Decentralize, or Be Destroyed!
The opinions and commentary expressed herein are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of everyone at Salad. We accept a diversity of viewpoints, flavors, and spices. In our #MappingtheMetaverse summer series, we explored a world where video games are eternal, people power the Internet, and you can get paid to hatch baby unicorns. Just a few months later, the Metaverse is no longer fiction. Game developers are making hefty profits by allowing users to conjure its heart-stuff. Household names like Facebook have sacrificed brand cache to develop its infrastructure. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball calls the Metaverse the “newest macro-goal of the world’s tech giants.” Legacy enterprises have already begun a hardware arms race to determine who will plug us in when the Internet goes metastatic. Over the next decade, we’ll see which companies survive the leap into a new dimension. If our last transmission seemed spare on allusions to the almighty ‘verse, it’s because this moment must be properly contextualized. There’s a timeline schism coming. Unless we band together as a distributed counter-current, centralized forces might cast our Metaverse in the mold of today’s Internet. …since the Street does not really exist—it’s just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere—none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations—the user interfaces—of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. — Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash IN THE BEGINNING Let’s spin a yarn of the early days. On January 1, 1983, a loose affiliation of academic researchers published the TCP/IP protocol, the simple vocabulary of exchange that still underpins all networked computer communications. Decades after military researchers had established ARPANet, those pioneers helped the world access tools that had been long reserved for siloed government applications. It was a victory for free information—but it was hard to see the point unless you moved in those circles. Keep in mind that pagers were king. Email was so new it was hyphenated. By the time Snow Crash hit shelves in 1992, the Internet remained a mostly anonymous web of interconnected pages. Yet Neil Stephenson saw what it represented. His seminal work gave us the very notion of the Metaverse we now anticipate. Stephenson’s hackers featured among the O.G. cyberpunk cliques, stalwarts of free exchange to its most lurid extremes. They nourished the Metaverse with katana combat, digitized dive bars, and rock venues that would make Party Royale blush. It was a decentralized Holy Land, where anyone could create anything, without the intervention of a third party. THE BOMB DOTCOM The years that followed introduced millions of people to unbridled information flow. Despite the limitations of the “read-only web,” (where you could only write or read data and content served from static HTML files) the early Internet became a boomtown. Fortunes were made and unmade on the changing whims of the world’s first webizens. Ecommerce sites rode the dotcom boom to vaunted positions like Major Kong on rewind. Then, America Online was not a repository of “mom news,” but a titanic service provider that held together a continent. For the zoomers among us, that distant era also furnished a once-humble bookseller with enough riches to stargaze at point blank range (and produce history’s biggest divorce settlement). Like any Wild West town, it wasn’t long before robber-barons ran out the competition. As it exists today, the Internet is a fiefdom in thrall to a select few corporations. The corporate victors of Web 2.0 have become more concerned with profit than with preserving the freedom promised by the early web. We surf at the behest of monolithic cloud providers, and we communicate under the watchful eye of the platforms. Old Sonora is no more. FREE-TO-PLAY PLATFORMERS The majority of web applications have a short life cycle; few see the mass adoption necessary to make ongoing development worthwhile. Platforms are a different beast altogether. These are apps that have grown into closed systems with the power to affect the Internet at large. Over the last decade, Silicon Valley social media giants have claimed unforeseen control of the web on the strength of their utility. Handy features have become the chaos emeralds by which they bind us, and their broad reach has made them so entrenched that most people see them as necessary pillars of the Internet. As developers at companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon continuously integrated their product with more third-party services and tools, proprietary features empowered a handful of brands to become sole overseers of some of the world’s most profitable web ecosystems. That vantage allowed them to leverage mobile and cloud technologies in ways no one else could. Most platforms now maintain their own colossal infrastructures—or else lord over other enterprises atop mountains of gigabytes. Their data centers are dragon’s hoards, and their fiber networks the interlarded tendrils of their market share. You can’t argue that their success is undeserved—after all, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are each responsible for volumes of research that helped to revolutionize the web. But we’ve already seen what they’re willing to do with the scepter. Are these the companies we want in charge when the Internet starts pouring out of our glasses? A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE In our first decades online, individuals helped to produce the purest distillations of the Internet’s foundational ideals. While early pioneers turned bits into bullion, Web 1.0’s most eager participants sought to answer time-worn questions of ownership, form, and self-expression. Peer-to-peer networks like Limewire and Napster probed the boundaries of intellectual property law. The emo confessionals of LiveJournal and MySpace set the tone for their social media successors. Places like Geocities allowed certified lunatics to post “totally true” accounts of cryptid sightings for the aghast delight of eight year-olds everywhere. Without their excesses we would not have the vocabulary to answer
Centralization Is a Systems Design Problem
