I really wish that the monthly flat rates were included when hourly prices are quoted on the pricing page and with "only pay for what you use" on the front page. Right now it's very easy to get a first impression of feeling misled.
Was going to try their Free account, until I signed up and the discovered the big black "Free" had a tiny light grey "+ Machine Utilization Charges" beneath it. Everything is "Free + Charges".
I have a pet theory that some of the managers that set up the "free - just pay shipping and handling" type businesses found a new home in e-commerce. I obviously dislike it.
Please breed if you can ;-) Hum, I mean, transmit who you are to other, infect them with greatness, however you can (books is a great idea, teaching and mentoring as well).
FWIW I think there's an ethical way to profit, but we have to be willing to wait for the value we created to actually materialize in the real world. A not-so-rare case, I think, is people donating large amounts to their mentors, once they "get there", once they're established and earning enough (likely 2-5 years after the mentorship or transmission took place; sometimes way more).
You certainly can't live from those returns. Some of them might be fabulous though, if what you transmitted was really life-changing. I guess. Never been on that side of things (gave, did not receive) but I'm thinking putting out the value is the mission, and anything else is a secondary concern (just keep that day job to pay the bills).
No cookies, no ads, source code always available, pay for a prebuilt version, user names price ... in excess of $100k/year (after 20 years :) ... ardour.org
I'd love to see a graph of that income over those 20 years! Also, do you get any license payments from Harrison Consoles? And if yes, are those included in the 100k per year?
There is a small "back payment" from Harrison, but it is not included in the cited numbers. I work closely with Harrison and they have worked very hard to not make Mixbus a "fork" of Ardour.
Note that there was essentially zero income for the first 8 years, and then a slow, steady rise once I needed to make a living again and instituted the Radiohead-inspired "pay tunnel".
The world is full of risks. Got to deal with them.
It helped that I had 8 years (post-amzn) not needing to make any income and thus able to build a large amount of goodwill and visibility within relevant communities.
People do "steal" the software in the sense of putting it into DVD/ISO packages that they charge for.
My concern has never been that everyone pays, only that enough people pay. But perhaps that's why Ableton Live changed the zeitgeist of computer music production, and Ardour is just ... Ardour.
When I opened the pricing page I was 'afraid' the hourly prices would come with the caveat of a monthly subscription (or separate fee). Seeing Free + Charges immediately answered that for me. But yeah, I also see your point.
Yeah, I signed up for free but it wouldn't even let me create a machine. If they're going to expect to sell it, then at least make it possible to put together a machine and then charge to launch it. So far all I know now is tha they have 3 DC's to choose from. The rest, no idea. Can't get that far.
They have free GPUs, and the account is free. Doing fast.ai currently on a free GPU. The extra charges are if you want to upgrade, like needing more storage.
This looks like a consumer targeted product. If so, they should use a "per month" pricing instead of the per hour pricing which only caters to nerds who will go through the trouble to calculate.
I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other options out there.
Clearly this is a product targeted to professionals, designed for using heavy application while mobile.
Gaming is a also a use case, but gamers that run heavy games tend to be nerds anyway.
Per month pricing would make it very hard to price competitively for users who work 6+ hours a day vs. users who need to work with CAD files a couple of times per month.
I don't know what kind of every-day consumers need to to run heavy CAD software.
> Moving your workflow into the cloud gives you the best hardware and networking performance possible, and helps you work on the tough stuff a normal computer just won’t do.
This is then followed by their "Advanced" specs @ 6vCPUs, 16GB RAM and 2GB VRAM. That's a mid-range laptop.
You can choose between per hour and per month pricing. The per hour pricing only runs when you're using the machine (only the cost of storage when it's off) and the per month pricing is a flat rate. They should offer a calculator for estimated usage costs.
I've been using Paperspace Air machine since they first launched (still paying early bird prices too) and their basic Windows VM is pretty amazing.
I'm mostly a Linux/Mac guy, but I spend a few hundred hours per year logged into my Paperspace machine and almost always have it doing something for me.
It's perfect for getting access to your own toolchain on any computer. And it's got plenty of resource to give it time-consuming jobs to do. It has just enough GPU to give it an edge over some of my cheap VPS options.
