Cloudsmash.io - Decentralized VPS Cloud Open To The Public

[sunbreak]

Will you be doing anything with Intel CAT to block cross-VM CPU cache attacks, especially on the handful of machines in this initial round?

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yuval_Yarom/publication/291830462_CATalyst_Defeating_Last-Level_Cache_Side_Channel_Attacks_in_Cloud_Computing/links/56a6b0d408aeded22e3544ff.pdf

a system that uses CAT to protect general purpose software and cryptographic algorithms.

Their approach can be directly applied to protect against a malicious enclave. However, this approach also does not allow to protect enclaves from an outside attacker.

- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.08719.pdf

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13995374

I'm aware of cache side channel attacks and the complications they introduce in a multi-tenant virtualization environment. For now unless you are using a fairly modern CPU that supports Intel's SGX extensions and are running an operating system and/or hypervisor that utilizes them then you are exposed to this type of attack.

Feel free to correct me, especially if you have more detailed information. My understanding is that SGX extensions and features like CAT are only now being tested in mainline Linux kernel releases. I believe CAT support was added in Linux 4.10. The kernel we compile for ourselves is based on the mainline distribution. All effort is made so that features like these will be utilized if your hardware supports it.

If you are a consumer shopping for virtualization resources, this is one of the things you will be able to specify as a criteria.

For example, you could search for providers who were offering virtual machines that specifically exposed AVX, SSE3 and AES-NI instructions.

Searching for a provider that supported SGX and CAT would be yet another CPU feature that could be added to the search criteria.

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[sunbreak]

Anyone have any other questions?

[noodle_dam]

Count me in on this project!

I am very interested and now this might actually get me to finally get into the cloud now.
Just send me what you have for me to do and I will do it so to be part of it!
Thank you very much.
Awaiting your application process.

[sunbreak]

I have been using sunbreak's service for over a year. First rate and professional!!

:thumbsUp

Thanks for the shout out.

[sunbreak]

I've just negotiated deals for two new peering points;

North Carolina, USA (AS174 - Cogent, AS7018 - AT&T, AS8175, A23336, AS8100)

Frankfurt, DE (AS33891 - DE-CIX, AS6939 - Hurricane Electric)

I'm in the process of getting another two up and running, one in Chicago, IL and one in Buffalo, NY.

[sunbreak]

Looks like I might have a deal to get a Singapore and Hong Kong peering point as well!

[sunbreak]

I've just negotiated deals for two new peering points;

North Carolina, USA (AS174 - Cogent, AS7018 - AT&T, AS8175, A23336, AS8100)

Frankfurt, DE (AS33891 - DE-CIX, AS6939 - Hurricane Electric)

I'm in the process of getting another two up and running, one in Chicago, IL and one in Buffalo, NY.

I've got both the new peering points online for some testing. Assuming my tests go ok and packets don't go globe trotting, I'll bring these nodes online full time sometime within the next few days. So far things are looking good. The Frankfurt peering point is on a 10G connection straight into the DE-CIX and should be fasssst. Having access to HE.net's 100 Gbps trans-atlantic crossing is pretty bad ass.

[sunbreak]

I've just negotiated deals for two new peering points;

North Carolina, USA (AS174 - Cogent, AS7018 - AT&T, AS8175, A23336, AS8100)

Frankfurt, DE (AS33891 - DE-CIX, AS6939 - Hurricane Electric)

I'm in the process of getting another two up and running, one in Chicago, IL and one in Buffalo, NY.

I've got both the new peering points online for some testing. Assuming my tests go ok and packets don't go globe trotting, I'll bring these nodes online full time sometime within the next few days. So far things are looking good. The Frankfurt peering point is on a 10G connection straight into the DE-CIX and should be fasssst. Having access to HE.net's 100 Gbps trans-atlantic crossing is pretty bad ass.

Testing is going well, I still need to figure out how to register our prefixes with RIPEDB for the Frankfurt peering point. However it is accepting and transmitting traffic, just the majority of the peers on the backbone are filtering our prefixes.

Once I get the RIPEDB stuff done the 10 Gb DE-CIX in Frankfurt will be fully online.