The opinions and commentary expressed herein are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of everyone at Salad. We accept a diversity of viewpoints, flavors, and spices in our Kitchen. Systems design questions are the scourge of first-year web developers everywhere. These prompts have become a standard part of engineering interviews across the stack. Whether you’re a coffee-soused trimester deep or walking on the sunny side of a computer science degree, you’re bound to encounter one. The premises are simple—”build Twitter,” or “diagram a scalable ecommerce backend”—but the challenges are profound. Engineering managers use systems design questions to screen potential hires for a certain kind of design thinking. Have they anticipated failure in critical subsystems? What have they implemented to deal with a tenfold spike in traffic, and at what stage in the pipeline? Candidates should be able to stitch up a system, implement load balancers at appropriate junctions, address a few high-level concepts, and name-drop the various SaaS suites du jour (without forgetting to plug in the thing). Proponents see inherent value in the exercise. It’s a good gut-check for bootcamp grads still foggy on finding the command line, and it’s useful heuristic for gauging calm under fire. Things can and do go wrong in web development; the systems design question is a shot across the bow. Good systems design requires disaster forecasting. You’ve always got to scheme out redundancies to weather crises, no matter how far-fetched the scenarios. Can you shrug off a meteor strike on your favorite data center? Is your moderation filter honed for the next channer brigade? Leaving one weak link in your system is like blowing a Christmas light in series circuit. If you’re not expecting cataclysm, it all goes kablooie. “Single points of failure” are therefore the most fearsome bogeymen in software engineering. Even rookies develop anaphylactic symptoms over the mere thought of committing this quintessential error of design thinking. You never want your name on the pull request that fubars Facebook. DOWN FOR THE COUNT One day, your grandkids—who have careers designing new Fortnite Islands—will look at you through their adorable, round, $2.5M iBall implants and ask, “Where were you when Facebook deplatformed themselves?” On October 4, 2021, Facebook and its affiliated services went dark for six hours—all because of a single technical error. It was hardly news to anyone who spurns social media, but it proved to be a huge headache for 3.5B Facebook users suddenly bereft of the ‘book. Half of the world got left on read as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger disappeared, along with the job security of countless web app developers using Facebook authentication. A rare exodus to Twitter ensued. Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure, explained how one command inadvertently authored a system-wide change to their servers’ DNS configuration, instantly obscuring the Facebook network from the web: Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt. In breaking normal DNS resolution, Facebook had equipped active camo for their entire product line. They most likely watched it happen in real time. It would have been a simple fix, had browsers been able to find their network: All of this happened very fast. And as our engineers worked to figure out what was happening and why, they faced two large obstacles: first, it was not possible to access our data centers through our normal means because their networks were down, and second, the total loss of DNS broke many of the internal tools we’d normally use to investigate and resolve outages like this. With remote access out of the question, Facebook engineers had to spend hours butting heads with hardware security protocols at the company’s physical data centers. They managed to restore functionality later that day, but only after putting the Internet through an opera’s worth of tension. When the happy blue logo returned to the web, no one’s private information appeared compromised, but the same couldn’t be said for the company’s public perception. MEA CULPA 2.0 You see, we lost more than grandma’s political rants during those six hours. Ecommerce markets the size of some GDPs vanished as Facebook’s ad ecosystem went belly-up. The hiccup cost Facebook up to $65M in ad revenue, tombstoned $6B from Mark Zuckerberg’s personal surf wax fund, and even caused Facebook’s seemingly invincible stock to quaver during the outage. In the calm that followed the blip, the worrywarts of the Internet also suddenly remembered that Facebook is custodian to innumerable petabytes of user data. To allay fears that malicious activity could have played a part in the outage, Mr. Janardhan published a supplemental explanation the next day, in which he called the events of October 4th “an error of our own making.” In it, he took pains to document the role of Facebook’s backbone network, flex a few thousand miles of fiber optic cable, and rather breezily reveal the line-level origin of the outage: a bug that failed to prevent a debugger from preventing the actions of a human who failed. You read that right. …in the extensive day-to-day work of maintaining [our] infrastructure, our engineers often need to take part of the backbone offline for maintenance—perhaps repairing a fiber line, adding more capacity, or updating the software on the router itself. This was the source of yesterday’s outage. During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally. Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command. Forgive an old-fashioned reader, but do ears still prick upon passive voice? Mr. Janardhan writes that a command “was issued.” Must we not necessarily infer that a human being gave the
SaladCast Episode 13: Kyle Dodson on Containerized Workloads
*Welcome to SaladCast! In this podcast series, we introduce you to Salad Chefs from all corners of the Infinite Kitchen. We hope you’ll join us as we get to know members of our community, indie developers, and teammates from our very own Salad staff.* In this episode: Engineering mastermind Kyle Dodson fields some heady questions about the history of containerization technology. If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet came to run on centralized services (or how Salad will change that), get ready for a crash course in all things cloud computing from one of the Kitchen’s most seasoned Chefs. Watch the full episode at the SaladChefs YouTube channel. Episode Highlights Highlights content has been edited and slightly reordered for clarity. Cloud computing has gone mainstream. How did we get here? BOB: At Salad, we’ve always focused on understanding the human element of distributed computing—how to motivate people to share compute resources—in order to build our network in anticipation of a moment like this. Containerization and virtualization technologies seem to be spilling over from the arena of cloud development into consumer operating systems. How did we get here? It’s become mainstream for even the largest enterprises to adopt various virtualization technologies. There are many bullet points you could list under their benefits, but one of the biggest drivers has been their potential to optimize resource utilization. Big companies always want to maximize their investments, especially what they spend on computing infrastructure. Twenty years ago you’d go buy a computer, and then go back and forth with an enterprise server sales rep