It was perfect when I was contracted out to a highly restrictive corporation and couldn't access my own employer's tools due to firewall policy. The browser-based remote desktop always worked.
Great idea. What do you recommend as a good standard/tool we could use to publish benchmarks? We have some CPU/memory-centric instances but our primary focus is on GPUs.
It doesn't look like this is launched yet, at least I don't see it when I log in. I've been happy with their notebook product Gradient though, and it will be interesting to see if latency is good enough for this to replace some local desktop usage.
Sorry for the confusion here, we are in the midst of separating out the two products and this is not reflected everywhere yet. Under the CORE section of the interface, you'll find these instances and you can download the desktop app here: https://paperspace.com/download
How's native peripheral support? I've been looking for a cloud solution that would act as a virtual rig for VR. However, from everything I read there's hardware limitation on memory to support meaningful peripheral throughput. I'm curious about what you and DTE have come across!
What kind of VR hardware are you using? I'm working on a cloud based virtual computer solution that leverges google's additive GPUs (You can add as many as you want to facilitate what you need to do).
That sounds awesome! I don't have a VR rig set up and am looking to build a PC and have some spec I can share. How do you hook up VR peripheral with the cloud?
The idea is that the VR hardware would have a companion software, and that this software can be run on the could-computer (where all the heavy lifting is done) and displayed through a browser on the basic device that you already have.
So in your case - instead of personally fronting the costs for a whole lot of VR ready hardware, you can just pay for a powerful virtual computer (with as much Ram and GPU power as you want for your task).
Connecting your own assets/files to the cloud-computer can be done via cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
But under your core product the only options for running Windows or Ubuntu are server instances. From what I can see I can't run a graphical desktop on top of your Ubuntu VMs.
Not a heavy user, but I've been using Paperspace a few times for gaming. They make it really easy. They have a "template" you spawn a new instance from, or use a blank windows install. Their template is handy since it has Steam and Parsec already installed.
What they seem to be doing here is saying you don't need Parsec and can just use their browser implementation instead.
You'd want to install Parsec on the server, then controllers work automatically (generally). It works pretty well (though I had to stop using Paperspace because I couldn't afford the cost).
I'm assuming this works by streaming your keyboard/mouse inputs to the VM, then it runs the game and then streams high-res video and audio back to you. What's the total latency with this approach? And the required bandwidth for the video stream?
If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to access games that aren't available.
"If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much?"
It really depends on the game.
For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're doing).
I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine, without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.
Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be avoided.
I hear that, after it left beta, the number of games that you can play on GeForce NOW is greatly reduced. I have read that you can no longer play arbitrary games from your Steam library (like you could in beta), and furthermore, a few major publishers have pulled their games from the service.
So the advantage of Paperspace would be that you can play many more games than you can on GeForce NOW.
I don't know how to show you an actual list compared to my Steam library but I only know a handful of games that have been removed (The Longest Dark was big drama a few weeks ago) but I'm sitting here testing a bunch of my most popular games (Bannerlord, DOS2, POE2, Destiny 2, LOL, Space Engineers, etc) and I haven't hit a game yet that I can't play.
Some publishers have been very anti-competitor regarding it and taken down their entire libraries but there is still a ton to play.
On the flip side, none of the games I play are available on GFN. It's incredibly frustrating. I've moved on to Shadow where I'm not subject to the arbitrary whims of publishers and developers. I can install any game that I own and nobody can do anything about it.
Shadow.tech I have had good experiences with. It does take a while to go from sign-up to them actually spinning up a machine for you but the latency is extremely good for cloud gaming.
I wish there was a way to automatically nuke the image on shutdown, and then spend 15 minutes to have a script auto-populate a few games in my steam library at next boot. It’d save $5/month, and also solve the OS update problem.
You can use the CLI to create/destroy instances, so what you could do is write a script that has Chocolatey (or boxstarter, which is a bit more for this purpose) install Steam, run it when you login, and then have another script destroy the instance using the cli command.
I’m relishing the switch back to the thin client / main frame model, but I want to own my main frame. Even if it physically sits in a company’s data center. With 5G we are getting closer to disposable glass thin client interfaces.
