distributed computing
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“Developers, as you know, do not like to pay for things”
In the previous part of this EC-1, we looked at the technical details of CockroachDB and how it provides accurate data instantaneously anywhere on the planet. In this installment, we’re going to take a look at the product side of Cockroach, with a particular focus on developer relations.
As a business, Cockroach Labs has many things going for it. The company’s approach to distributed database technology is novel. And, as more companies operate on a global level, CockroachDB has the potential to gain some significant market share internationally. The company is seven years into a typical 10-year maturity model for databases, has raised $355 million, and holds a $2 billion market value. It’s considered a double unicorn. Few database companies can say this.
The company is now aggressively expanding into the database-as-a-service space, offering its own technology in a fully managed package, expanding the spectrum of clients who can take immediate advantage of its products.
But its growth depends upon securing the love of developers while also making its product easier to use for new customers. To that end, I’m going to analyze the company’s pivot to the cloud as well as its extensive outreach to developers as it works to set itself up for long-term, sustainable success.
Cockroach Labs looks to the cloud
These days, just about any company of consequence provides services via the internet, and a growing number of these services are powered by products and services from native cloud providers. Gartner forecasted in 2019 that cloud services are growing at an annual rate of 17.5%, and there’s no sign that the growth has abated at all.
Its founders’ history with Google back in the mid-2000s has meant that Cockroach Labs has always been aware of the impact of cloud services on the commercial web. Unsurprisingly, CockroachDB could run cloud native right from its first release, given that its architecture presupposes the cloud in its operation — as we saw in part 2 of this EC-1.
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Gucci brings digital items and experiences to Roblox in new partnership
As gaming platforms capitalize on pandemic-fueled traffic to their digital worlds, brands that drive culture in the physical world are fighting to ensure they don’t miss any new opportunities. A new partnership between Roblox and Gucci brings digital items from the fashion house into the platform’s metaverse alongside a new limited-run digital experience.
Gucci’s new experience teams a set of virtual spaces with a set of digital branded items in an effort to immerse Roblox users inside a world that feels unique to the Gucci brand and Roblox platform. The new space, called Gucci Garden, debuts today for a two-week run on the Roblox platform.
The environment takes advantage of recent advances in the game engine powering Roblox, bringing users a high-dynamic set of environments that they can traverse as blank mannequins, which evolve visually as users move through different spaces. Different rooms in the experience draw influence from different Gucci campaigns of the past several years. The digital event’s rollout accompanies a real-world multimedia event in Florence, Gucci Garden Archetypes.
The rollout follows an early pilot with creator Rook Vanguard in releasing Gucci-branded digital items to the platform this past December.
Image Credits: Roblox
In an interview with TechCrunch, Gucci CMO Robert Triefus details how the luxury fashion brand has been redefining its approachability as it extends its reach to digital platforms like Roblox — which the company sees as an opportunity that’s growing too quickly to ignore.
“Hats off to Roblox, scale came quickly,” Triefus tells TechCrunch. “Gucci is scale, though it’s taken us 100 years, and it took Roblox about 100 days.”
For high-fashion brands, the digital sphere has presented plenty of challenges when it comes to preserving exclusivity on a medium that begs for mass adoption. Triefus says Gucci has aimed to lean into the access offered by digital platforms as a way of promoting a more inclusive brand.
“There’s so much talk today about the metaverse,” Triefus says. “In the last six years, [Creative Director Alessandro Michele] has created a Gucci Metaverse but it’s not necessarily a digital manifestation, it’s a narrative.”
Luxury and authenticity have been some of the central sells of blockchain-based NFTs, something Triefus still sees opportunities for down the road. “It’s astonishing to me how fast the conversation around NFTs has exploded,” Triefus says. “We’ve been studying blockchain for a long time as you might imagine, authenticity of product and of experience is extremely important.”
In addition to experiments with Roblox, late last year Gucci partnered with startup Genies to outfit user avatars.