to plan out what you needed, resource-wise—not just for today, but for whatever lifetime you wanted out of that resource. “Our business is going to grow this way, we’re going to add more users, here’s how the software scales…” You had to understand all that up front, and then make a purchase, while guessing about the lifecycle five or six years from that moment. It was a black art. You got it wrong all the time, and it was really difficult to manage. So the thinking changed. “What if we built large, optimized servers, and partitioned their resources for the applications running on them?” Virtual machines allowed you to configure your systems so that, instead of having 20-40% of your resources sitting unused for the first few years of the hardware life cycle, you could put all of those resources to use for discrete purposes and maximize your long-term investments. That’s been a trend in software development for a long time. What is the difference between virtual machines and containers? Think of a virtual machine as a base operating system layer and all its associated overhead. Containers are really just another step within. When you’re running several virtual machines on one really large server, you’re paying all this overhead for each virtual machine that’s actually running on the underlying hardware. There’s an opportunity there. As more enterprises adopted virtual machines, people began to ask, “Could we optimize this even further?” Containerization technology eliminated some of that redundant overhead and consolidated it down so you could apply more of those low-level hardware resources to applications running on your server. What other problems did containerization technology solve? Once again, these innovations arose from the desire to eke more returns out of your investment. Many containerization technologies were built on solutions that had been around for a while, or borrowed features from existing technologies. Docker didn’t start with a complete feature set from beginning to end. It was the product of concurrent trends in the information technology and software engineering worlds. As developers and network administrators looked for better ways to manage the compute ecosystem, those individual features became the coherent software packages we know today. By the time containers arrived, you weren’t buying one computer and loading up ten applications on it. Most companies had scaled to a point where they were buying several racks of computers and distributing hundreds of applications across them. Containers provided a neat way to orchestrate and distribute those software packages across all your hardware. How did containers and virtual machines lead to cloud computing? Suppose you have a network, the abstract concept of a disk, and a collection of hardware resources at your disposal. If you want to execute a software package in that ecosystem, you first have to figure out how to distribute that workload across a cluster of machines. And to ensure reliability at scale, you need enough touchpoints so you can access those resources at all times. If you have some spare cycles sitting on the side, it’s no big deal if one machine goes down. You just need to transport those resources over to the failed system. There might be some downtime, but you could set resources aside to make sure the system comes back up. It sort of swung it back to that old problem of future-proofing your resource needs. You were still trying to make predictions before investing in hardware. The cloud really emerged when large enterprises began to approach the same core requirements. They needed resources to run their baseline of live workloads, extra resources for backups, resources for emergency disaster scenarios, and resources to scale five years out. So along came these big cloud companies—notably Amazon, with AWS—who said, “We’re doing these things too, and we’ve got all this unused disaster capacity to share.” When you launch an elastic instance from AWS, everyone collectively pays for the uptime cost, effectively reducing your total investment. You said that orchestration is the next step. Could you explain that? BOB: To recap what we’ve discussed so far: containerization technology arose from a desire to maximize investments into network infrastructure. Developers adopted virtual machines to confront the fixed constraints of the hardware lifecycle. Now they can buy bigger pieces of hardware, run a few different services on them, and effectively share a redundant, lower-level OS layer through containers. You said that orchestration is the next step. Could you explain that? To go back to a dated example:
SaladCast Episode 12: Our Product Roadmap With Daniel Sarfati
Welcome to SaladCast! In this podcast series, we introduce you to Salad Chefs from all corners of the Infinite Kitchen. We hope you’ll join us as we get to know members of our community, indie developers, and teammates from our very own Salad staff. In this episode: The SaladCast staff series continues with Bob at the helm! Now that trustless mechanisms have given Salad the chops to take on virtually any computing task, Product Director Daniel Sarfati crashes the ‘Cast to lay out our roadmap to diversified workloads. Learn how users in the Salad Chefs Discord have helped us develop the Salad app, grok tech at the ephemeral edge, and hear all the things the Kitchen can do that data centers just can’t. Watch the full episode at the SaladChefs YouTube channel. Episode Highlights Highlights content has been edited and slightly reordered for clarity. You’ve been here for 90% of Salad’s history. What first attracted you to Salad? Before coming to Salad, I had worked in the aerospace industry, and done some experimental “side hustles” in gaming. Our teams were tackling complex data problems that required coordination between distributed servers, like plotting aerial traffic routes, or linking social gaming networks. The question was always, “How do you distribute these massive data processing workloads?” Taking that and applying that to consumer PCs was really exciting. That’s a problem that still isn’t solved at the enterprise level. And as the need for compute grows, there’s no way to solve it just by building more data centers. There has to be a huge shift in the way we think about and use computers to handle the scale of the data that needs processing. We’re obviously focused on solving that supply problem. How do you shepherd a novel value proposition like ours to market? Salad had this unique way of “hacking” the two-sided market problem. Other people who talk about this focus on getting data scientists and getting users online. We just focused on the latter. We always knew we could hire the data scientists down the line, but we didn’t need them to grow the market. Our goal is to make Salad easy enough for anybody to use it—which is why we abstract away detailed stats like your