Greetings to all, we are pleased to present a new company under review — Bluzelle. To cut a long story short, Bluzelle is a decentralized service provider that aims to allow users to create on-demand, scalable databases for blockchain applications. ICO ended 20th January of 2018. However, this company is not a large one and is not rapidly developing. However, a certain degree of progress has been observed lately. The main point is new whitepaper. It hadn’t been as triumphant as we had hoped, but it might be helpful in dealing with some of the issues involved. For instance, it can be helpful in finding out answers to questions like ‘What problems games that are chasing a global audience are facing?’, ‘What an edge cache is and the benefits gained from it?’, ‘How blockchain empowers both high availability and security?’, ‘How companies can move from DevOps to NoOps?’, ‘What are the specific use cases for an edge data cache?’ Moreover, one member of the tech team explained the comparison between Edge and Cloud and the development team has released some code updates. To conclude, we are counting on further development and are about to monitor the progress.
Intro
Since we are looking at Bluzelle for the first time, we feel that we have to explain to you what Blezelle is.
Bluzelle is a decentralized service provider that aims to allow users to create on-demand, scalable databases for blockchain applications. Bluzelle — a highly distributed key-value store edge caching service that provides both high-performance and high availability. The Bluzelle server is written purely in C++ and runs natively on Linux, Mac-OS-X, and other platforms, but can also run in Docker containers. Bluzelle can provide localized edge-computing performance that is vastly faster than a typical cloud-based REDIS+DB deployment.
The network plans to provide scalable and reliable database services to distributed applications. Users can rent their excess storage and computing resources to application developers using the native BNT token as payment. Bluzelle hopes to connect consumers through a variety of distribution points such as AWS, Android Studio, Quorum, and Microsoft Azure. The project focuses on software developers and enterprise software architects in the Asia Pacific region.
Development
- Bluzelle published a new white paper, Smart Data Caching at the Edge. Download now. This one includes answers to such questions as:
- What problems games that are chasing a global audience are facing
- What an edge cache is and the benefits gained from it
- How blockchain empowers both high availability and security
- How companies can move from DevOps to NoOps
- What are the specific use cases for an edge data cache
- “bzapi” for internal testing and bug verification. Bluzelle (by utilizing our new C++ common runtime) is being used to reproduce and validate database bugs. Multiple test-cases were implemented on the bzapi and will be added to future automated regression testing.
- Multiswarm initialization via automation. With the addition of our multi-swarm functionality, topology complexity has dramatically increased. The operations team has made significant progress in ability to deploy and upgrade our various networks of swarm nodes. With a single command line, a swarm instance or entire swarm can be instantiated and registered to the ESR. The process of spinning up a new node to add capacity takes minutes.
New tutorials:
- Sprint Highlight: Adding Information onto Bluzelle Ethereum Smart Registry (ESR)
In this video Software Developer Matthew Ilagan will show you a demo of adding information onto Bluzelle Ethereum Smart Registry (ESR).
Social encounters
Live Webinar: Edge vs Cloud Computing
In this webinar you will learn about:
- Current state of the cloud and proliferation of IoT devices, smart phones and so on
- What is the edge and how it is different from the cloud
- How the next generation of applications are different and will need edge computing — the cloud will not cut it
- How Bluzelle is leading the charge with edge computing, with the Bluzelle edge cache
- Today: The Cloud, Internet of Things, Smart Phones, and Status Quo
We are having an explosion of internet of things. You can find small and big devices all over places like manufacturing industries and consumer businesses. Smartphones are becoming mainstream, especially in developing countries. We can almost assume that every average citizen has a smart phone. The Internet is becoming democratized. It is no longer limited to users in traditional western industrialized nations.
- What is Edge?
There are lots of definitions of what it is. Think of a single client computer (e.g. someone from the web, or someone that is playing the game) that is accessing data, traditionally, it has to retrieve data from the cloud server which may be set up in other side of the world. This would take quite a while. However, an edge cache server (Bluzelle) will sit much nearer to the client, which largely accelerate the data accessing speed.