Virtual items from real-world retailers have been relatively slow to pop up inside digital worlds, though as user perceptions of paying for digital goods have shifted, platforms are moving to capitalize.
“We don’t partner with very many brands,” Roblox exec Christina Wootton tells TechCrunch. “One thing that was very special when we started speaking with Gucci is that they took the time to understand our platform and what works well for designers and creators in our community.”
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Spinning out from the cryptocurrency hardware developer Bitfury, LiquidStack pitches a data center cooling tech
Data centers and bitcoin mining operations are becoming huge energy hogs, and the explosive growth of both risks undoing a lot of the progress that’s been made to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s one of the major criticisms of cryptocurrency operations and something that many in the industry are trying to address.
Enter LiquidStack, a company that’s spinning out from the cryptocurrency hardware technology developer Bitfury Group with a $10 million investment.
The company, which was formerly known as Allied Control Limited, restructured as a commercial operating company headquartered in the Netherlands with commercial operations in the U.S. and research and development in Hong Kong, according to a statement.
It was first acquired by Bitfury in 2015 after building a two-phase immersion cooling 500kW data center in Hong Kong, that purportedly cut energy consumption by 95% versus traditional air cooling technologies. Later, the companies jointly deployed 160 megawatts of two-phase immersion-cooled data centers.
“Bitfury has been innovating across multiple industries and sees major growth opportunities with LiquidStack’s game-changing cooling solutions for compute-intensive applications and infrastructure,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury. “I believe LiquidStack’s leadership team, together with our customers and strategic support from Wiwynn, will rapidly accelerate the global adoption and deployment of two-phase immersion cooling.”
The $10 million in funding came from the Taiwanese conglomerate Wiwynn, a data center and infrastructure developer with revenues of $6.3 billion last year.
“Wiwynn continues to invest in advanced cooling solutions to address the challenges of fast-growing power consumption and density for cloud computing, AI, and HPC,” said Emily Hong, chief executive of Wiwynn, in a statement.
In a statement, LiquidStack said its technology could enable at least 21 times more heat rejection per IT rack compared to air cooling — all without the need for water. The company said its cooling method results in a 41% reduction in energy used for cooling and a 60% reduction in data center space.
“Bitfury has always been focused on leading by example and is a technology driven company from the top of the organization, to its grass roots,” said Joe Capes, co-founder and chief executive of LiquidStack, in a statement. “Launching LiquidStack with new funding enables us to focus on our strengths and capabilities, accelerating the development of liquid cooling technology, products and services to help solve real thermal and sustainability challenges driven by the adoption of cloud services, AI, edge and high-performance computing.”
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Microsoft’s Project Natick underwater data center experiment confirms viability of seafloor data storage
Microsoft has concluded a years-long experiment involving use of a shipping container-sized underwater data center, placed on the sea floor off the cost of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company pulled its “Project Natick” underwater data warehouse up out of the water earlier this year (at the beginning of the summer) and spent the last few months studying the data center, and the air it contained, to determine the model’s viability.
The results not only showed that using these offshore submerged data centers seems to work well in terms of performance, but also revealed that the servers contained within the data center proved to be up to eight times more reliable than their dry-land counterparts. Researchers will be looking into exactly what was responsible for this greater reliability rate in the hopes of also translating those advantages to land-based server farms for increased performance and efficiency across the board.
Other advantages included being able to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in regions where the grid on land is not considered reliable enough for sustained operation. That’s due in part to the decreased need for artificial cooling for the servers located within the data farm because of the conditions at the sea floor. The Orkney Island area is covered by a 100% renewable grid supplied by both wind and solar, and while variances in the availability of both power sources would’ve proven a challenge for the infrastructure power requirements of a traditional, overland data center in the same region, the grid was more than sufficient for the same size operation underwater.