hashrate. We’re building an intelligent platform that saves the users all that configuration. In a way, we’re doing twice the work as a traditional cryptominer. Is there a conflict between making something easy and making it individually optimized? There’s been a natural evolution of the product. People who have been around for a while will know that we used to have flat earning rates. As long as Salad was Chopping on your machine, you were getting X dollars per hour, no matter what. So that’s come a long way. The big improvements we’re making in the near future will get us closer to that ideal state where Salad is truly optimized for every user’s machine to get them the most value. Today we’re taking these cryptomining workloads and figuring out the best way to run them. When we start to move into different workloads in the future, we’ll be doing the same thing—having a deep understanding of the problem, and figuring out what to change on individual users’ PCs. What was the thinking behind fixed rates? When we first started, we had only a few dozen users on the app at once. Then we were very focused on refining the user experience. Fixed earning rates were a business risk for us that gave us the leeway to adjust things in the background without changing the user experience. We saw it as an opportunity to move quickly, get something in front of users, grow the community, and create those mechanisms for getting feedback. That work took us to where we are today—verifying every single coin that’s mined, and attributing every single share to a user. How has the community helped to grow the Kitchen? Having access to 35,000 people in Discord is incredible. Our community is so engaged that when I go into the lobby channel on our server and start typing, I see dozens of messages saying, “Daniel is typing! What’s Daniel going to say?” They’re so engaged with us that, whenever we have questions or prototypes, we can have twenty users work through a design and help us find the stumbling blocks before it even gets into the hands of the engineering team. That’s huge for us, and that’s why our focus has always been building our community and enhancing the user experience. While blockchain workloads helped us to build, fund, and maintain the network. Right. Crypto is such a powerful product because it is completely trustless. Any machine can come onto the network and start earning money from day one. If they try to act fraudulently, the network will automatically reject that action. It was extremely beneficial to be able to leverage those existing systems, because we now have a baseline for establishing the new requirements of diversified workloads. With SaladCloud, we can support much more than blockchain mining—though it could be the first workload for a new user. You come in and start mining on Salad. After a certain number of hours we’ll have benchmark data on that PC, which gives us room to say, “This PC is perfectly suited for AI training,” or for some other workload. So trustless mechanisms were actually key to building out our trust rating system. Where do we go from there? With that solid foundation in place, pretty soon we’re going to unveil dynamic pricing models so that, as the markets fluctuate, we’re changing the miner that you’re running and optimizing it for an individual PC like never before. Those unlocks will enable new workloads with completely different use cases. Some of them can be run 24/7. If I decide to run my machine in the middle of the day, or at night, there will be workloads available. But some of the workloads we’re considering are dependent on the consumer on the
SaladCast Episode 10: The Salad Business Model With CEO Bob Miles
Welcome to SaladCast! In this podcast series, we introduce you to Salad Chefs from all corners of the Infinite Kitchen. We hope you’ll join us as we get to know members of our community, indie developers, and teammates from our very own Salad staff. In today’s episode: Salad CEO Bob Miles joins the SaladCast to discuss our company business model, Salad’s humble beginnings, and the exciting future for our distributed network. Watch the whole episode at the SaladChefs YouTube channel. Episode Highlights Highlights content has been edited and slightly reordered for clarity. How did Salad first come to be? There was that big runup with crypto back in 2017, and one of the things that I found really curious was…a lot of the gamers that I knew weren’t actually mining. That sent me down a path of investigation to try and understand, “What’s the friction? Why aren’t people sharing their idle computer to make that 50 to 90 bucks each month?” What hurdles did you identify back then? After a lot of conversations, three main hypotheses formed. Firstly, too many people still think of crypto as a virus. It’s guilty by association from the early days of the Silk Road, and gets lumped in with hackers, drug dealers, and other nefarious actors. Even when you install our application today, most antivirus software will flag Salad—with a false positive—because of that kind of thinking. We also realized that most gamers either don’t have the technical aptitude or the sheer willpower to go out there and mine themselves. Think about it: you have to figure out the most profitable protocol for your machine, find the right library, configure it from the command line interface, run your own private keys, and then make the transactions—and those are taxable events. Most gamers throw that in the “too hard” basket. That’s a big opportunity for us here at Salad, and one that I hope we’re executing on better and better, day by day—making it easy to get the value out of your idle PC. The third and most important thing we learned: the value proposition for cryptomining is just completely wrong for most gamers. If you tell them, “run this application for a month, and we’ll give you 0.0086732 ETH,” or FileCoin, or Storj, or some other kind of token, it’s not as motivating as the value proposition of “share your PC for a month, and you’ll get games, Nitro subscriptions, gift cards, or skins.” That’s real. That’s tangible. That was the big “why now” moment for Salad. Every computer has meaningful value. We want to make it easy to deliver that value to gamers. How did Salad overcome those frictions? There was a huge amount of friction back in 2017. Gamers were really pissed off at cryptominers. We even tried that somewhat cringeworthy, classic sort of “By Gamers, for Gamers” tagline back then, but that didn’t last long. Gamers are sensitive to bullshit. The key was recognizing that gamers already had this value locked up in their PCs, and showing them that they could participate in crypto to their mutual benefit. Would you say gamers have embraced cryptomining? Back then, we didn’t have the foresight to understand what it would blossom into today, especially when you consider how meaningful something like the