZ manager to enable faucet management

Q3 2023

  • Template marketplace where users can publish templates with guides
    • One click deploy existing applications
    • Publish your own templates
    • Rating system to easily find the best template for the job
  • Improve the deployment experience by integrating our SDL builder
  • Add more on-chain analytics based on the sig-analytics documents
  • Live shell

Q4 2023

  • Implement improved uptime solutions

    • Auto-redeploy when provider is down
    • Auto-refill leases when escrow is low
    • Auto-renegociation of leases

  • Integrate Kado Money

  • Implement billing module

    • Monthly expense reports
    • Forecasting
    • Export to excel or csv

Q1 2024

  • Develop custom solutions to be published on the marketplace
  • Improve UX of our tools based on community feedback
  • Team manager
  • Implement public API for all of our on-chain analytics

While we work on these projects, we will continuously support the community and adapt our tools to support new features released on the network such as GPUs. The exact roadmap will change and adapt to the network needs to maximize adoption.

We will provide regular updates of our progress in the respective special interest groups and working groups.

Use of funds

Most of the funds will be used to pay salaries, operating expenses, infrastructure, contracting design work with Design DAO, attending live events, marketing and miscellaneous expenses of running a business. We’re currently 2 full time software engineers. Design DAO were the ones who made our branding and helped in the past for various design activities.

While we do have plans to monetize our products in the future to ensure sustainable growth, our immediate priority is to increase the adoption of the Akash Network. To achieve this, we plan to make our products free and easily accessible. This will allow us to reach a wider user base and demonstrate the value of our products, which we believe will ultimately benefit both our users and the Akash ecosystem as a whole.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we are confident that our proposal will provide the Akash Network with the necessary tools and resources to achieve its goals. With our experience and expertise, we are uniquely positioned to deliver a high-quality solution that will not only improve the chances of success but also enhance the overall user experience. We believe in the vision of the Akash Network and are committed to supporting its growth and development. Thank you for your time and consideration.

This proposal will be on-chain on March 1st 2023 to give 1 week of discussions and feedback from the community.

Link to our previously rejected grant proposal:

1 Like
2

$300k is a lot and I think it’d be better spent elsewhere. Cloudmos - while a great project - has received plenty of grants and rewards already, and I believe that the community fund should be utilized for other projects instead. Furthermore, Cloudmos recently introduced a 3% fee on all deployments meaning that a business strategy is already implemented. Maybe the strategy is not successful yet, but as this post shows, there is a big userbase that is growing with the ecosystem.

3

Thank you for this, as this proposal stands I have a couple of issues.

  1. With the new open model for Akash Network I think such a large amount should be directed towards open tools and projects.

Our team’s deep understanding of the challenges facing the Akash Network, coupled with our development of critical tools and technologies for cloud parity, positions us perfectly to execute this proposal

To note that different teams, Overclock, Cloudmos, Praetor & Quasarch are all working towards cloud parity in what is the vision for the Akash Network.

  1. Although you point out different problems and possible solutions, I truly believe $300k on a single (2 person) team wouldn’t be able to address efficiently all of those. On top of that there are teams already working on those specific problems or are strategically better placed to solve them.

Auto redeploy when provider is down
The balancer could also auto-scale based on demand
Auto re-negotiation redeploy on providers when a better lease is available for the current AKT price, before a solution is implemented with the proposal Akash economics 2.0
Auto refill when deployment balance is low

This is part of our effort with the new under development client libraries.

HTTPS tooling (Let’s Encrypt)

I recently made a PR that adds support for any issuer (including Let’s Encrypt) on Akash Providers.

We want to explore implementing an easy to use solution to deploy simple web apps or servers without needing any docker experience.

Spheron is doing this, from what I have seen, perfectly.

Trust. It’s difficult to trust providers without sufficient information of their operations and reputation.

Praetor has a very rich provider database that is currently integrated with by other systems, including the Akash Terraform Provider.

Create simplified educational content for easier user onboarding with a focus on;
Deployments
Templates
Payments
And more

Quasarch and Overclock Labs are currently revamping the new Doc 2.0 as part of the SIG Documentation.

  1. Currently $300k amounts to more than 30% of the community pool which might put a strain on it if taken in 1 go. I do believe the funding is deserved although I would propose a phased funding based on major milestones.

  2. As a community we should better organize as to not waste resources/effort/time implementing and solving the same problems. The beauty of a full open system is that we can achieve a great degree of efficiency across the ecosystem. We should also focus on strengthening the core product (Akash Network) and build features such as Metrics/Security/Observability. Third party tools, at this stage, should enhance the UX of the network and not add network features outside of the network as this will highly impact its openness. We should strive for an open framework for Akash Network interoperability.

Conclusion
I’m a big supporter of you and your work. I do share concerns on the efficiency, openness and cost of this proposal. As a team which 95% of its work is Akash Network, we at Quasarch, relate to your struggles. I’m open to discuss alternatives.