Microsoft’s Natick experiment was meant to show that portable, flexible data center deployments in coastal areas around the world could prove a modular way to scale up data center needs while keeping energy and operation costs low, all while providing smaller data centers closer to where customers need them, instead of routing everything to centralized hubs. So far, the project seems to have done spectacularly well at showing that. Next, the company will look into seeing how it can scale up the size and performance of these data centers by linking more than one together to combine their capabilities.
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Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches with $20.6M led by a16z
Open source has become a critical building block of modern software, and today a new startup is coming out of stealth to capitalise on one of the newer frontiers in open source: using it to build and manage distributed application environments, an approach being used increasingly to handle large computing projects, such as those involving artificial intelligence or scientific or other complex calculations.
Anyscale, a startup founded by the same team that built the Project Ray open-source distributed programming framework out of UC Berkeley — Robert Nishihara, Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica, and Berkeley professor Michael I. Jordan — has raised $20.6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation also from NEA, Intel Capital, Ant Financial, Amplify Partners, 11.2 Capital and The House Fund.
The company plans to use the money to build out its first commercial products — details of which are still being kept under wraps but will more generally include the ability to easily scale out a computing project from one laptop to a cluster of machines; and a group of libraries and applications to manage projects. These are expected to launch next year.
“Right now we are focused on making Ray a standard for building applications,” said Stoica in an interview. “The company will build tools and a runtime platform for Ray. So, if you want to run a Ray application securely and with high performance then you will use our product.”
The funding is partly strategic: Intel is one of the big companies that has been using Ray for its own computing projects, alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Ant Financial.
“Intel IT has been leveraging Ray to scale Python workloads with minimal code modifications,” said Moty Fania, principal engineer and chief technology officer for Intel IT’s Enterprise and Platform Group, in a statement. “With the implementation into Intel’s manufacturing and testing processes, we have found that Ray helps increase the speed and scale of our hyperparameter selection techniques and auto modeling processes used for creating personalized chip tests. For us, this has resulted in reduced costs, additional capacity and improved quality.”
With an impressive user list like this for the free-to-use Ray, you might ask yourself, what is the purpose of Anyscale? As Stoica and Nishihara explained, the idea will be to create simpler and easier ways to implement Ray, to make it usable whether you’re one of the Amazons of the world, or a more modest, and possibly less tech-centric operation.
“We see that this will be valuable mostly for companies who do not have engineering experts,” Stoica said.
The problem that Anyscale is solving is a central one to the future of large-scale, involved computing projects: there are an increasing array of problems that are being tackled with computing solutions, but as the complexity of the work involved increases, there is a limit to how much work a single machine (even a big one) can handle. (Indeed, Anyscale cites IDC figures estimating that the amount of data created and copied annually will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025.)
While one day there may be quantum-computing machines that can run efficiently and at scale to address these kinds of tasks, today this isn’t a realistic option, and so distributed computing has emerged as a solution.
Ray was devised as a standard to use to implement distributed computing environments, but on its own it’s too technical for the uninitiated to use.
“Imagine you’re a biologist,” added Nishihara. “You can write a simple program and run it at a large scale, but to do that successfully you need not only to be a biology expert but a computing expert. That’s just way too high a barrier.”
The people behind Anyscale (and Ray) have a long and very credible list of other work behind them that speaks to the opportunities that are being spotted here. Stoica, for example, was also the co-founder of Databricks, Conviva and one of the original developers of Apache Spark.
“I worked on Databricks with Ion and that’s how it started,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz said in an interview. He added that the firm has been a regular investor into projects coming out of UC Berkeley. Ray, and more specifically Anyscale, is notable for its relevance to today’s computing needs.
“With Ray it was a very attractive project because of the open-source metrics but also because of the issue it addresses,” he said.
“We’ve been grappling with Moore’s Law being over, but more interestingly, it’s inadequate for things like artificial intelligence applications,” where increasing computing power is needed that outstrips what any single machine can do. “You have to be able to deal with distributed computing, but the problem for everyone but Google is that distributed computing is hard, so we have been looking for a solution.”