Metaverse could be. The first communities to really adopt digital goods were gamers. Thanks to DLC, skins, and in-game currencies, gamers already have a mental model that imbues digital items with inherent value. Gen Z is entirely digital natives. They’re spending increasing amounts of time in these digital ecosystems. They already understand the importance of a digital persona and digital ownership. How will the Metaverse change things? We’ve always lived in a society of “CTRL+C, CTRL+V.” For the first time, the blockchain technology behind NFTs have created true, verifiable items that exist in cyberspace. That’s absolutely revolutionary. Nowadays, the average American spends seven hours a day online. As these big market trends come together, value lies where human attention is focused. If we can now leverage this technology that allows true and verifiable digital ownership, the only limit is your imagination. What will it take to create the Metaverse? It’s going to be absolutely fundamental to ensure the integrity of those blockchains and those networks. If it ultimately comes down to all of these blockchains being powered by AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, that’s a centralizing force that starts to eat away at the integrity of that digital ownership. So that’s the future we’re building towards here at Salad. We believe every device will generate value, not only in terms of games and subscriptions, but purpose as a self-sovereign server to ensure the integrity of that ecosystem. What’s the biggest challenge for Salad going forward? We’re introducing an entirely novel value proposition—share your idle PC in return for rewards—and we’re bringing it to market in a world where people have zero attention span and zero patience. We’ve all been conditioned by our phones to move on to the next thing. We’re not talking about a get-rich-quick scheme. The challenge for us is to reconcile that desire for immediate gratification with the actual unit economics of computesharing. It takes patience to reach that “a-ha!” moment where you redeem your first reward on Salad and it clicks. But in five years time, this model will be ubiquitous. “Pay with your PC” will be well understood. The analogy I like to use is: imagine if we were pitching AirBnB or Uber in 2008. A complete stranger’s going to pick you up in their car, or sleep in the bedroom next to you tonight. Most people would have been like, “Hell, no! You know there’s axe murderers in the world.” Now you look at it and go, “Of course!” The exact same thing is going to happen with Salad. We’re at the very start of an S-curve of adoption. How will Salad’s network change as it grows? The bigger we get, the more meaningful we become. We’ve got 20,000 daily active nodes
Exploring Distributed Data Parallel (DDP) Training on Consumer GPUs
Our team is currently developing utility applications for Salad Container Engine (SCE)
How to Refactor Public Cloud to Reduce Cloud Cost
Cloud cost is ballooning for everyone. The global cloud market is expected to generate at least $206B in revenue this year, even as customers overwhelmingly fear overprovisioning and estimate that up to 32% of cloud spend goes to waste. It’s only natural to assume that rational actors will embrace new technologies and providers to lighten the load. Thanks to the broad adoption of containerization, we’re headed for a fragmentation of the landscape, wherein more and more customers may turn to alternative infrastructure. Containers Made Multicloud Possible Nowadays, it’s rare to find a company without a hybrid or multicloud configuration, but that wasn’t always the case. Vendor lock-in used to be a fact of life. Enterprises anxious to modernize during the heyday of Web 2.0 didn’t have the time to compare cloud solutions once they were up and running, and neither did the up-and-comers nipping at their heels. For enterprises and innovators alike, it was oftentimes easier to tack on a service from a current vendor than shop around for the most cost-effective solution. Containerization changed all that. The portability and immutability of the format made it possible to package software with its dependencies and execute as intended wherever it was sent. As web applications decoupled, software developers began to take a renewed interest in optimizing cloud spending by aligning their resource strategies to discrete use cases. The benefits of immutability and portability translate to zero switching cost. Now nearly every cloud customer on the planet relies on multicloud infrastructure powered by containerization technologies and virtual machines. By making better, more needs-based choices, cloud customers came to acknowledge a fundamental flaw in the value proposition of public cloud: complexity inevitably leads to overprovisioning and high cloud costs. Serverless Wasn’t Painless In the last half decade, centralized cloud providers have tried to adapt to reality. The Big Three released a spate of so-called “serverless” container orchestration services that ostensibly sought to address a growing appetite for simplicity. Billed universally as out-of-the-box solutions, these products promised to streamline deployment by eliminating the operational burden of server management and allowing customers to focus solely on app development. I assume we’re all pretty familiar with how marketing works. Leaving aside, for the moment, that “serverless” is a horribly imprecise term of art, the first generation of fully managed orchestration services didn’t do enough to distinguish themselves as standalone solutions. Added perks like on-demand elastic bursting, event-driven autoscaling, and pay-as-you-go pricing certainly sweetened the deal, but folks lost in the wildlands of “everything-as-a-service” couldn’t readily grok the value proposition. If the provider continued to manage the underlying infrastructure, wasn’t serverless just a nuanced version of the conventional cloud deployment workflow? That’s not to say those products had no merit. Fully managed orchestration is a valuable service for specialized and discrete use cases, and reclaimed development time was a sufficient incentive for many notable enterprises to embrace it. But those initial offerings didn’t provide the cost optimization they were after. Fully managed orchestration failed to curry early favor because the first products on the market were too much like everything else. They came laden with fluctuating and extravagant cloud costs, unforeseen operational overhead, and a tendency toward vendor lock-in. Worst of all, they didn’t actually alleviate pain points. They just redistributed them! Frustration-as-a-Service No category of cloud products has fallen short of its promise quite like fully managed serverless. Instead of streamlining deployment and unburdening developers, most of those early solutions inadvertently replaced the onus of server management