NuNet Development Outlook For 2022 — Part 1: Platform Development Model
Greetings Singularitarians,
2021 has undoubtedly been a key year for NuNet, having seen the launch of both the private alpha and our utility token NTX, but as we look ahead to 2022, it promises to be an even more eventful and transformative period for the project. Here we will give an overview of the Platform Development Model — which we will use to implement our ambitious roadmap to bring NuNet’s vision to fruition.
· Roadmap update
· Platform development model
· Use-case integrations
∘ Fake news warning application
∘ Cardano stake pool operator nodes
∘ GPU based ML workflows
· Road to Public Alpha
· Community Engagement
· Expanding the Team
· About NuNet
Roadmap update
While we currently have a roadmap on the NuNet website, it is currently undergoing a major overhaul and detalization while transferring it to the Atlassian Jira portal where it will be hosted and constantly expanded and updated as development progresses. On top of the roadmap update we have structured the internal operations model which will guide pretty much all operations and activities of all Nunet subteams. We consider this model of utmost importance for efficient development of the platform and guiding the agile processes.
Platform development model
NuNet is establishing infrastructure, processes and technical tools for advancing its use-case based platform development model. Recall, that use-case development model implies that we will be attracting early use-case integration partnerships in order to prioritize and then drive the design and development of platform features. This model ensures the alignment of go-to-market activities with the deep-tech development of the software and enables early usages even before all features planned in the roadmap are completed.
We can describe our use-case based platform development model in terms of three aspects: (1) current and planned platform features (2) technical development flow and (3) use-case integration partnership program.
Lets unwrap each of them:
(1) Platform features. The platform consists of many features, most of which are currently planned and not yet implemented, but as development progresses, the list of implemented features will grow, giving space for the design and development of the new ones.
As an open source project, NuNet has set up a public project tracking and management system on Atlassian Jira, the most feature rich project management and issue tracking software out there. To that end, the NuNet team is moving away from managing the project solely via its GitLab repositories, which are not able to support our team scaling and project management needs. Nevertheless, the NuNet issue queue, technical discussions and source code will forever remain public and accessible for community developers. Furthermore, we strongly encourage all interested community members to participate in the development and setting priorities via the community developers program.
All implemented, planned and currently developed issues will be publicly tracked via this project on NuNet’s Atlassian Jira portal: NuNet Platform Development. Obviously, it is closely related to the whole agile development flow and processes. We will provide full access to all tools to community developers participating in the community developers program.
(2) We are structuring the internal NuNet development flow as follows:
- We will be constantly prioritizing and re-prioritizing features documented in the NuNet Platform Development project (which is actually the extended and detailed Roadmap, to be constantly updated as we progress) and including them into the platform backlog which will be picked by the development team;
- NuNet will always run at least two networks — a testnet, on which we will develop and early-test all the newly developed features (all CI/CD pipelines and integration testing will run on the testnet) and a mainnet, on which only fully tested features will be running in production mode and on which actual applications and tokenomic flows will be enabled. Private Alpha, released in September, actually runs only on the testnet and is not production ready. The upcoming Public Alpha should run on the mainnet and feature use-case integrations in production mode. Depending on immediate needs, we may be running more networks than testnet and mainnet, but these will be the absolute minimum. We will expand on the Public Alpha related development later in the blogpost.
- As indicated in our initial roadmap published last year, we are planning to do major releases every year (alpha, beta, post-beta) and minor releases each quarter. Furthermore we will be doing patch releases in between, hopefully each month, when the development flow reaches its full scale. In terms of agile process we are gearing up for weekly sprints. All sprint boards, issues and the backlog will be publicly available to anybody interested for viewing. Obviously, this development flow will not be reached immediately but we hope to set it up soon enough.
- Participants of the community developers program will have the ability to comment on each issue, create new issues on the roadmaps and report bugs, submit feature requests and pull requests for testing and merging. Only the core development team will have the ability to merge community pull requests into the testnet and eventually mainnet.
- Each release will have a separate bug tracking project set up on Atlassian Jira and accessible publicly. Currently this involves the bug tracking project of Private Alpha release.
(3) Use-case integration partnership program realizes the major component of the platform development strategy — use-case based development. As communicated before, our long term development strategy is to cover the roadmap in an iterative use-case based manner and we are gearing towards implementation of this strategy. In simple terms, a use-case based development means utilizing real-world use-cases for prioritizing core platform features and pulling the overall platform development up by making these use-cases operational and user-facing from day one.
NuNet’s use-case based development model can be illustrated by an upward facing spiral of iterative development of the platform with each subsequent use-case, where each use-case propels platform features and drives releases.
Each loop in the diagram represents a single use-case integration with different platform features and external stakeholders — we call the platform features that are needed for a single use-case to be implemented on a platform the 360 degree requirements.