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Guardian Circle upgrades with a decentralized alert network
Chris Hays and Mark Jeffrey wanted to create a way for everyone to be able to tell their loved ones if they were in trouble. Their first product, Guardian Circle, did just that, netting a mention a few years ago. Now the same team is truly decentralizing alerts with a new token called, obviously, Guardium.
The plan is to create an ad hoc network of helpers and first responders. “Guardium and Guardian Circle together open the emergency response grid to vetted citizens, private response and compatible devices for the very first time,” write the founders. “Providing an economic framework on our global distributed emergency response network; Guardium brings first responders to the 4 billion people on the planet without government-sponsored emergency response.”
Because the product already works, the team is taking on the token sale as a new challenge.
“We’re serial entrepreneurs — both of us have been venture-backed in the past by names like SoftBank and Intel, and we’ve been senior execs in companies backed by Sequoia and Elon Musk. Transitioning to the token sale-backed universe has been an interesting study in contrasts,” said Hays. “There are a number of ‘panic button apps’ — but without exception, all of them have forgotten ‘the second half of the problem’ — organizing the response. Getting people who do not know one another into instant communication and location sharing during an emergency — the importance of that cannot be overstated.”
The founders found that their idea wasn’t fundable in the valley. After all, what VC wants to help people when they can invest in Snapchat? Instead, Hays and Jeffrey are aiming bigger.
“We’re rebooting the world’s safety grid,” said Hays. “We’re creating a new global public utility. And we want it to service everyone, everywhere on earth. Although it is a very big vision, and it is a capitalist, multibillion dollar ecosystem that we’re chasing — it’s still a very different vision, and not the one venture capitalists are looking for.”
The token works to create a flash mob of help. Guard tokens pay first responders and dispatchers and “cities, campuses, and resorts stake $GUARD to access Alerts created within their geofenced borders,” allowing local folks to help immediately. They’ve sold half of their hard cap of $10 million thus far.
While tokens are always an iffy investment, this team has produced product and, more important, it’s clear they’ll never raise venture. A token, no matter how it’s used in the future, seems like a solid solution.
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Sagewise pitches a service to verify claims and arbitrate disputes over blockchain transactions
Sometimes smart contracts can be pretty dumb.
All of the benefits of a cryptographically secured, publicly verified, anonymized transaction system can be erased by errant code, malicious actors or poorly defined parameters of an executable agreement.
Hoping to beat back the tide of bad contracts, bad code and bad actors, Sagewise, a new Los Angeles-based startup, has raised $1.25 million to bring to market a service that basically hits pause on the execution of a contract so it can be arbitrated in the event that something goes wrong.
Co-founded by a longtime lawyer, Amy Wan, whose experience runs the gamut from the U.S. Department of Commerce to serving as counsel for a peer-to-peer real estate investment platform in Los Angeles, and Dan Rice, a longtime entrepreneur working with blockchain, Sagewise works with both Ethereum and the Hedera Hashgraph (a newer distributed ledger technology, which purports to solve some of the issues around transaction processing speed and security which have bedeviled platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin).
The company’s technology works as a middleware, including an SDK and a contract notification and monitoring service. “The SDK is analogous to an arbitration clause in code form — when the smart contract executes a function, that execution is delayed for a pre-set amount of time (i.e. 24 hours) and users receive a text/email notification regarding the execution,” Wan wrote to me in an email. “If the execution is not the intent of the parties, they can freeze execution of the smart contract, giving them the luxury of time to fix whatever is wrong.”
Sagewise approaches the contract resolution process as a marketplace where priority is given to larger deals. “Once frozen, parties can fix coding bugs, patch up security vulnerabilities, or amend/terminate the smart contract, or self-resolve a dispute. If a dispute cannot be self-resolved, parties then graduate to a dispute resolution marketplace of third party vendors,” Wan writes. “After all, a $5 bar bet would be resolved differently from a $5M enterprise dispute. Thus, we are dispute process agnostic.”