with a multitude of additional tasks. As Corey Quinn of Last Week in AWS explains: The bulk of your time building serverless applications will not be spent writing the application logic… Instead you’ll spend most of your time figuring out how to mate these functions with other services from that cloud provider. In practice, functions-as-a-service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda require such declarative execution patterns that they transmute hours better spent on business logic into a full-time business of managing functions to get the job done as intended. (You could argue that Lambda does help to reduce a codebase to its essential business logic, but that’s like saying the monkey’s paw really did grant wishes.) Can you blame anyone for dismissing fully managed orchestration from the start? Detractors looked at the gooey, “serverless” moniker as a gateway drug to vendor lock-in, while more charitable critics begrudgingly admitted that it could be a stopgap solution for cases where your go-live was yesterday, but it wasn’t something you’d choose to rely on in the long haul. I’m inclined to agree—at least as the assessment pertains to those early implementations. Engaging with centralized serverless invariably forced you to sacrifice autonomy, limit versatility, and incur unnecessary expense. Put another way, they suffered the classic ills of public cloud. The CaaS Alternative To my mind, every industry trend suggests a prevailing sense of cloud fatigue: Budgetary spillover has undermined the whole argument for leaving bare metal in the first place! Now that containers have broken the floodgates, customers are well provisioned to divert resources to novel infrastructure that’s more optimized for containerized deployment. And there’s nothing more frightening to tier-one vendors than simple, affordable alternatives. For evidence, you’d need only consider the newest fully managed products from the Big Three. Long gone are the daisy-chained function outputs and thorny, plug-and-play backends. Newer containers-as-a-service (CaaS) products like AWS Fargate and Azure Container Instances have reduced the feature set to exactly what’s on the box—namely infrastructure, orchestration, and event-driven scaling. If that sounds like “Docker images on demand,” that’s because it is. It could even be the future. Companies don’t want to spend inordinate amounts monitoring systems that cost peanuts to run. Fully managed CaaS orchestration is especially useful for discrete use cases that don’t require access to the underlying nodes, such as long-running data processing batch jobs or 3-D accelerated rendering queues, but it’s equally suited to autoscaling decoupled microservices. In a recent survey by Datadog, a significant share of cloud customers signaled interest in migrating Kubernetes clusters to fully managed serverless. That’s great news for the paradigm as a whole, but
Salad Raises $17M to Decentralize the Cloud
Left Lane Capital and Origin Ventures co-lead our Series A, alongside existing investors Royal Street Ventures, Carthona Capital, and Kickstart Fund As Salad enters its fourth year, we’re proud to have hundreds of thousands of PC gamers and an incredible lineup of investors joining us in our mission to build a Community Cloud for the next generation of the web. The Salad network has already become one of the most powerful multi-purpose distributed supercomputers in the world. In a few months’ time, SaladCloud’s first enterprise workloads will help us illustrate just how computesharing can provide affordable, distributed alternatives to traditional cloud solutions—which is something far more necessary than ever before. A Decade of Innovation There’s an exciting and determinative decade ahead of us. Private individuals are exploring digital sovereignty with crypto, Web3, and the emerging metaverse. Our lives are becoming more connected, and market analysts breathlessly anticipate billions more IoT devices, mobile phones, and people coming online by 2025. Some of the biggest names in gaming, tech, and social media are looking to a more immersive future powered by machine learning, artificial intelligence, and individual creativity. Connecting those dots will take a near-ubiquitous supply of compute resources—and with data demand already surging at an exponential rate, it’s become painfully obvious that Web3 will present an insuperable challenge for the centralized cloud. Today, more than half of all available compute resources sit idle within our own homes, locked inside gaming rigs or other performance PCs. As our lives become further entwined with digital experiences, latent consumer resources like storage, bandwidth, and compute cycles could become the precious commodities of the 21st century. To power all of the digital venues, technical milestones, and decentralized economies of Web3, we’ve got to awaken the world’s Internet-enabled devices to their true potential. Salad will empower millions of individuals to unlock the hidden value of their compute resources. The Power of Computesharing When I see nearly 50,000 gamers chatting in our community Discord server, it’s almost easy to forget just how radical Salad’s value proposition still is today. In 2018, you could hardly convince one person to share their PC to a distributed network, let alone a hundred. It’s humbling to realize that, nowadays, hundreds of thousands of individuals—from 188 different countries!—voluntarily share compute resources on Salad every month. Thanks to their contributions, our network has attained activity peaks of 80+ petaFLOPS. Salad is the world’s most distributed supercomputer! It’s an amazing feat, but our hodge-podge Kitchen would be nothing without the visionary Salad Chefs who took a chance on us. We’re forever indebted to the visionary early adopters who took the first bite, along with the hundreds of YouTubers and content creators who have shared the warmth of our Kitchen since the beginning. You’ve put the social proof in the pudding, and given the whole world a taste of what our community can do. Since our founding, Salad Chefs like you have contributed 8,000+ years of processing cycles to Ethereum and dozens of other cryptocurrency networks. Gamers in our community annually claim over 3 million games, subscriptions, gift cards, and other digital rewards using just the power of their PCs. You’ve joined us in donating thousands to environmental charities like 1% for the Planet and #TeamTrees. And in four years of service, no one has ever suffered a security intrusion or incurred hardware damage while using our software. Your trust has given us the chance to prove that computesharing works. We’re excited to help you profit from your PC for years to come. Our Series A Partners I’d also like to extend heartfelt thanks to our new and returning investment partners. Your support is an essential ingredient in our