Friday's AMA covered a wide range of topics and a lot of ground. It was also the last AMA of the decade! Those questions not answered this time will be picked up in the next AMA.
Written By
Bolaji Oyewole
• 1 min read
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Question 1
What's the status of Gateway onboarding? I understand the first wave will be selected handovers of existing Gateways, yes? When will we be able to onboard gateways ourselves?
Arthur Mingard: There are a bunch of items that need to be lined up for self on-boarding of Gateways to be enabled, key of which is the replacement of Consul with a custom solution at this layer in the network. Timing for this is TBC, and will be outlined in the coming update to the roadmap (which has been slightly held off to allow for the sequencing of new requirements such as this). And yes, rentals will be open up in the first instance.
Question 2
How far away are we from fully automated self on boarding of hosts?
Adam K Dean: Expected Q1 2020.
Question 3
What's the status with utilising host GPUs in CDN to speed up the image processing?
Arthur Mingard: The community behind vips have run extensive benchmarking comparisons between GPU/CPU image processing and have concluded that the performance benefits are negligible. We suspect that this will change over time, and are keeping a close eye on developments.
Question 4
For how long will the name dadi be used and why?
Joseph Denne: In Github for example, simply because we haven't found the right moment to fully migrate legacy repositories relating to web services yet. And of course, it exists in the token contract which, isn't something that we change. The only way to fully remove it from the token would be to issue a new contract, but this would require a token swap, which isn't something that we think that we should be doing just for a rebrand. It will happen in time, but we're not sure when yet.
Question 5
How is Tiipr App doing? Are they still in the race for making the world a better place with cashless tips?
Joseph Denne: Very well! They now have two apps (one for customers and one for service staff, powered by API and making use of CDN for component delivery), and a portal for businesses/venues in the works (built on Edit). You can expect to hear much more from them in 2020.
Question 6
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Knowledge
Last Updated:
December 2019
I was wondering what behaviour I can expect when I exceed the limits of the Free tier. What status code can I expect and will this result in immediate termination of service or will assets continue to be served at a lower level of priority? How can I best monitor this?
Adam K Dean: We’re working on exposing telemetry for usage. There’s no hard cut off, rather a cool down period to allow for switch over. We expect to be exposing telemetry for use in Q1 next year.
Question 7
Is there any overall goal in terms of host capacity within self onboarding phase?
Joseph Denne: There's no set goal for capacity overall as the requirements are a moving target depending on service utilisation. As this side grows we expect to get a feel for the balance of resource / capacity, which in turn should allow us to publish the requirements in the network, which could go as far as showing which areas are in need of capacity and even looking at methods to incentivise the back filling requirements quickly.
Question 8
What I'm curious about is the earning potential. $4.69 is what is reflected on the edge website. We earned like 15-25 for the last months till self onboarding started. But how does edge get to that $4.69 number?
Joseph Denne: The figures on site/in legacy docs are not updated in real time and do need a refresh. The average annualised ROI against the POS for Hosts in November was 40.73%, which is ~3.39% per month.
Question 9
Looking at the roadmap we have several network ready services such as API, Publish and Storage. When will we see those going live on the network? How about containers?
Arthur Mingard: API + Publish = Edit. Storage should be in Beta in Q1. Containers are in use now, but opening up the framework is complex and is not expected to be in testing until the back end of next year. The updates to the roadmap will provide more detail.
Question 10
A little bit longer than a month until the end of the new year. Is the network code about to be open sourced?
Arthur Mingard: Not in full as we're not quite ready for that yet. But we are starting to open the code for a bunch of components and tools, and will be opening up key service dApps as well.
Question 11
The Q4 2017 DADI marketing strategy presentation; Brand Development was planned to be outsourced to creative agency. Was the current edge website/brand delivered by an agency? What agency? When agency?
Joseph Denne: We delivered this in house, including the re-brand to Edge. We have one of the best brand designers in the UK as our design director and he is continuing to move forward our visual style.