[sunbreak]

Currently active peering points

United States

• Seattle, WA - NTT, GTT, Equinix Asia, Cogent, Telia, Level 3
• Dallas, TX - NTT, GTT, Equinix Asia, Cogent, Telia, Level 3
• Matawan, NJ - NTT, GTT, Equinix Asia, Cogent, Telia, Level 3
• Miami, FL - NTT, GTT, Equinix Asia, Cogent, Telia, Level 3
• Charlotte, NC - Cogent, AT&T
• Los Angeles, CA - Hurricane Electric
• Chicago, IL - ColoCrossing, Hurricane Electric, GTT
• Buffalo, NY - ColoCrossing, Hurricane Electric, GTT

Europe

• Frankfurt, Germany - DE-CIX, Hurricane Electric
• Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

Peering points still in progress

United States

• None in progress

Asia Pacific

• None in progress

I'm sure I'll end up adding something in Amsterdam and Tokyo eventually, but for now I think this makes for a pretty sufficient selection of geo-diverse carrier connectivity. All virtual machines on the platform receive traffic from all of our BGP peering points during normal operation. By default outgoing traffic is sent through the highest throughput / lowest latency pop. Platform consumers can define static routes and set specific pop's for any destination address. All sorts of ECMP options become available for virtual machine users using this strategy. It also makes a great resilient network with lots of multi-homing. If and outbound pop becomes unavailable you simply fail-over your outbound traffic to any of our others points of presence.
 

[sunbreak]

Looks like I'll be bringing Los Angeles, US and Manchester, UK in full operation by the end of the week. All testing has gone without issue.

Singapore and Hong Kong are taking some time, I question if the provider I chose has ever set up a peering arrangement before, even though they claim they have.

I may have also found a small regional peering point in the Portland, OR area with direct peering into Tata, NWAX, etc. Updates to follow on this.

Chicago, IL and Buffalo, NY are also progressing at a snail's pace.

[sunbreak]

Well good news, it has taken forever but the Hong Kong peering point is online. The only downside is that currently we are only receiving traffic through the pop and are unable to originate traffic from there. I'm sure it will get worked out eventually. The HK peering point is connected directly to the HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange).

Additionally I expect that the Chicago and Buffalo pop's will be coming online sometime this week.

Singapore is still a work in progress.

[sunbreak]

The Portland, OR pop is now online. This is a huge benefit for people who are using virtualization resources that are located in Portland Metro area as gateway access is now <1 ms. It also seems to have fixed some of our issues with getting traffic into Comcast at a decent speed.

Just wanted to give a huge thanks to Telos and Opus Interactive for taking the time to setup peering for Cloudsmash. They had never setup a peering arrangement quite like mine before and were extremely helpful and totally went the extra mile to make it happen.

[btcton]

This looks quite interesting, but also technically challenging. While I definitely do not have the knowledge to help with the project as a developer or contributor, I most definitely will be following this as a consumer. Is there any ETA (I assume a very rough one considering you guys are still in the beta testing phase) for when you plan to open the project for public consumption? What other cloud providers do you expect to be competing against? Is it the DigitalOcean / AWS Lightsail sort that simply provide cloud services or bigger infrastructure-as-a-service giants such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? I am talking functionality-wise rather than scale-wise, at least to begin with.

On a side note, your website seems to be down still. Is there any official way to follow the progress of this project? Are there any plans on creating a fully fledged website with the information or is it still too early for that?

[sunbreak]

Is there any ETA (I assume a very rough one considering you guys are still in the beta testing phase) for when you plan to open the project for public consumption? What other cloud providers do you expect to be competing against? Is it the DigitalOcean / AWS Lightsail sort that simply provide cloud services or bigger infrastructure-as-a-service giants such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? I am talking functionality-wise rather than scale-wise, at least to begin with.

On a side note, your website seems to be down still. Is there any official way to follow the progress of this project? Are there any plans on creating a fully fledged website with the information or is it still too early for that?

I'm hoping that we will open to the general public for VPS use sometime in the fall of 2017. It might not be until early in 2018 that we open to the general public for server contributors.

There are some "IaaS" aspects to it in terms of the private mesh networking, automated storage replication and fault tolerance. However it is mainly targeted at unmanaged services. I would expect that people would build managed services on top of it.

Yes, there is a web site coming. Until then I'll be updating the status of the project here.

[btcton]

Is there any ETA (I assume a very rough one considering you guys are still in the beta testing phase) for when you plan to open the project for public consumption? What other cloud providers do you expect to be competing against? Is it the DigitalOcean / AWS Lightsail sort that simply provide cloud services or bigger infrastructure-as-a-service giants such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? I am talking functionality-wise rather than scale-wise, at least to begin with.

On a side note, your website seems to be down still. Is there any official way to follow the progress of this project? Are there any plans on creating a fully fledged website with the information or is it still too early for that?

I'm hoping that we will open to the general public for VPS use sometime in the fall of 2017. It might not be until early in 2018 that we open to the general public for server contributors.