I'd like to see a cost comparison across different providers. A comparable v100 machine on Google Cloud is $2.015/hr, while Paperspace seems to charge 2.30/hr for a dedicated v100 (https://www.paperspace.com/pricing)
Google Cloud is very sneaky with their pricing as they don't include the instance itself in the advertised GPU pricing. Here's an instance very comparable in specs (8 vCPU, 30GB RAM, 1 V100, 50 GB SSD): https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=a9fbcab5-cb... It's $3.19/hr. The Linux version is $2.87/hr.
Thanks for this link, I've been going by the estimated cost on the Google Cloud VM deployment page which seems to give significantly lower prices than your link. With GC I always seem to end up paying a lot more than I planned to...
My ideal scenario is something like this that's $20/month for unlimited usage, with the caveat that you have to have the server in your own house with your own internet, but the service is that it provisions your machine and proxies it for fast speeds everywhere.
If the goal is gaming, GeForce Now and Moonlight are amazing. You can also get a remote desktop via GeForce Now but probably better just to use remote desktop.
> For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per month to cover storage and access. Additionally, you are charged an hourly rate when the machine is running. Monthly plans are offered at a flat rate for unlimited access.
Then the pricing page doesn't list the flat rate, when looking at hourly pricing - but does show an hourly price for monthly billing? Possibly monthly/(30 * 24)?
Ed: looks like hourly for monthly plan is calculated as monthly/(365÷12×24)
+1 on Shadow!! - I would definitely recommend Shadow. You get a full instance of Windows 10 to do anything you want (I primarily game). I wrote a quick review of it, including 3dmark scores for the base version here: https://medium.com/@ec822/playing-in-the-cloud-d0c023b77bdd
I've had great experience with shadow. I am pretty close to one of their servers (Dallas) so get around 8ms ping, but even up to 40ms ping it works very well.
I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related to the topic...
1) I go on Github and configure a service
2) I make a wallet that people can donate to
3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host guarantees that the code at that Github is what's really running.
I can imagine lots of other things I want, too, but this is the bare minimum. I think it'd be really useful in a lot of scenarios.
Agreed, something like "Netlify for virtual machines" would be useful.
You could probably get close by auto-deploying from GitHub Actions but you wouldn't get the main benefit of a service like that (having ops done in a clean way without having to think much about it).
Without having any experience in the field, aren't lambda functions supposed to provide something like that?
The host would prove that the source available online is the exact same code running on the instance, so you know that it wasn't modified by the developer/bad-guy before it went into production.
Netlify (primarily) takes a git repo containing a program to generate a static site and turns that into a live running website that automatically updates when the generator repo changes. You don't have to think about configuration or security or updates and you don't have to maintain a server.
Ideally this would be a service with the same ergonomics but the outcome isn't a hosted static website but a machine (somewhere in the cloud) running whatever the user wants. "Tedious" tasks like hardening, monitoring and upgrading (and redeploys) would be handled by the service provider, as opposed to the user.
For people who like doing ops this might not sound appealing but developers (especially single devs and small teams) often just wanna focus on their app, not their ops, even more so when it comes to continous maintenance.
Addendum: I think Laravel has some of this covered in their ecosystem with tools like Forge and Envoyer. But I've never tried any of them so I can't judge.
This is what Platform-as-a-service (PAAS) is and has been around for a long time. Google's Appengine, Heroku, and many others offer it.
Since then we've seen "serverless" or functions-as-a-service (FAAS) which is just smaller bits of code (down to a single javascript function) but the same concept of everything else being managed by the provider. This is AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Functions, etc.
The latest offerings now take a Dockerfile or container image that you build, which means you can run anything on any stack while the provider manages the rest. Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, Fly.io, Zeit Now, etc.
This is a really hard problem with "solutions" that usually run counter to privacy and, you know, controlling the machine consuming your electricity. Remote Attestation has come a long way, but (at least on Linux) still in its infancy.
First time I hear about "Remote Attestation", got any trusted sources/resources for someone to read up on it more? (besides Wikipedia and it's sources)
True true, wasn't meant to be hostile but I see that I wrote my comment unkindly.
