There were a lot of things that happened in November for Sonm. Even though the crypto industry is unstable, the month was fruitful for us in terms of product development and brand-building, so we have plenty of things to include in our monthly wrap-up. We made substantial progress in improving the platform and introduced a new bot, Taskman, designed to make the automatic management of deals and tasks even more easy.

We also added an SSH for remote and secure access to the platform for Customers and Suppliers, and made a special guide on how to start earning on Sonm with a video overview of the process. We took part in four conferences with six speaking opportunities, including Highload in Moscow, the biggest conference in Russia for computing-intensive projects, and shared our expertise in fog computing, blockchain, the digital economy, and fintech with a huge number of industry professionals and early adopters from all over the world. We updated our website and our Q&A session, made a number of new videos that we’re regularly sharing with you, and continued to develop our Brand Advocacy program. Btw, we’ll be posting the best content pieces on our Twitter over the next few days, so if you’re not following us yet, why not start now? Here’s our handle: @sonmdevelopment

So, that was a brief overview for those who prefer to keep things brief. However, we invite you to learn more details and read the whole article below!

Product

Platform

Implemented a Module for the automatic management of deals and tasks – Taskman (a new bot that enables automatic resource provision on the Sonm platform). More information is available here. Documentation is available here.

Testing of the Sonm OS public beta with an automated installer continues. A version of Sonm OS has been created with another installation option based on the Debian installer and with a mode for booting into a “live USB” with a Windows-based software installer for to prepare the Sonm OS USB drive, which is now being tested by developers. In the near future, this version will also be released in public beta.

Research on the QUIC protocol was completed, and experimental support for the protocol on the SONM platform was implemented.

QUIC is an experimental transport layer network protocol that we use as an alternative to TCP to achieve reliable communication between our components. The main reason we’re including it is to increase connection, establishing stability between any two peers located in private networks.

QUIC is designed on top of UDP, which is more predictable and has been investigated for NAT penetration, unlike TCP.

Since QUIC allows for many connections in a single socket, there is no need to penetrate NAT for the same client-server pair multiple times. After the first successful attempt, the punched hole will be reused.

The Rendezvous server has been updated to support UDP hole-punching using the QUIC protocol. Additionally, it exposes its gRPC server to the same UDP port as for TCP, since it is possible to reuse ports when different network protocols are used. The wire level remains the same – gRPC.

QUIC is an experimental transport layer network protocol that we use as an alternative to TCP to achieve reliable communication between our components. The main reason we’re including it is to increase connection, establishing stability between any two peers located in private networks. QUIC is designed on top of UDP, which is more predictable and has been investigated for NAT penetration, unlike TCP. Since QUIC allows for many connections in a single socket, there is no need to penetrate NAT for the same client-server pair multiple times. After the first successful attempt, the punched hole will be reused. The Rendezvous server has been updated to support UDP hole-punching using the QUIC protocol. Additionally, it exposes its gRPC server to the same UDP port as for TCP, since it is possible to reuse ports when different network protocols are used. The wire level remains the same – gRPC. The function “Geolocation for Suppliers/Workers” is implemented on the side of the SONM Worker component. Now Workers can detect the country ISO code of their location and provide it in their status handler.

Changelog

Added the ability to automatically determine the geolocation of Worker.

Added the ability to collect metrics from DRI devices. Now we’re trying to find the hwmon (hardware monitoring) path on the device initialization. If we can do this, the monitoring interface for this card will become available. The «Monitoring» method reads data from the “/sys/dev” internals, and all behavior has been imported from the ROC-smi tool.

Added the ability to collect extended network metrics in Worker. The extended network metrics, including traffic/packet minute-averaged rates (required for determining the network pressure caused by a task), are now returned when requesting container/task stats..

Added the ability to SSH on a Worker host. Now it is possible to SSH to a Worker using a Node proxy. Internally it works the same way as with SSH into containers, except that the user identity can be the public ETH address of a Worker.

