December is a great time to sum up the results of the fading year, to appraise the achievements made, to admire ascents once again, and to draw conclusions based on the events of 2018. This year was very fruitful for Sonm; no matter how bearish the market behaved, we successfully moved from an MVP release to a working product with the total deals run on suppliers’ machines culminating in more than hundreds of thousands, as well as promising partnerships and community initiatives.

Twelve Months of Development — from MVP Release to 124,349 Total Deals

So, let’s go back to December 25, 2017 when Sonm launched its Minimal Viable Product on Ethereum testnet. This is when Sonm began to mature; at this point, all eyes were on us. How did we feel at that moment? Well, we actually were on pins and needles, anxious to learn the feedback to the testnet, to see the reaction to many months of persistent work. We understood that we were in for more workload, that there would be many challenges and things to redo; we’ve never felt so anxious. Our experience could be likened to that of a young craftsman who builds his very first wheel and is anxious to see if it would work.. Indeed, the Sonm testnet proved that there was a need for a marketplace which will enable the exchange of computing resources, and this achievement was the very first seed for the Sonm marketplace to emerge.

From the development side, after the MVP testnet launch, the next great milestones followed one by one, making the community celebrate and the competitors sigh; the titles in Sonm blog read “Machine Learning Available”, “We Build an Ethereum Sidechain”, “Sonm IaaS is Here”, “New Components added” and then, finally “We are Live”. The platform became fully operational June 30 this year which means that the development from the ground up took us a little longer than a year. Astonishing, isn’t it?

Sonm has become one of the few projects which actually met the goals outlined in the White Paper and moved according to the roadmap. We created a functional marketplace that brings together the suppliers and consumers of computing resources.. Half a year has passed since the platform’s launch. What do we have now? More than 124,349 deals and 346,768 hours deals duration, with suppliers available in the US, European states, China, Japan, Russia, Argentina and even New Zealand. We still know this is only beginning, but this is a very inspiring beginning for us, who BUIDL.

Joining the Computing Community and Finding New Partners

The next big thing that happened to Sonm in 2018 was the company joining two widely known initiatives — the Open Fog Consortium organized by fog computing pioneers such as Princeton University, Intel and others, and Cloud 28++ launched by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. By joining the two communities, SONM made an important step towards being recognized as an important contributor to the decentralized computing marketplace. Together with the Consortium and Cloud 28++, we move closer to developing solutions for real-world problems as we pursue our aim of democratizing tomorrow’s cloud computing landscape.

Throughout the year we initiated promising partnerships with IT companies in different spheres: Ashmanov Neural Networks, Hacken cybersecurity community, DBrain neural network training service and Teleport CDN project. The partnerships gave us the chance to get the third party expertise in the relevant spheres to expand the marketplace features and launch joint initiatives.

Making Contents and Drawing the Community together

In Sonm, we definitely love the community that formed around the product and supported the team from the very first steps. You have always been close to us — asking questions during the Q&A sessions, leaving commentaries on YouTube and initiating discussions in Telegram. You have celebrated the achievements with the team, scolded us from time to time and helped us to become better.

Check one of the recent Q&A sessions featuring a winner of Fog Computing Challenge:

Trying to engage the community in Sonm affairs, we decided to launch Sonm Advocacy program which was met with much enthusiasm from the community. Writing the reviews, initiating discussions and possible partnerships and hunting bugs — these are the tasks Sonm advocates do and are rewarded for.

Besides, we have had a very positive experience of launching Fog Computing Challenge which united Sonm-friendly programmers in one contest. As a result, we got some very useful feedback and became friends with some very talented programmers.

Summing up the results of the fading year, we should say that it was definitely positive, and the challenges that occured on the way pushed us, to make up something new, to improve the job done and to meet the demands of the market. Now that the platform is live and the deals are running, the time has come to adopt the product across various OS’s, to make it easy to use and install, simply plug-and-play.

Eager to meet the challenges of the coming year, thankful to the community and to partnering companies for the support and help, we say goodbye to 2018 looking forward to 2019. We at Sonm know the work we do well. And we know that the product we are developing will one day disrupt the industry.

Cheers! And see you in 2019!

Sonm Team