I do think the point stands though. They are names for the same technology. How it is used, and who uses it will determine what type of spin I'd put on it.
Monitoring the integrity of a trusted audio decoder in my system's kernel: DRM
Monitoring the integrity of an open source tool that I bought and paid for: remote attestation.
Both will come down to various arrangements of trusted computing enclaves, asymmetric cryptography and groups trying to bypass said arrangements.
I couldn’t agree more. DRM is just hardware and software. It’s a tool and implementations matter. HDCP is one of those implementations that seem like a good idea but which have all kinds of side effects that make the product the DRM is part of (HDMI in this case) much less useful for certain fair use law abiding use cases. As long as we have the interoperability exception for breaking DRM there’s a way around but it would be better if interoperability was a requirement of accessibility standards in the first place.
Here's some words Red Hat folks wrote[0] about Keylime[1][2], "open source scalable trust system harnessing TPM Technology,"[3] written in python and rust, originally created within MIT Lincoln Labs.[4] It leverages TMP 1.2 and 2.0[5] and also involves/includes/references code from Intel[6] and Cloudflare[7].
You should really look into GitLab. It's free to self-host the whole thing if you want, and there's a full CI/CD pipeline (you can plug whatever you want in there).
It's miles and leaps beyond what GitHub offers (different target I suppose).
You'd still have to code the linking to a wallet part, but that's definitely doable.
The GP poster's point was that the hosting service needs to prove to the consumers of the app that what's running on the hosting service is the same code they can browse through on GitHub.
When you're both the developer and the consumer, you can certainly prove this to yourself (to five nines of confidence or so) by just setting up the hosting yourself. But we're talking about the case of a centralized backend for a multiuser service, e.g. a forum, where the users want to not have to trust the moral fibre of the person who set up the server, but merely trust that the infrastructure used in the hosting guarantees that it can't run anything other than the codebase (that they control.)
Theres some interesting security ideas you could try to solve with something like this. With an open source service that is hosted by someone else, you never know what is actually running. You can't trust it.
I was thinking about something similar a few months back, and I think it could be doable. You'd need a CI service that creates reproducible builds, and a hosting service that can show what build artifact is currently loaded. You'd allow the public to view the state of the service. I think it could work with heroku or similar.
That gets me closer to: I trust the code, and I trust the hosting service (I.E. AWS), but I don't need to trust the person running the code as I can verify that it matches what's on GitHub.
This—the ability to audit what's running on the backend you're talking to—is in large part what people get out of smart contracts on e.g. Ethereum. You can take the contract source code from GitHub, compile it (deterministically), and validate that the deployed-on-chain smart-contract binary is the same. The blockchain nature of the platform then ensures that the contract will do exactly and only what you "expect" it to do (i.e. it'll do the same thing "in production" that it does when you test it on your own machine, since any node that tries to execute the code differently would diverge its state from the consensus, and be ignored.)
In essence, a Turing-complete smart-contract blockchain is a deterministically-trustworthy compute-hosting service. It's one that has the disadvantage of all the overhead distributed auditability requires; but at least has the advantage (compared to centralized compute-hosting with remote-attestation) that it already exists and is usable right now for real-world use-cases.
(And you can also reduce the blockchain-y overhead by moving whatever backend business logic you can out of the "trust kernel" into untrusted regular machines, and then just having the "trust kernel" do the important stuff. CryptoKitties is a good example of this: the only thing their smart contract does is track who owns what kitty, because that's what people would try to dispute by forging transactions. The rest of the stuff is state in a regular centralized RDBMS, because it's dictated by the service, rather than by user input, and so is not under dispute.)
What you are describing is almost exactly how Codius is envisioned to work. Our company is actively working on this right now and it is close to being in an alpha/beta state.
I used paper space for remote gaming via Parsec.
I also purchased one of their machines for remote development purposes. While I was waiting for parts to fix my laptop.
The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to local. They also offered very powerful hard ware.
I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year, year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a month for me. I moved onto a dedicated server that I used KVM and LibVirt to manage.