General platform improvements: added the function PayoutTargeted to Gatekeeper (sidechain only; the masterchain gate does not need this. PayoutTargeted creates a transfer to the target destination). added used bytes to the disk benchmark (needed to avoid two syscalls to gather disk space and to monitor Workers).

Optimus algorithm improvements: Optimus will no longer remove active plans. The new logic in the Worker should eliminate races – all running bots are engaged in a new, profitable order, but only one of them succeeds. Now it will cancel ask-plans only if there is no deal associated with them, delegating other plan management logic to the Worker.

Fixed platform component bugs.

v0.4.16

Added the ability to collect power consumption for GPUs.

Fixed platform component bugs.

v0.4.17

Experimental QUIC protocol support. Affected components: Worker, Node, Rendezvous. Both Node and Worker now expose their gRPC services on both TCP and UDP sockets (the port number is the same). Note that this feature is currently in an experimental stage.

Added version checking for core components. Currently, we often run into a situation where our clients (both suppliers and customers) don’t know whether a new version of the platform has been released. To remedy this, we’ve added a simple console notification to let clients know when it’s time to update.

Added the ability to collect background metrics for Worker: implemented the MetricsHandler plugin, which is bound to an instance of Worker. It’s responsible for handling hardware-specific metrics providers (currently for GPUs only) and updating the whole set of metrics by the timer, returning them to the last known state. implemented the GRPC method for WorkerManagement API, which can be used to retrieve metrics using the master or admin address.

Rendezvous improvements: implemented a replacement TCP KA with HTTP2 pings to Rendezvous. Earlier, we tried to set up a TCP keepalive option to ensure that even if the NAT closes the connection, we’re still able to detect it properly; however, the library we use to configure the SO_REUSEPORT option just ignores any keepalive specifications. This results in a situation where sometimes during either network instability or NAT conntrack configurations, the Rendezvous server properly detects whether a Worker is disconnected, but the Worker itself does not detect it; otherwise, it would try to reconnect. To avoid such cases, we have implemented a replacement TCP KA with HTTP2 pings. implemented a solution to eliminate deadlock in the Rendezvous server.

General platform improvements: added the metrics collection addr and ACL for Worker. added the ability to show deal type in deal list cmd (#1749). added the “type” field to the “sonmcli deal list” command. The type indicates whether the current user is selling or buying resources in the given deal. added the ability to announce relay concurrently. At the moment, we have a time window where, after accepting a relayed connection, clients are forced to wait until the server publishes itself again. This window can be reduced if clients announce several connections concurrently (by default, the concurrency is set to 2, but it can be increased up to 4 in the config). added a timeout in Optimus when removing plans. added the ability to show master and Worker IDs in the deal status.

Fixed platform component bugs and implemented small improvements in system stability.

v0.4.18

Implemented small improvements in system stability.

v0.4.19

Improved QUIC protocol support in the system.

Fixed platform component bugs.

Implementations in progress:

There is active development and testing of the Ratings and SLA system (a system to enforce the reliability of rented resources based on the economic incentive of receiving higher ratings). The Ratings and SLA system affects many components of SONM. We have implemented the work prototype of the Ratings and SLA system. The active phase of testing the prototype will begin shortly.

Work is in progress on a UI for the Blockchain Explorer.

Work is in progress to add support for the feature “Geolocation for Suppliers/Workers” in the SONM Market.

Work is in progress on the prototype implementation of TensorFlow on SONM.

An auto-withdrawal feature is underway and being testing. It will allow hardware suppliers to specify an Ethereum address for automatic withdrawal, similar to how it works in the mining pool.

Research in progress:

Research is underway on deploying a CGI rendering farm on Sonm using the Afanasy render farm manager. We have successfully conducted the first tests of prototypes of Workers for video-rendering based on the SONM platform

Research is underway on the choice of options for a referral system to reward network users who contribute to the platform’s growth.

