Decentralized Infrastructure

Friend consists of a network of servers and clients (most of the time running in a web browser). The server side of things provide you with storage space, computing power, redundancy and services — which is “consumed” by the clients. Whilst FriendUP gives you a virtual Cloud Computer, the Friend Network of servers also gives you a virtual data center with nearly unlimited resources at your fingertips.

This virtual data center can be used for anything. For example, to run a web site. Or to offer a server backed API. Or to boost your own multiplayer game server network.

In the conventional world, Amazon Web Services(AWS) may not fully equate with the Friend Network(FN) in every aspect. It is utterly huge, well established, and we are just getting started. Still, the comparison makes sense for a number of reasons. FN has generic infrastructure on offer — decentralized and implemented using Blockchain technologies — but the infrastructure is analogous to AWS. It can be used to achieve the same things.

Amazon offers flexible infrastructure based on configurable virtual machines. You spin up your environment, install and configure any kind of software and then scale once an instance maxes out due to heavy load. The services are relatively cheap, and the costs increase fairly as you need more horsepower.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others are all wonderful feats of engineering. Problem is, they are centralized. They are owned by a giants growing ever larger, and as we have seen with several other Silicon Valley companies, these become politicized over time. You are never sure about where they will go after the next quarter. They may start sharing data with national intelligence agencies. They may suddenly start censoring, as a result of a law suit. They are far from neutral players. And by the end of the day, their decision making process are far removed from the people who those policies may concern. The users. And in these time of rapid disruptions, not only in technology, but in policy, users who just want to deploy and utilize tech may have their concerns.

The Friend Network will be able to offer much of what AWS do, but in a decentralized way. As a hub for other Blockchain projects, you will be able to find all the technologies in one place; databases, storage space, data services, compute power, monitoring and administration. The services will be based on shared resources and technology that is owned by the users. This is what people want. The faith in the global hegemonic technology powerhouses is failing. And we are offering an agnostic — non political infrastructure, albeit on philosophical foundations (see our five pillars).