That worked but it's obviously a lot of over head.
Signing up right now for this - glad to hear it worked well. I have a Mac at home (not ideal for games) and at most a couple hours a week to do any gaming (so it's not worth buying a PC). For the absolute best machine they have, my outlay will be less than ten bucks a month. An easy sell.
It's not much different than stadia or nvidia geforce(?).
I played online multi player games. If you have a 144hz gsync/freesync monitor. Then this isn't meant for that. But it was totally playable.
The weak portion is you're beholden to your internet. Traveling for work it didn't work at all. Most places I stayed had very slow internet and then the latency became unplayable.
I see this as a completely viable option if you're on Linux, or Mac and want to game every now and then. Or if you're waiting for a new GPU to come out and still want to game.
On the off chance you see this, I'm pleased to report that the answer is, no! It works brilliantly as long as you use the free "Parsec" service's client to access the desktop and your games. Browser access to the Paperspace desktop is fine for normal app use but no good for gaming.
Setup wasn't quite push-button but I got it up and running by dumbly following the instructions. Parsec was the most confusing part. Trust the docs, and it'll work.
Mostly older FPS multiplayer games against friends. Garry's Mod, the Source version of Counterstrike. Haven't seen any issues at all, really feels like it's on local desktop (other than the quite obvious graphical degradation in fast-moving play). I have a hardwired ethernet connection to my router though; I bet it'd stink over Wifi.
Also - am not good. :)
EDIT the latency figures are nothing like 50ms though. Low tens maybe, total. This isn't a huge surprise though: on the same machine and connection I've also (using JamKazaam, not over Paperspace) had decent success doing online realtime music jam sessions with local friends too, where the latency tops out around 25ms - can't really get into the pocket playing funk, but just fine for rock.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] thread$1343 / hour
$1.84 effective hourly price
Disclosure: I work on Workstream
No cookies, no ads, donations only.
It hasn't paid off aside from about 1k per year in revenue and lots of thank you emails.
After a while I changed to donations Because the idea was to help people. And my day job pays 6 figs.
Please breed if you can ;-) Hum, I mean, transmit who you are to other, infect them with greatness, however you can (books is a great idea, teaching and mentoring as well).
FWIW I think there's an ethical way to profit, but we have to be willing to wait for the value we created to actually materialize in the real world. A not-so-rare case, I think, is people donating large amounts to their mentors, once they "get there", once they're established and earning enough (likely 2-5 years after the mentorship or transmission took place; sometimes way more).
You certainly can't live from those returns. Some of them might be fabulous though, if what you transmitted was really life-changing. I guess. Never been on that side of things (gave, did not receive) but I'm thinking putting out the value is the mission, and anything else is a secondary concern (just keep that day job to pay the bills).
Have a great one.
Note that there was essentially zero income for the first 8 years, and then a slow, steady rise once I needed to make a living again and instituted the Radiohead-inspired "pay tunnel".
The GPL license give you better protection then say MIT in this regard though.
It helped that I had 8 years (post-amzn) not needing to make any income and thus able to build a large amount of goodwill and visibility within relevant communities.
People do "steal" the software in the sense of putting it into DVD/ISO packages that they charge for.
My concern has never been that everyone pays, only that enough people pay. But perhaps that's why Ableton Live changed the zeitgeist of computer music production, and Ardour is just ... Ardour.
there does not appear to be any free rdp/streaming services, but the jupyter playback seems to function.
agreed that the pricing methods are somewhat sneaky -- email harvesting with sleight of tongue.
Dark UI pattern.
More annoyingly, they don't see what those charges are.
I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other options out there.
Gaming is a also a use case, but gamers that run heavy games tend to be nerds anyway.
Per month pricing would make it very hard to price competitively for users who work 6+ hours a day vs. users who need to work with CAD files a couple of times per month.
I don't know what kind of every-day consumers need to to run heavy CAD software.
> Moving your workflow into the cloud gives you the best hardware and networking performance possible, and helps you work on the tough stuff a normal computer just won’t do.
This is then followed by their "Advanced" specs @ 6vCPUs, 16GB RAM and 2GB VRAM. That's a mid-range laptop.