Question 12
How well does the network currently operate? When I extrapolate my earnings, I calculate a total per month to around 150k tokens which with today's valuation is like 7.5k USD. This feels very low, like the team is holding back the process of shifting over traffic to the edge network. Reason? Just being careful or bugs? Is it possible to get some elaboration about this (sensitive) topic?
Joseph Denne: I can't comment on specific figures or assumptions as this is commercially sensitive information. However, the platform is live and performing well. There are no known bugs in the current deployment of either DNS or Content Distribution. We have had some issues with Consul, which we're working to resolve. But in the main our focus is on service enhancements (which is informed by a feedback loop of live data), and moving to a self-service footing.
Question 13
As I understand, with CDN the Gateways are the nodes in the network that have the contact with the clients. Will it be like that for all other services as well? Or will there be services where the hosts and clients speak directly?
Arthur Mingard: As a general rule everything passes through a Gateway. This isn't always a direct hand off however. It could be the channelling of a data stream. Because of the realities of mixed home and business environments, and the security that exists around these networks, it is not possible to consistently connect an end user to a Host without both parties first having software installed. This is the key barrier that the architecture of the Edge network solves.
Question 14
How many Gateways will be available for rentals and will self-onboarding available for Gateways?
Joseph Denne: All Gateways will be made available. And yes, but the timing for self on-boarding is not yet set.
Question 15
Does CDN utilise the OpenGL ES API? If not, will it be considered since it could increase the performance of image processing by using GPUs on ARM devices?
Adam K Dean: CDN doesn’t use OpenGL ES API at the moment since libvips has no direct support for GPU processing, but we’ll consider using it when we add video streaming.
Question 16
Is Eduardo Bouças still with us? Just saw he contributed in Stackbit repo. Is this project affiliated with EDGE Network somehow?
Joseph Denne: Eduardo has stepped down from his role on Edit and has now left the company. His work has been picked up by Jean-Luc, who has been doing a brilliant job moving the platform forward. On which, I had planned to share the new interfaces with the community this week, but the issue we saw with Consul in the week had the effect of pushing that back. I'll be sharing them next week instead.
Question 17
How are things going with edit dot com? Bringing in any traffic yet to the network?
Joseph Denne: It's moving and starting to bear fruit. 2020 is shaping up well, but as ever there's a lot to do! Everything that runs on Edit touches the network to a greater or lesser extent. There are components of functionality that are directly integrated. And we look to the future we expect the core data layers to move to the network as well.
Question 18
Are there plans for building a product for affiliate and/or drop shipping sites, similar to Shopify?
Arthur Mingard: Not at the moment, although you could our tools to create one if you wanted!
Question 19
How will Edge increase its reach in regions outside of central Europe and North America? Is there a long term strategy for getting more people to run hosts?
Arthur Mingard: This completely comes down to supply and demand. If there is end user demand in those regions, it will ultimately be profitable to run a node in them. We have loads of ideas for driving adoption where there is a shortfall but where there is also demand however.
Question 20
What is the benefit of having hosts in the current CDN system considering that - a) the average host upload speed is probably less than the average download from source speed, making cache misses very slow - b) On cache hits: having a 1TB SSD disk cache on the gateway is orders of magnitude faster than retrieving from 100 hosts over the wire - c) modern GPU software can decode, down sample, encode up to 100-1000 images per second, making a GPU-based transformation pipeline on the gateway much more efficient than relying on comparatively slow image transformations on the hosts.
Arthur Mingard: In our benchmarking, GPU based transformation is nowhere near as fast for image manipulation. The only way to build a scalable decentralised model is to distribute work, which is why Hosts resolve the requests and return them to Gateway, rather than a single Gateway doing all of the work, which is a huge bottleneck. On scale, a single Gateway with 250 hosts connected will manage far more requests than if the Gateway were to have to request all of the source content and process it.