recipe, and we look forward to sharing all our future achievements with you. With a thriving community and powerhouse partners like you on our side, Salad is uniquely provisioned to address the growing appetite for elastic compute resources, and enable private individuals to directly compete with traditional cloud providers. “We are at peak centralization right now. As computing becomes embedded everywhere in our world, transforming how we interact with people, places, and things, and as the physical and digital worlds converge, we will require more sovereignty and more decentralized control. Cloud and edge computing will evolve to meet these real-world needs.” — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (Source) Why We Chop This is a fight against Centralization itself—and we couldn’t have picked a more opportune moment to enter the fray. Enterprise-standard cloud technologies have already begun to mingle with consumer operating systems, while native compatibility layers such as WSL2 open additional vectors for distributed applications. Thanks to developments like these, SaladCloud will provide an extensible and ideal compute environment in which to delimit entirely new Web3 protocols. Our people-powered platform will help tomorrow’s big thinkers realize unsung ideas in a way that’s easy, transparent, and far more affordable than the incumbent cloud computing solutions. Since 2020’s seed plus round, our engineering team has been hard at work developing SaladBowl, a proprietary orchestration engine that allows us to distribute workloads to select cohorts of virtual and physical machines across a standardized infrastructure layer. One day soon, Salad Chefs will get the chance to opt into ephemeral edge-computing jobs, run embarrassingly parallelizable AI algorithms, or even share bandwidth to support some of the world’s most popular VPN services—safely, and on their own terms. The Future We Share No matter what the future holds, I believe some things will always remain true. For starters: In that vein, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve officially signed contracts with our first enterprise clients. Over the next few months, we’ll begin to onboard them onto our flagship SaladCloud services, and devise ways to incorporate their new, non-crypto workloads into Salad’s menu of computational cuisine. Gamers using Salad will soon be able to choose between all-new SaladCloud jobs or classic cryptomining tasks whenever they Chop. It’s been a journey to get to this point, and for any Salad Chef rolling their eyes, let me assure you: this thing is inked! We can’t divulge any more details just yet, but
How the Kitchen Conquered 2021
When you’re in the Salad Kitchen, time tastes a little bit different. Treasured gaming hours—those moments spent mercking kids on hot mics, puzzling our way out of dungeons, or exploring the unknown vistas of the map—are more readily savored just knowing our PCs won’t get lonesome when we return to reality. There they sit, quietly purring, dreaming up new rewards for their loving owners. The little scamps. This time last year, who would have thought that hundreds of thousands of people might soon be thinking the same thing? Let’s push pause to appreciate everything the indomitable Salad Chefs achieved in 2021. Community Growth These past twelve months have certainly crowded the Kitchen. Our computesharing network is serving 950% more people than it did in all of 2020—and the newcomers came hungry! Together the Salad Chefs claimed a whopping $3.49M in value and redeemed over 3.2 million digital rewards* from the Salad Storefront in 2021. In those 365 short days, our community also managed to earn 3.18 billion experience points. That means each and every Salad user joined a colossal effort to share 6,054 years of computer processing. We’re now the world’s most distributed supercomputer, and we’re still in our salad days. But any chef worth their salt knows: the real magic of the Kitchen lies in its ability to dish it out. *Including rewards issued as Bonuses during Salad Seasons and Community Challenges. Charitable Contributions Salad users collectively made over 60,000 individual charitable donations in 2021. In addition to their contributions to the many charities we support via the Salad Storefront, our Chefs doled out seriously generous portions in the fall and winter. During the ScreamTrees Community Challenge, Salad Chefs joined us in raising a Halloween helping of $3,100 for #TeamTrees—because there’s nothing spookier than a world without trees! Then, a month later, they tripled down in our Growvember 2021 charity campaign. In just thirty days our community rallied to raise $9,630 for environmental charities around the world, including another $5,091 for the reforestation efforts of #TeamTrees. The Chefs do truly amazing work—but they still make plenty of time for play. Season 2 In Review When Salad Season 2 began, we explained how thousands of user responses guided us in cooking up this season’s fresh new features and remixed challenges. As we bid adieu to our second Salad Season, we’d like to thank our loyal community once more for helping us perfect the recipe. Over 175,000 unique Salad Chefs took a spin on the latest levels, earning a total of 812,000 Bonuses, games, and rewards from our seasonal bill of fare. Though only 413 legendary individuals completed all 20 XP Levels in Salad Season 1, we’re pleased to announce 1,489 Chefs are joining that stouthearted cohort in Season 2. Congratulations to all those who reached Level 20! If you have already claimed your Level 20 Bonus, look out for your exclusive rewards to arrive in the next few weeks. Season 2 Giveaway We hope you saved room for dessert. One lucky Season 2 Giveaway winner has won a state-of-the-art Nanoleaf Shapes RGB light panel kit—a coveted, glow up grand prize that comes drizzled with Salad Balance. We’ve also issued $100 Salad Balance Bonuses to one hundred runners-up. All told, that’s ten thousand smackers to satisfy even the most fiendish loot lust. Thanks to everyone who participated! If you made off with a prize, don’t forget to share your latest sweet redeems in the #show-off-your-earnings channel of the SaladChefs Discord. 