I'm mostly a Linux/Mac guy, but I spend a few hundred hours per year logged into my Paperspace machine and almost always have it doing something for me.
It's perfect for getting access to your own toolchain on any computer. And it's got plenty of resource to give it time-consuming jobs to do. It has just enough GPU to give it an edge over some of my cheap VPS options.
It was perfect when I was contracted out to a highly restrictive corporation and couldn't access my own employer's tools due to firewall policy. The browser-based remote desktop always worked.
This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information.
It's not the normal open security settings and allow message.
I am on a MacBook pro running Catalina 10.15.3.
So in your case - instead of personally fronting the costs for a whole lot of VR ready hardware, you can just pay for a powerful virtual computer (with as much Ram and GPU power as you want for your task).
Connecting your own assets/files to the cloud-computer can be done via cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
What they seem to be doing here is saying you don't need Parsec and can just use their browser implementation instead.
Sounds great!
Super Meat Boy is about as twitchy as I get, and the latency for that is fine (at least in the SF bay area).
Obviously, the GPU can do more than that, but I haven’t tried pushing in that direction.
* allegedly. Tried to set up Paperspace and Parsec without result.
It really depends on the game.
For instance, Factorio, which is enormously popular on HN, has a perfectly functioning Linux version. Many other games do too, and some games even perform better on Linux than on Windows, not to mention having a better user experience on Linux (especially if you are technical and know what you're doing).
I have an old Linux laptop, and Factorio performs well enough in single player, but I run in to serious performance issues on multiplayer. It's be nice to be able to run this Linux game on a more performant Linux machine, without shelling out the $$$ for a new gaming rig.
Further, I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible, where it can be avoided.
So the advantage of Paperspace would be that you can play many more games than you can on GeForce NOW.
Some publishers have been very anti-competitor regarding it and taken down their entire libraries but there is still a ton to play.
Am I charged when my machine is off? For hourly plans, if your machine is powered off, you will only be billed for your storage."
Are those charges listed anywhere? They don't seem to be on the Workstream pricing page.
https://support.paperspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000380433...
The lowest level is 50GB for $5 per month
A bit fiddly, but it'd work.
1. https://www.vagon.io
My ideal scenario is something like this that's $20/month for unlimited usage, with the caveat that you have to have the server in your own house with your own internet, but the service is that it provisions your machine and proxies it for fast speeds everywhere.
If you’re technical enough to need that, you’re technical enough to set it up.
> For hourly plans you are charged a flat rate(depending on machine type) per month to cover storage and access. Additionally, you are charged an hourly rate when the machine is running. Monthly plans are offered at a flat rate for unlimited access.
Then the pricing page doesn't list the flat rate, when looking at hourly pricing - but does show an hourly price for monthly billing? Possibly monthly/(30 * 24)?
Ed: looks like hourly for monthly plan is calculated as monthly/(365÷12×24)
Is Paperspace overpriced or is Shadow burning cash? I'd think of the latter.
1) I go on Github and configure a service
2) I make a wallet that people can donate to
3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host guarantees that the code at that Github is what's really running.
I can imagine lots of other things I want, too, but this is the bare minimum. I think it'd be really useful in a lot of scenarios.
You could probably get close by auto-deploying from GitHub Actions but you wouldn't get the main benefit of a service like that (having ops done in a clean way without having to think much about it).
Without having any experience in the field, aren't lambda functions supposed to provide something like that?
Ideally this would be a service with the same ergonomics but the outcome isn't a hosted static website but a machine (somewhere in the cloud) running whatever the user wants. "Tedious" tasks like hardening, monitoring and upgrading (and redeploys) would be handled by the service provider, as opposed to the user.
For people who like doing ops this might not sound appealing but developers (especially single devs and small teams) often just wanna focus on their app, not their ops, even more so when it comes to continous maintenance.
Addendum: I think Laravel has some of this covered in their ecosystem with tools like Forge and Envoyer. But I've never tried any of them so I can't judge.
Since then we've seen "serverless" or functions-as-a-service (FAAS) which is just smaller bits of code (down to a single javascript function) but the same concept of everything else being managed by the provider. This is AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Functions, etc.