There are some "IaaS" aspects to it in terms of the seamless global networking, automated storage replication and fault tolerance. However it is mainly targeted at unmanaged services. I would expect that people would build managed services on top of it.

That sounds great. The website still seems to be down, however.  Are there any official channels to obtain constant updates on this project? If not, what way could I be kept up to date on what is happening and the potential release dates as well as open services? I definitely do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to know how much work this takes or even the back-end or structure of this shared cloud, which is the main reason why I would like to know potential ETAs and milestones for the project as soon as possible.

[jhonbravo]

i want 1 VPS at Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

i will pay you via BTC

Thanks

[btcton]

i want 1 VPS at Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

i will pay you via BTC

Thanks

If I understand correctly, this project is still in the conceptual design/starting implementation phase still. This means that they are nowhere close to actually delivering a finalized product for the end user/consumer (us). In the last update they said that they have plans for opening the service to the general public in the fall of 2017, but they did warn that it is possible that it will not actually be happening until later next year. Given how I still cannot find a website for them, I believe it is too early to be asking for offers. If there are any updates I am not aware of please let me know.

[sunbreak]

Well good news, it has taken forever but the Hong Kong peering point is online. The only downside is that currently we are only receiving traffic through the pop and are unable to originate traffic from there. I'm sure it will get worked out eventually. The HK peering point is connected directly to the HKIX (Hong Kong Internet Exchange).

Additionally I expect that the Chicago and Buffalo pop's will be coming online sometime this week.

Singapore is still a work in progress.

Good news, the Chicago and Buffalo pop's are online and working. Thanks to Nexeon for providing the hosting for those.

In other news, the Hong Kong and Singapore providers are just awful. I've decided to shutdown those pop's for now, they have created far more problems than they have solved.

[sunbreak]

i want 1 VPS at Manchester, UK - Hurricane Electric, M247

i will pay you via BTC

Thanks

If I understand correctly, this project is still in the conceptual design/starting implementation phase still. This means that they are nowhere close to actually delivering a finalized product for the end user/consumer (us). In the last update they said that they have plans for opening the service to the general public in the fall of 2017, but they did warn that it is possible that it will not actually be happening until later next year. Given how I still cannot find a website for them, I believe it is too early to be asking for offers. If there are any updates I am not aware of please let me know.

Actually the core infrastructure all works and has been operating without downtime since August 2016. It's quite beyond the conceptual stage, the real question is scale, how many people and machines can I load up on my network topology before things start getting problematic.

The reason for the beta rounds is to slowly introduce additional people onto the platform to monitor and observe the network and any problems the beta applicant might run into.

There will be several beta rounds for virtual machine consumers and separate beta rounds for virtual machine providers. We are currently in our second round of beta applicants for consumers. If you are interested in getting a virtual machine please let me know by email at decentralizedvpscloud@gmail.com

[sunbreak]

Is there any ETA (I assume a very rough one considering you guys are still in the beta testing phase) for when you plan to open the project for public consumption? What other cloud providers do you expect to be competing against? Is it the DigitalOcean / AWS Lightsail sort that simply provide cloud services or bigger infrastructure-as-a-service giants such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure? I am talking functionality-wise rather than scale-wise, at least to begin with.

On a side note, your website seems to be down still. Is there any official way to follow the progress of this project? Are there any plans on creating a fully fledged website with the information or is it still too early for that?

I'm hoping that we will open to the general public for VPS use sometime in the fall of 2017. It might not be until early in 2018 that we open to the general public for server contributors.

There are some "IaaS" aspects to it in terms of the seamless global networking, automated storage replication and fault tolerance. However it is mainly targeted at unmanaged services. I would expect that people would build managed services on top of it.

That sounds great. The website still seems to be down, however.  Are there any official channels to obtain constant updates on this project? If not, what way could I be kept up to date on what is happening and the potential release dates as well as open services? I definitely do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to know how much work this takes or even the back-end or structure of this shared cloud, which is the main reason why I would like to know potential ETAs and milestones for the project as soon as possible.

Yeah, no website yet. What can I say? I'm a better packet wrangler than graphic designer. If anyone wants to help with a website I am open to suggestions. Currently this project is operated only by myself. I am actively looking to hire someone for help though, anyone interested?

Over the summer I did work on a web app for user interaction and it is mostly working. I just need to tie it into the backend and it should allow people to manage their virtual machines from the comfort of their web browsers. For now I handle all the administration (power on, power off, os install), however once the machine is running I'm basically hands off and the end user has full control of their environment.