Wavemaker Genesis led the round, which also included strategic investments from affiliates of Ari Paul (Blocktower Capital), Miko Matsumura (Gumi Cryptos), Youbi Capital, Maja Vujinovic (Cipher Principles), Jordan Clifford (Scalar Capital), Terrence Yang (Yang Ventures) and James Sowers.
“Smart contracts are coded by developers and audited by security auditing firms, but the quality of smart contract coding and auditing varies drastically among service providers,” said Wan, the chief executive of Sagewise, in a statement. “Inevitably, this discrepancy becomes the basis for smart contract disputes, which is where Sagewise steps in to provide the infrastructure that allows the blockchain and smart contract industry to achieve transactional confidence.”
In an email, Wan elaborated on the thesis to me, writing that, “smart contracts may have coding errors, security vulnerabilities, or parties may need to amend or terminate their smart contracts due to changing situations.”
Contracts could also be disputed if their execution was triggered accidentally or due to the actions of attackers trying to hack a platform.
“Sagewise seeks to bring transactional confidence into the blockchain industry by building a smart contract safety net where smart contracts do not fulfill the original transactional intent,” Wan wrote.
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Kik launches beta product after $100 million ICO
Kik made waves last year after a successful $100 million ICO. Now the company has released its first beta product related to its Kin token. Called Kinit, it’s a simple wallet that enables users to earn, store, and spend its tokens.
“Kinit is a fun, easy way to earn Kin, a new cryptocurrency made for your digital life. Earning Kin is just like playing a game, only better, because you get rewarded for completing fun daily activities like surveys, quizzes, interactive videos and more,” reads the Google Play Store description. You can download the app for Android here.
The Kin token is unique for a few reasons. First it is not a traditional ERC-20 token and is instead uses Ethereum for liquidity and the on the Stellar network to improve transaction speed. Further, the company is spending a great deal – about $3 million – to get developers to develop on the token through its KinEcosystem site. The Kinit app is the first effort to get normal users to adopt the tool.
The app makes it possible for users to generate a few dollars in value per day and then exchange those dollars for gift cards and perks. According to CCN, Kik has created a product without a business model and instead it wants to drive the adoption of the token through giveaways.
“Kinit is the first publicly available app dedicated to Kin. Our goal with Kinit is to get Kin into more consumers’ hands. It’s a major step towards making crypto truly consumer-friendly through fun and engaging experiences, and we plan to learn and iterate based on real-world user behavior. We’re excited to get even more people earning and spending Kin — all on the Kin Blockchain,” wrote Rod McLeod, Kik’s VP of communications. The app currently asks you to complete surveys in order to get discounts and gift card codes for products.
With the rise of the product-less ICO it’s clear that Kik has the right idea. By encouraging usage they drive up the token price and token velocity and by launching a general beta full of cutesy imagery and text they are able to avoid the hard questions about developer adoption until far into the future. While the KinIt app is probably not what most Kin holders wanted to see, it’s at least an interim solution while the team builds out sturdier systems.
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The future of Ethereum looks bright
In what amounted to one of the most far-reaching and interesting conversations at TC Sessions in Zug, Ethereum masterminds Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Karl Floersch spoke openly – and often candidly – about a bright future for Ethereum scaling and, more interestingly, their way to build teams that work.
“There’s definitely changes that we could have made into the protocol,” said Buterin when asked whether or not he would have changed anything if he could start Ethereum again. But, he said, “there are ways in which that the problem is fundamentally hard.” In other words, growth was the only option.
“The demand for using public blockchains is high and we need to up the stability in order the meet that demand,” he said.
Floersch discussed the problems associated with Ethereum in the context of “adversarial networks.”
