This dive into thoughts on DFINITY from members of the team was filmed during the Q2 2018 internal DFINITY engineering summit. This blog post is both a synopsis and supplement.

The DFINITY Vision

DFINITY is developing the “Internet Computer” network with the aim of creating a novel public cloud infrastructure that can host the next generation of the world’s software and Internet services.

The purpose of the DFINITY project is to create a public compute platform called the “Internet Computer” using an open decentralized network and advanced Computer Science techniques. This will act as a globally accessible public cloud computing resource, upon which purpose-built software systems and a new breed of open autonomous Internet service can be hosted. In short, our aim is to create a public infrastructure that can host the next generation of the world’s software and services.

The Internet Computer is more than just a public cloud, and also introduces a new framework for developing new systems and services designed to be much simpler when compared with the traditional IT stack. The aim is to reduce human capital costs and provide a tamperproof computing environment that can support systems that are automatically more secure (without the need for constructs like firewalls and other anti-intrusion systems) and always available, highly interoperable, and in future releases, able to preserve privacy of personal data and confidential content, addressing many of the critical issues facing IT today. Furthermore, the platform also supports the creation of a new kind of “autonomous” software instance that has no owner and runs and exists independent of any single person or organization, which can optionally update and manage itself through inbuilt tokenized governance systems — which we believe can provide the foundation of a new breed of open Internet service.

Cloud History

The Internet was the world’s first decentralized system and although it was conceived to create a resilient communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war, it became much more broadly applied as a general network that could connect people, organizations and services to each other.

In the 1990s, prior to the emergence of cloud hosting services, people had to run their own servers. Due to the fragility and hassle associated with hosting servers in-house, professional hosting centers, or “data centers”, emerged. These provided reliable high-speed connections, uninterruptible power supplies, effective cooling and a host of other benefits that made them the ideal place to host private machines.

This model began to evolve in the early 2000s, with some data centers offering completely virtualized services that could be rented, rather than rackspace to install your own servers, and also made it possible to purchase add-ons to meet other needs, such as bandwidth, data storage and backup. In 2006 Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched, providing a range of rentable compute services in a form that today we most often associate with the colloquial term “the cloud”. Services such as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have become successful by reducing their costs through huge scale and providing a convenient one-stop shop for compute capacity and related needs that customers can simply turn on as needed.

Despite the popularity of the services, much is left to be desired. For a start, they are run by monopolistic Internet giants and are proprietary platforms. When customers build their own systems upon these platforms using the custom features they provide, they’re quickly subject to vendor lock-in as the systems they create cannot easily be ported to another competing cloud service. Irrespective of other issues, for this reason alone if all things were equal, many would rather build on a public cloud infrastructure where they would not become a captive customer. DFINITY not only aims to address this need by providing a public cloud infrastructure, it also reinvents how software is built and designed using cutting-edge computer science techniques, aiming to provide unimagined additional benefits.

The Internet Computer cloud is very different to anything that has come before, and can be better thought of as a virtual mainframe computer in cyberspace that the world shares. It is this difference in essence that makes the creation of autonomous software systems possible, which DFINITY hopes can underpin the a new generation of open Internet services and a more open Internet.

DFINITY

Full details of the DFINITY system will become available when the testnet is made public. It involves the notion of “network code” — which is similar in some respects to “smart contracts” — that can be integrated into a software system very easily without any concept of distribution. This network code actually runs on the Internet Computer and has special properties, persisting data automatically, easily interoperating with other network code, and of course running in a tamperproof manner and providing any level of availability needed by drawing on the properties of the underlying cryptographically driven decentralized network.

The full workings of this system are beyond this post, but DFINITY’s approach is highly technical and is famously known for driving its network protocols using the world’s first high performance, fully decentralized, unstoppable, unmanipulable and unpredictable random beacon, which emits random numbers using a protocol called Threshold Relay. These numbers in turn drive other blockchain protocols such as Probabilistic Slot Consensus, which is able to bring massive networks comprising even millions of nodes (computers) to agreement in a matter of seconds. DFINITY is also known for its work with the WebAssembly Virtual Machine, and developing a new language called ActorScript, which is purpose built for the new framework that it will provide. One thing is for sure: the Internet Computer will provide a new and highly original means of developing systems with new properties that can be hosted on a tamperproof public platform.

We are aiming for this public Internet Computer to become Cloud 3.0.

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