The latest offerings now take a Dockerfile or container image that you build, which means you can run anything on any stack while the provider manages the rest. Google Cloud Run, AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, Fly.io, Zeit Now, etc.
This is a really hard problem with "solutions" that usually run counter to privacy and, you know, controlling the machine consuming your electricity. Remote Attestation has come a long way, but (at least on Linux) still in its infancy.
I do think the point stands though. They are names for the same technology. How it is used, and who uses it will determine what type of spin I'd put on it.
Monitoring the integrity of a trusted audio decoder in my system's kernel: DRM
Monitoring the integrity of an open source tool that I bought and paid for: remote attestation.
Both will come down to various arrangements of trusted computing enclaves, asymmetric cryptography and groups trying to bypass said arrangements.
[0] https://next.redhat.com/2019/06/25/keylime-using-tpm-to-secu...
[1] https://keylime.dev/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhr_aVBCZPw
[3] https://github.com/keylime/keylime
[4] https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/laboratory-staff-develop-new-cyb...
[5] https://github.com/tpm2-software
[6] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...
[7] https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl
It's miles and leaps beyond what GitHub offers (different target I suppose).
You'd still have to code the linking to a wallet part, but that's definitely doable.
When you're both the developer and the consumer, you can certainly prove this to yourself (to five nines of confidence or so) by just setting up the hosting yourself. But we're talking about the case of a centralized backend for a multiuser service, e.g. a forum, where the users want to not have to trust the moral fibre of the person who set up the server, but merely trust that the infrastructure used in the hosting guarantees that it can't run anything other than the codebase (that they control.)
Different target, yet again.
I was thinking about something similar a few months back, and I think it could be doable. You'd need a CI service that creates reproducible builds, and a hosting service that can show what build artifact is currently loaded. You'd allow the public to view the state of the service. I think it could work with heroku or similar.
That gets me closer to: I trust the code, and I trust the hosting service (I.E. AWS), but I don't need to trust the person running the code as I can verify that it matches what's on GitHub.
In essence, a Turing-complete smart-contract blockchain is a deterministically-trustworthy compute-hosting service. It's one that has the disadvantage of all the overhead distributed auditability requires; but at least has the advantage (compared to centralized compute-hosting with remote-attestation) that it already exists and is usable right now for real-world use-cases.
(And you can also reduce the blockchain-y overhead by moving whatever backend business logic you can out of the "trust kernel" into untrusted regular machines, and then just having the "trust kernel" do the important stuff. CryptoKitties is a good example of this: the only thing their smart contract does is track who owns what kitty, because that's what people would try to dispute by forging transactions. The rest of the stuff is state in a regular centralized RDBMS, because it's dictated by the service, rather than by user input, and so is not under dispute.)
Everyone gets a copy of the code AND all the data/state, and can execute all instructions.
Problem is that it’s too slow/expensive to do anything useful.
But perhaps the killer app for blockchain is buried somewhere in this concept.
Please investigate ethereum name system(ENS) and Handshake name system.
Checkout codius.org
The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to local. They also offered very powerful hard ware.
I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year, year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a month for me. I moved onto a dedicated server that I used KVM and LibVirt to manage.
That worked but it's obviously a lot of over head.
I played online multi player games. If you have a 144hz gsync/freesync monitor. Then this isn't meant for that. But it was totally playable.
The weak portion is you're beholden to your internet. Traveling for work it didn't work at all. Most places I stayed had very slow internet and then the latency became unplayable.
I see this as a completely viable option if you're on Linux, or Mac and want to game every now and then. Or if you're waiting for a new GPU to come out and still want to game.
Setup wasn't quite push-button but I got it up and running by dumbly following the instructions. Parsec was the most confusing part. Trust the docs, and it'll work.
Also - am not good. :)
EDIT the latency figures are nothing like 50ms though. Low tens maybe, total. This isn't a huge surprise though: on the same machine and connection I've also (using JamKazaam, not over Paperspace) had decent success doing online realtime music jam sessions with local friends too, where the latency tops out around 25ms - can't really get into the pocket playing funk, but just fine for rock.