And here we come to the crux of use-case integration partnership program: in order to develop a single use-case for propelling the platform development, we will constantly be looking for and forming concrete use-case oriented partnerships among specific type of application developers, compute providers, data providers and sources, AI developers, and consumers.
Use-case integrations
Fake news warning application
We can say that the first (or rather zero-th) use-case that we have used to kickstart the NuNet platform development and which is the use-case behind the Private Alpha release of the NuNet platform is the Fake News Warning Showcase App. This use-case has driven the development of the fundamental building blocks of the platform: the telemetry API and application API, compute onboarding scripts, workflow API, tokenomics API and more (see posts 1 and 2).
We are looking to partner up with a team which would be willing to take over the development of the Fake News Warning application as a business case. Please contact us if you are interested.
Cardano stake pool operator nodes
The next use-case that the NuNet development team is working on right now and which is driving platform features, is allowing Cardano nodes to run via NuNet. This use-case was already presented in live AMA as well as submitted as a Catalyst Fund 7 proposal. The proposal is titled Nunet: Decentralized SPO Computing and can be found in the A.I. & SingularityNET a $5T market challenge category of the Catalyst program. Anyone who has ADA in a Cardano private wallet can register to vote using the Catalyst Voting app.
If the proposal is accepted, NuNet will develop the integration to allow Cardano stake-pool operators to run their block-producing nodes on NuNet, increasing Cardano’s decentralization and decreasing its reliance on big tech cloud computing. This will also be a massive driver of utility for NuNet’s cloud computing as we seek to expand into even more use-cases.
In order to develop Cardano Node Deployment for SPOs use-case, the team will develop a number of new platform features, including sandbox security, secure shell access to containers running on NuNet provisioned machine, NTX gateways and more (see the list of epics and issues attributed to this use-case).
GPU based ML workflows
The next potential use-case integration that is currently being structured by the team and external stakeholders features allowing GPU devices and clusters to be onboarded on NuNet platform for running Machine Learning workflows and the specialized application interface for that purpose (see the preliminary specification of the use-case).
Road to Public Alpha
Platform features implemented as a part of use cases like the Cardano SPO nodes and GPU based ML workflows will bring features to the platform which, once in production, will take the platform from the Private Alpha phase to the Public Alpha phase — as was originally planned in the NuNet roadmap and communicated accordingly. The currently running Private Alpha network will turn into the Public Alpha after the following features will be merged into the codebase and deployed on the mainnet:
- NTX payment gateway, allowing users to earn NTX tokens by providing their unused compute power to the network (to be implemented as a part of Cardano SPO nodes);
- AGIX <-> NTX payment gateway, allowing AI algorithms running on the SingularityNET AI marketplace to directly compensate compute resource provides on which they are running (to be implemented as a part of Cardano SPO nodes);
- Community developer program, allowing for community developers and compute providers to directly contribute to the platform development and use-case integrations and get compensated for the early engagement into the platform;
We expect to implement Public Alpha features in a few months from now. Technically, the NTX and AGIX gateways can be fairly quickly implemented on on the Ethereum platform, but, considering that we included them into the use-case of Cardano SPO nodes, we want to enable them on Cardano network immediately — and that exposes us to some Cardano- related constraints. Importantly, the technical aspects are not enough, because compute providers will be able to actually earn NTX tokens only when we have compute users — therefore we have integrated these features into Cardano SPO nodes use-case. Which means that compute providers will start to be compensated when we have the full 360° requirements implemented for this use-case and respective stakeholders using this solution. We are looking forward to the results of our Catalyst Fund7 proposal and looking forward to connecting to the Cardano community and SPOs!
Community Engagement
NuNet is committed to develop its platform in close cooperation with the community. In order to do so, regular development progress updates will be shared on twitter and other social media. Additionally, regular AMA sessions are held and to that end, please consider subscribing to NuNet’s Youtube Channel. We need at least 1000 subscribers to begin live streaming frequent updates and chats from our own channel.
This Friday, January 21st 2022, at 17:30 UTC, our CEO Dr. Kabir Veitas will host an AMA on the SingularityNET YouTube channel, please submit any questions you might have to this form.
Expanding the Team
Based on the requirements of the updated roadmap and identified use-cases, NuNet is actively expanding its development, management and executive teams. We are still very eager to add more talented individuals with a passion for NuNet’s vision to bring decentralized cloud computing to the world. Since iterative use-case integration cycles will not end, NuNets human resources strategy ensures the ability for constant search and attraction of human talent.
Software engineers, including those with Plutus script experience, are a prime example of individuals we are seeking. All interested parties can check SingularityNET’s job portal for NuNet related job vacancies or email their CV and an accompanying letter to recruitment@nunet.io to apply.
About NuNet
NuNet lets anyone share and monetize their computing resources, turning cloud computing power from a centralized service into an open protocol powered by blockchain. Find out more via:
