I will show you an interesting experience about cloud computing market. If you try to order a cloud server from Alibaba in the USA, it will cost between 4.5$ and 79$ per month.

And in HK, it will cost between 9$ and 79$. That is twice as much.

In China it will cost between 19$ and 109$. That is four times more. 

Let us now have a look at what we can get in Europe from a French company called Kimsufi.

For less than 20$ per month, we get a server which is two times bigger than the one Alibaba provides in China. And there is no limit for network transit.

Let us now look at Rapid.Space, a cloud provider which my company is operating.

For about twice as much as the largest server of Alibaba in the previous screenshots, we get 10 to 40 times more performance. Again, there is no limit for network transit, unlike Alibaba cloud.

Some people say that price of cloud is not important.

This is not true. Excessive price can prevent economic development.

Imagine if the price of cars in China was 10 times higher than in Europe. Everyone would just ride bicycles. There would be no highways.

In Europe, cloud is so cheap that every student can afford his or her own cloud server, then learn by experience. This is close to impossible China. As a consequence, European students have much higher skills about cloud, network and cloud software than students in China. 

Besides students, if price of cloud in China could be lower, more than one million jobs could be created, as we calculated in an article published on our web site..

SlapOS first appeared in the media in 2009.

Nexedi has been using SlapOS since around 2008. SlapOS supports many kinds of applications: CDN, database, virtualisation, big data cloud, ERP5, IoT, etc.

We call it "Edge Computing" because SlapOS does more than cloud computing (see Five Evolutions of Cloud Computing "https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Blog.Five.Cloud.Evolution"). 

Unlike most cloud computing systems, SlapOS can manage cloud resources not only in single data centre but also in thousands of small data centres located in different cities, regions, countries, etc. 

SlapOS also appeared in scientific publications.

SlapOS ideas originate from a discussion with Professor Christophe Cérin - who is currently visting professor at HDU (Hangzhou) - about grid computing systems used by NASA for example. Cloud was very popular at that time (2009) and Nexedi was already using it.

It became obvious during this dicussion that the main purpose of cloud was to automate things, rather than virtualise things. It also became obvious that nothing prevented from doing cloud in a decentralised or federated way. IPv6 had become available in all homes in France. It was therefore possible to host servers at home and build a distributed cloud, or to distribute cloud service in many datacenters.

SlapOS has already been taught in universities.

The first lecture about SlapOS was given at HDU with Prof. Congfeng Jiang in Hangzhou.

SlapOS was designed to be resilient.

It is capable of being operated in very harsh conditions: 

• insecure network (anyone can spy it);
• unstable network (packets are lost, connectivity is lost);
• unstable hardware (any component can crash);
• unstable electricity (electricity shortage is always possible).

We designed SlapOS like this was because we found that many cloud providers are not reliable. The article "Downtime statistics of current cloud solutions" (http://iwgcr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/IWGCR-Paris.Ranking-003.2-en.pdf) gives a good overview of the problems that most cloud providers face in terms of networking and electricity no matter, who is the supplier. All cloud suppliers in the world face downtime of a couple of hours per year.

We tried to solve such problems with SlapOS. We also solved the problem of unstable networking which every professional faces in China due to congestion or routing errors.

SlapOS was recently introduced to the German industry at the Edge Computing Consortium Europe in Berlin. It could become in the future a key component for open source edge computing architectures used in Industry 4.0.

What makes SlapOS so different is its simplicity and resiliency.

Its simplicity is the result of using only two components: a master and a slave. Other system can have hundred components.

For resiliency, we based all our design on the idea that resiliency must be implemented with software and should rely on a distributed infrastructure of distant sites with diverse suppliers of telecom or electricity. However each site or hardware does not need to be redundant. This is the same as having multiple imperfect suppliers rather than expecting a single supplier to be always perfect.

By sticking to a very simple and minimal architecture, SlapOS could also achieve with a small budget what huge community projects such as OpenStack still fail to achieve after 10 years. And we could do much more, because our architecture was more generic.

SlapOS is used by Rapid.Space

Rapid.Space (https://rapid.space/) is a high performance, low cost cloud infrastructure that provides:

• big servers;
• CDN;
• (soon) IoT buffering.

It is available in Europe and we hope soon in China. It is based on SlapOS and Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware.

Everything about Rapid.Space is public.

• Business Model: https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Blog.Low.Cost.Cloud.Business.Model
• Performance Optimisation: https://www.nexedi.com/NXD-Blog.High.Performance.VM.DB
• Source Code: https://slapos.nexedi.com

Grandenet is our partner in China. Grandenet provides acclerated IPv6 networking in China with accelerated Web sites. Grandenet has official government licenses. Grandenet is based on SlapOS.

Woefel (Germany) collects data from hundreds of wind turbines using fluentd which is itself deployed using SlapOS (server side).