The idea here is to bring the data as close to the customer as possible — that’s what the edge is. Not like traditional cloud servers, edge servers are not in a single location but distributed everywhere in the world. No matter where the clients are, they will be close to one of these edge servers.
Edge computing is about bringing its edge as close as possible to the customer. The closer it is, the better performance gets.
- Edge vs Cloud
Edge and cloud are generally opposites. Cloud concentrates power while the edge paradigm spreads it out.
The cloud is about consolidating power into data centers. You have to use services like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud platforms to access computing and networking resources in centralized locations. Edge computing’s goal is to move these resources away from data centers and bring them as close to the user as possible.
However, edge and cloud are not mutually independent. Edge networks can interact with cloud networks or can exist purely on their own. This is where decentralization comes into play.
- Tomorrow: The Next Generation of Applications and Why They Need the Edge
The next generation of applications will not necessarily run close to these traditional data centers. They will run on smartphones and IoT devices which are widely distributed and closer to the consumers, but much further away from the cloud data center than before. Remember that traditional cloud data centers have to be physically set up in locations, which are expensive and time consuming.
Data needs are therefore now far more spread out all over the globe. There is a large opportunity for businesses to capture these new customers. Competitive advantage will strongly be defined by speed to access application data, and availability of this data. This requires bringing the data as close to the customer as possible, and ensuring it is always available.
The users are no longer consolidated to large cities in traditionally “developed” nations. The users are now far more spread out and away from the confines of established cloud data centers. Global competitiveness means reaching these users too.
The future is highly lucrative, with an explosion in IoT devices, smart phones, and applications that run on these devices. Developers must future-proof their applications, by having a dynamic architecture that adapts to the changing needs of the users, at the edge.
- How the Blockchain Helps Bluzelle to Power its Edge Computing Network
There are four areas that where Bluzelle is using blockchain and decentralization to power our edge cache network. However, please note that Bluzelle itself is not a blockchain but borrows the concept of decentralization (e.g. consensus etc) to make our edge product more competitive.
Decentralization — There are no special servers or power authorities and where every node in the blockchain network is equally expendable. Bluzelle uses decentralization to achieve extreme edge computing abilities. Every server in Bluzelle is also equally expendable.
Reliability — Like blockchain networks, data is replicated as needed across Bluzelle’s network. If a server or even a whole bunch of them go down, Bluzelle continues to run smoothly.
Security — Attempts to attack a server or a group of them will fail as the rest of the network will reject such attacks.
Availability — Without defined points of failure, Bluzelle is robust — this means high availability (99.999% or better).
- Bluzelle: Leading the Charge with its Edge Cache
Traditional caching layer was limited to Redis in singular cloud data centers. Bluzelle has a global network of edge servers, to cache data as close to the customer as possible, far beyond the reaches of the cloud. Bluzelle introduces an edge caching layer to replace or augment the traditional caching layer. Works with existing or new applications.
Bluzelle will replace DevOps with NoOps, meaning companies can focus on software development without managing backups, scaling, and security. Bluzelle is always on and already deployed.
- Other advantages of Bluzelle include:
- Uses the best of blockchain tech to provide consistently high performance and availability.
- Partnered with global Tier-1 network to ensure Bluzelle will always have the consistently fastest connections with its network.
- Comparable in cost to existing caches.
- Can deploy into new or existing applications in < 10 mins.
- Support for all major programming languages.
- How do you make sure all data is synced in real-time when the data is all processed at the edge? Will it be slow?
It’s about 850ms delay from the time when data is written to the point it is propagated across the network. That is comparable to the speed of other key-value store services like Google, Cloudflare etc. One of our top areas in research is to have the fastest consensus algorithm to ensure data synchronization is fast.
- How does Bluzelle handle content security and privacy issues?