Question 21
The current process of node update for Founding Nodes is extremely complicated, involving shipping of sd cards (which could be corrupted) or having ports open on routers and expecting a remote update. Is there a plan to release a self-diagnostic tool or a document for us to download and fix our Founding Nodes, if it’s not reported as online in the dashboard? Want to avoid losing on $EDGE over extended periods of time.
Joseph Denne: It's not really that complicated, but I accept that's it less than optimal. Unfortunately, it's a facet of the Founding Node being the first in-home and in-business device on the network. The flip side of this is the gauntleted base payment for Founding Nodes. So yes. we'd like it to be simpler... it take time this side as well. But it's a question of priorities and slotting it in to what is already a packed roadmap.
Question 22
When will I be able to host a website on edge? Is it going to be Serverless only or docker based containers?
Adam K Dean: You can cache an entire site for delivery under your own domain via Content Delivery in the network now. Running a site in full in the network will need to wait for the Edge Compute service.
Question 23
If I want to trial a site on edit.com, how do I go about this?
Adam K Dean: Drop an email to hello@edit.com and we'll follow up with you directly.
Question 24:
Where is the promised roadmap update for the next 18 months?
Joseph Denne: The road map update is ready, and has just been held back to allow us to sequence in new requirements, such as the need to replace Consul. We expect to be releasing it ahead of Christmas. (As a side note: we don't make promises. We give indications of expected timings for in plan deliveries. I hate the use of this word in crypto – it's misleading; ignores the realities of product development and R&D; and contributes to the general background of FUD that is holding the whole sector back.)
Question 25
Who is VP Strategy & Business Development?
Joseph Denne: My co-founder, Chris Mair.
Question 26
I assume that there's not enough gateway spots available to fill the list of people who want a Gateway. While the list may not be up to date, can we know till how long the 50,000 deal will be honoured, and if it will work based on lottery who gets a Gateway?
Joseph Denne: Timings are not set yet. We’ve still not decided how best to choose Gateway stakers equitably. There’s the option of the lottery which isn’t the fairest, there’s also FCFS which disadvantages fairly newer members of the community. We're waiting until we achieve a certain level of utility that will allow them be profitable for the stakers. We have also been thinking about the potential for creating a community stargate that will those who don’t get into Gateways can stake with.
Question 27
Why doesn't the dadi.tech website redirect to edge.network?
Joseph Denne: Good spot. And a quick fix. Resolved.
Question 28
What are your ambitions for edit.com? Do you see it moving to a more self-onboarding model like Prismic? Prismic is really lovely to use. Feels like edit.com could play in this space if you want / produce excellent documentation like Prismic.
Joseph Denne: Edit is currently targeted at SMEs and Enterprises, and provides an incredibly flexible and fast development and editorial experience. We're also working on a self-serve proposition, but there are no timings available for this yet.
Question 29
Is it the gateway or host that downloads the original image to the CDN transformed from the source?
Arthur Mingard: Hosts handle this portion of CDN operation.
Question 30
Will Gateway's be self onboarded or rental of existing ones?
Arthur Mingard: In the first instance, rentals, like Stargates. Why? Because we're early in the lifecycle of network roll out and we need to ensure performance. As the network grows in scale and in usage, and the tools needed to fully monitor the performance of self on boarded Gateways become available, we will open this up.
Question 31
How is the new video going? (mentioned after launch new website)
Joseph Denne: Held back to allow us to focus on more pressing items such as the Edge Console. We'll get to it, but it won't be until we’re on a full self-service footing with Content Distribution and we can ensure that the messaging is in line with the service offer.
Question 32
Having a timing-allow-origin headers set in CDN response would be a nice-to-have. Any chance this could be enabled? (as an option switch in dash for example)
Arthur Mingard: All source headers are passed through CDN so if you’d like to use this, just define it on the origin. It wouldn’t be sensible to CDN to assign this as it could conflict with headers from the origin.