2021 Events This year, Salad introduced some long-awaited wishlist features, overcame obstacles, and partied down with the people of the Kitchen. Here’s just a sampling of some of the biggest events and developments of 2021. Community Challenges This year we welcomed Community Challenges, a series of biweekly, limited-time missions that offer extra rewards for everyone in the Kitchen. Salad Chefs joined us in donating to important causes, helped us test new features, and even amplified our signal on social media. For every Challenge conquered, our users earned supplemental earnings boosts, exclusive profile avatars, and other exclusive perks. Soon after, our click-and-claim Bonus system made it easier than ever to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Media Milestones In April the official SaladChefs community server earned its verification on Discord. What finally tipped the scales? Perhaps it was the combined might of more than 43,000 individuals (and counting!). Later on the SaladChefs Twitter followed suit, going offish with a snazzy blue check. Those badges might seem meaningless to a headshotter dripping with Call of Duty emblems, but they’re important battle standards in the fight for decentralization. As more and more legacy platforms begin to acknowledge the strength of our Kitchen, we’ll be able to show millions more people how to profit from their PC. Salad is too legit to quit, and now the world knows it. Salad Season 1 Salad users earn XP for every minute of work shared to our network—but for a while, it didn’t do much else. Salad Season 1 turned that XP from an inert cheevo into a full-blown leveling system! For the first time ever, Salad Chefs earned games, subscriptions, and Salad Balance boosts just for running Salad, no matter what hardware they brought to the party. Mapping the Metaverse Over the summer, our community journeyed into the Metaverse. Their mission? Save the six Chefs we had lost on the other side. As part of the #MappingtheMetaverse Summer Series event, everyone who shared our featured articles earned a rare profile avatar featuring one of those intrepid explorers. Summer Series The original #MtM articles harkened to a more aspirational time, when we saw major gaming companies as compatriots on a quest to craft the next era of video games—and the Internet itself. Reminisce with us in the six O.G. entries: Winter Series Now things have taken a darker turn. The ongoing Mapping the Metaverse Winter Series covers the cultural and technological impact that centralization may have on the burgeoning metaverse if left unchecked. Catch up with our call to arms below: 15K Fall Series In October, local gamers joined us at Esposure Studios in Dallas, TX for the championship round of the 15K Fall Series NBA2K tournament. Pre-qualifying teams sliced into Salad’s $15,000 prize purse, leading to the ultimate showdown between No Tolerance and Farewell Gaming on #TheMainCourt. Congratulations to No Tolerance on their victory—and bravo to Farewell Gaming for making it a real nail-biter!
2022 In Review
It’s difficult to measure the importance of a year. Whether you gauge success in lucky headshots or quarterly goals, there are simply too many moments and milestones in anyone’s life to understand which ones may have planted the seeds that nourished the future. As 2022 draws to a close, we’d like to invite our faithful Chefs, customers, and partners to celebrate the best achievements from another year together in the Salad Kitchen. Company Newcomers Back in March, Salad raised $17M to turn our humble network—already the world’s most distributed supercomputer—into an affordable computing platform for real-life innovators. Thanks to that heaping helping from our investment partners, we’ve more than doubled our team in just a few months. That’s a full reno in the ranks of Salad HQ! With more cooks in the Kitchen, Salad can finally develop robust systems to help everyone power a more equitable Internet safely and securely, right from home. Quest Progress Saved Watch ‘Welcome to Salad’ Now Since the start of the year, over 494,000 new Chefs have joined our quest to save the Internet. These faithful few have sent typical Chopping time through the roof since the summer—and claimed a legendary trove of loot along the way! With record numbers of first-time redemptions from the Salad Storefront, our community claimed a whopping total of 238,000 choice Chops, including games, gift cards, and new rewards requested over at r/SaladChefs. Thousands more Chefs sent their Salad Balance web-wide through our recently unveiled PayPal integration. Take a look at the top ten most-copped Chops of the year! Mere months after the triumphant return of Fresh Loot Friday, we’ve expanded our pantry with a host of sought-after sundries, such as affordable indies, VPN subscription plans, and profile-personalization tools for the savvy webizen. Salad App Updates Watch a short video. This year also saw the arrival of our sleeker, more minified Salad 1.0 experience. Now snugly secured in the Windows System Tray, our dutiful dynamo has taken on a form to suit its longtime ambition: to help you profit from your PC as simply and as unobtrusively as possible. Smart Workload Selection gave Salad 1.0 the chops to seamlessly switch between blockchain workloads and a variety of on-demand jobs whenever they offer greater Salad Balance. Chefs can now sink their teeth into profitable tasks that match their unique hardware configurations as soon as they become available—without worrying about maxxing out any machine settings. Diversified Fare Salad ain’t your garden-variety cryptominer! Earlier this year, our Discord community participated in a closed beta to serve our first-ever distributed container workloads. Thanks to that overwhelming response from the Salad Chefs, our team successfully deployed thousands of containers, improved overall network resiliency, and configured 90% of participating machines to serve containerized workloads. We’re confident that Salad Container Engine can now accommodate virtually any stateless compute application, and that the large majority of Chefs will be able to do the same. In another limited beta test, 4,855 participants spread across the U.S., U.K., and Germany shared bandwidth to support P2P video streaming, earning nearly $19,000 in Salad Balance directly from Salad Gateway Service customers. We’re excited to see just how much you can earn as we expand bandwidth access to new countries. With the arrival of container environments and high-bandwidth jobs, Salad’s menu of computational cuisine has grown to include persistent processing workloads, ad hoc networking tasks, and on-demand deployments from real innovators. Upcoming Salad Features Now that container workloads have gone gold across the network, we’re prepping a smorgasbord of features to make Salad the most profitable “set-and-forget” experience around. One of the first to arrive will be Background Chopping, an all-new personalization setting to help you tackle snack-sized Salad jobs that consume minimal CPU while you’re using your PC. Thank You Salad is simple, but it’s not the easiest thing to explain. And like all head-smackingly good ideas, lots of folks won’t understand it without first trying it out. We’re honored to have thousands of people from around the world joining us in the Kitchen every day. If you hadn’t taken that first bite, Salad might still be an idea. Your continued support is the soil for our every effort. We can’t wait to share compute for epic loot by your side for years to come. — Team Salad