The main thing that Bluzelle is protecting is the access rights. If you have a namespace of a key-value pair stored on Bluzelle, Bluzelle will ensure nobody except authorized owners of that data can write to it, which is dictated by the private key. So if you own the private key to the namespace, you can write to that data. That is to ensure the authenticity of the data. Bluzelle currently does not encrypt data for you. The data owner can do this in the application layer.
- How does token come into play?
Bluzelle will release more details on token economy further down the road. It will see BLZ tokens being used in the upcoming release in November. BLZ tokens will be used as payment utility as well as compensation to farmers (network nodes).
- Will all blockchains move towards edge computing in the future?
The development team thinks the blockchain is using edge computing or is part of edge computing. Think of Bitcoin blockchain or Ethereum, their nodes are distributed everywhere. Every time you write data, it will propagate across the whole network. When you read data, it is reading from the nearest node. Therefore blockchain is a good example of an edge network.
- Why are big cloud companies like Google & Amazon not moving into edge computing?
Big cloud storage companies are adopting serverless computing. They are operating cloud data centers. They can’t technically adopt edge computing because edge is about moving beyond where the cloud data center is to much closer to where the customer is. Traditional cloud companies are limited to where the data center is. This is where Bluzelle’s opportunity lies.
- Examples of real world adoption of edge computing?
Edge computing applies to many existing applications, e.g. gaming. In a global multi-player game, you can have a client pulling the data from the edge rather than waiting 100ms for the data from a centralized server on the other side of the planet.
Bluzelle is designed in a way that you don’t have to replace your backend. You don’t have to replace any of your current DBs including MySQL, NoSQL, or caching services like Redis, but use Bluzelle directly on top of these to add global availability instantly to your data. In this way we can drive adoption of edge computing faster.
- Are there any regulatory hurdles?
For the tech itself, Bluzelle is providing infrastructure-as-a-service, which is not subject to any regulatory hurdles as far as we know. Tokens, financials or other areas in the company are separate issues from the tech.
Interviews:
- CEO Pavel Bains was interviewed by Jordon Heal from Coin Rivet on how the decentralised data cache network plans to enhance game performance and reduce latency.
- CTO Neeraj published explains the differences between Bluzelle and BitTorrent File System (BTFS)
- CEO Pavel spoke about Bluzelle’s Data Delivery Network at True Global Ventures Conference at Seoul Korea. He also joined a panel on blockchain gaming.
Events:
No updates.
Roadmap
MEIER release, late April/early May, 2019
- Smart caching. Data is stored using RAM and SSD. Cache features like eviction and expiry.
- Multi-tenancy governance. Enable multiple customers to use the swarm with proper controls to protect data and ensure high availability and performance.
- Multi-swarm. Data can be scaled using tiering across multiple geo-decentralized swarms worldwide.
- Ethereum Swarm Registry. Auto-bootstrapping allows nodes and clients to discover existing swarms using the Ethereum mainnet.
- StatsD. Aggregation and dissemination of swarm metrics, for monitoring and analytics.
- External monitoring. Third party monitoring of Bluzelle nodes to ensure uptime, performance, availability, and other metrics are maintained.
- JS and C++ clients. Full programming language support.
- C++ common runtime. Base library to quickly develop support in new languages.
- Bluzelle Studio. Updates to support multi-swarm and caching primitives.
- Chaos module. Intentional entropy to harden the network preemptively against attacks, faults, load testing, and edge cases.
CURIE release, late October/early November, 2019
- Pricing. BLZ tokens are required to pay for and use the services.
- Trustless decentralization. Nodes operated by members of the public can join swarms. These farmers earn BLZ tokens for services provided.
- Proof of Storage. Challenges to enforce governance of farming nodes and rewards.
- Swarm-level geo-fencing. New swarms can have geographic properties, such as EU-only swarms and China-only swarms.
- Native data types. Strings, sets, sorted sets, lists, hashes.
- In-place mutability. Functions on native data types, performed directly on Bluzelle.
Partnerships and team members
No updates.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