The network, he said, should “penalize people who don’t provide guarantees” and he felt that the tools available to simulate economic actors – including bad actors – are still weak.
“We come up with ideas, try to formalize them, and implement them,” he said. But, he said, the simulations still aren’t available.
The team expects aspects of Ethereum 2.0 – namely the Casper upgrade and the addition of sharding – to begin rolling out in 2019. After that, said Floersch, Ethereum 3.0 would enable quantum secure systems i.e. systems that can withstand the power of quantum computers.
“We’ll push quantum secure updates before there are commercial quantum computers,” he said.
Ultimately, said Buterin, Ethereum runs because the team is so tightly knit thanks to a clear roadmap. He said Bitcoin has many heads and the gridlock created was dangerous.
“Can they agree? No. You have gridlock,” he said.
“Part of the reason is that the Ethereum community early on [continued] to promote the idea of the Ethereum roadmap,” he said. “I feel that the roadmap is part of the social contract.”
“People who buy into ethereum buy in knowing that these are the things that people are going to want to push it forward. There may be deadlock on what specific path the community should take,” he said. But, he noted the roadmap keeps everyone on the same path. Given the expansive popularity and reach of the technology, it’s a fascinating bit of team-building that should inform other open source and blockchain projects over time.
You can watch the entire panel below:
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Upbound grabs $9M Series A to automate multi-cloud management
Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, does a great job of managing a single cluster, but Upbound, a new Seattle-based startup wants to extend this ability to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud environment. It’s a growing requirement as companies deploy ever-larger numbers of clusters and choose a multi-vendor approach to cloud infrastructure services.
Today, the company announced a $9 million Series A investment led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with numerous unnamed angel investors from the cloud-native community. As part of the deal, GV’s Dave Munichiello will be joining the company board of directors.
It’s important to note that the company is currently working on the product and could be a year away from a release, but the vision is certainly compelling. As Upbound CEO and founder Bassam Tabbara says, his company’s solution could allow customers to run, scale and optimize their workloads across clusters, regions and clouds as a single entity.
That level of control could enable them to set rules and policies across those clusters and clouds. For example, a customer might control costs by creating a rule to find the cloud with lowest cost for processing a given job, or provide failover control across regions and clouds — all automatically. It would provide the general ability to have highly granular control across multiple environments that isn’t really possible now, Tabbara explained.
That vision of enterprise portability is certainly something that caught the eye of GV’s Munichiello. “Upbound presents a credible approach to multi-cloud computing built on the success of Kubernetes, and as a response to the growing enterprise demand for hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” he said in a statement.
Companies are working with multiple Kubernetes clusters today. As an example, CERN, the European physics organization is running 210 clusters. JD.com, the Chinese shopping site has over 20,000 servers running Kubernetes. The largest cluster is made up of 5000 servers. As these projects scale, they require a tool to help manage their workloads across these larger environments.
The company’s founder isn’t new to cloud-native computing or open source. Tabbara was part of the team responsible for producing the open source project, Rook, an offshoot of Kubernetes and a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox project. Rook helps orchestrate distributed storage systems running in cloud native environments in a similar way that Kubernetes does for containerized environments. That project provided some of the ground work for what Upbound is trying to do on a broader scale beyond pure storage.
The computing world is suddenly all about abstraction. We started with virtual machines, which allowed you take an individual server and make it into multiple virtual machines. That led to containers, which could take the same machine in let you launch hundreds of containers. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration tool that has rapidly gained acceptance by allowing operations to treat a cluster of Kubernetes nodes as a single entity, making it much easier to launch and manage containers.
Upbound launched last Fall and currently has 8 employees, but Tabbara says they are actively seeking new engineers. The nature of their business is about distributed workloads and he says the workforce will be similar. They won’t have to work in Seattle. He says the plan is to use and contribute to open source whenever possible and to open source parts of the product when it’s available.
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