State of Decentralised Compute in Early 2021

In early 2021 there were a few services that provided a way to get something executed on systems pooled by individual service providers but to use them there were multiple hurdles.

Users needed to get some specific tokens.
The really big learning curve for even just getting started like
1. Having to pay to even try and see if it works.
2. Learning complicated flow
3. Only CLI was available with a long process.
4. Users have to generate multiple certificates and complicated signing.
No way to no reliable providers.
No easy way to do domain management.

Spheron fit well in to bridge the gap

My work before Compute

I joined Spheron as their first full-time developer hire, back at that time, Spheron had the functionality of hosting website frontends to Arweave and linking domains to websites hosted on Arweave.

Spheron was slowly becoming part of the developer lifecycle at least for the front end and had plans to be part of the complete development lifecycle.

I worked on some initial infrastructure-related things like Smart contracts for payments and subscriptions, token handling, and adding support for multiple providers with IPFS, Filecoin, pinata, and a few others. Spheron now had the infrastructure to add support for compute as well.

Compute shaping up

I started to work on abstracting out, raising requests, building docker images, sending docker images, picking the right config, handling ports, picking the right and reliable providers, and payments, sending manifests, and a lot more behind a single click. I also worked on setting up infrastructure for funding wallets, checking the status of various images that were hosted, and linking domains.

At this point, I left Spheron to work full time on my own product Slick Wallet but Spheron worked on it for some time and now Spheron is the best and probably the only AWS counterpart for decentralized hosting services.

If you are a developer, do check out Spheron, a lot of hard work and sleepless nights went into it.

https://spheron.network

Decentralised Compute with Spheron