Research is underway on Market Explorer, a system to give Sonm users the ability to track deal histories and view platform usage statistics.

Research is underway on a system for purchasing Sonm tokens with wire transfers for corporate clients (fiat gate).

Research is underway on various options for implementing Gate Masternodes and Sidechain PoS to select the best solution. We are investigating Plasma options and other possible solutions.

Business & Marketing

Sonm OS

This month, we took a step toward introducing our product line to the audience and added a dedicated page on our website for Sonm OS. Our clean, easy-to-read page offers a short introduction of what Sonm OS is and how to start earning on your hardware on Sonm.

Q&A New Format

This month, we continued to rethink the Q&A format. As you may have noticed, there were a lot of changes last month — we made the video crisper, changed the settings to make it visually more appealing (remember the levitating plant?), and invited our presenter Andy Saks to host the sessions along with CTO Igor Lebedev. This month, we continued experimenting with improvements and completely recomposed the intro, so the session was more energetic, modern, and cool. Also, we had special guest Vyacheslav Akhmetov, winner of the Sonm Fog Computing Challenge, industry expert, and Sonm user.

Vyacheslav had a bunch of questions about the system and got all his answers live from our CTO Igor Lebedev.

Brand Advocacy

This fall, we launched a brand advocacy program to find the most active members of the community and encourage them to help us spread brand awareness all over the world. We continuously update the program and unlock new challenges each month.

Take a look and find new inspiration for your inner blogger and crypto enthusiast!

sonm.com/community

Follow the links below for the best works submitted previously:

https://medium.com/@akme/how-to-run-custom-application-on-sonm-caa6b7879f3c

https://medium.com/@almondelectriccompany/how-to-run-sonm-supplier-on-a-macbook-pro-late-2011-using-dual-boot-method-fccf0104c34f

https://cryptoblogger.quora.com/Clearing-the-FOG-with-SONM

Events

Highload ++ 2018

We started the month off immediately participating in the biggest and most advanced conference for developers of computing-intensive projects — Highload. The event took place at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre in Moscow and attracted thousands of industry professionals in the cloud-computing field.

Sonm presented there with a booth, a fog bar, and multiple speaking opportunities designed to provide food for thought for different kinds of visitors. Eugene Safronov, Sonm’s software engineering Team Lead, took the stage with a keynote speech on “Decentralised NUT-punching”. Anton Schukin, Sonm Blockchain Senior Developer, hosted two workshops on “How to build your own blockchain in an hour”, and Eugene Manaev, Sonm System Architect, spoke about “Running distributed DB on fog computing resources”.

Watch a short video recap here:

GoTech

Also, this month, Sonm co-founder Aleksei Antonov took part in a panel discussion entitled “Fintech unicorns of the future: who are they?” on the GoTech forum joined on stage by Dmitry Chikhachev, Managing Partner of Runa Capital; Dmitry Ufaev, Head of Bitfury in Russia; and Eldar Vagapov, Managing Partner of Larnabel Ventures. Participants discussed the next big thing in fintech, the difference between financial regulation in Russia and other countries, and whether partnerships between banks and startups can drive fintech innovation, among other topics.

CryptoEvent

Mid-November Crypto Event Moscow took place as a part of Russian Internet Week. Sonm joined the event with two presentations. Co-founder Aleksei Antonov told the audience about the progress Sonm has made this year, and COO Oleg Lyubimov spoke about the best practices in hiring for IT projects, especially in blockchain.

Data Science Conference

The largest data science conference in Ukraine was held this month in Kyiv, and Sonm CBDO for Russia and CIS Aleksei Krotov visited the event with the goal of presenting Sonm to potential clients. Some interesting meetings took place, and some more potential clients requested details and specs.

Thank you all for being with us! Stay tuned, and if you’re a newcomer, let us just remind you that we offer 24/7 support and are always glad to help you install Sonm.