Hi all,
My name is Sasank Chilamkurthy. I run this company called Von Neumann AI. Earlier, I used to be CTO of this AI company called Qure.ai.
You will be surprised to know this website is literally hosted from People+AI office from this server! For people who have gone to the P+AI office in Koramangala, you will recognize that this is on the first floor. When you opened this site, your request has literally visited people+AI office! No, I am not kidding.
At Von Neumann, we manufacture these servers and write the software to make this magic happen! We call this server JOHNAIC after the name of a historical computer
So how does this work?
You see most websites are hosted on what is called as cloud. Cloud is nothing but a computer that is constantly connected to power and network. So if we replicate the same, it turns out we can have our own private cloud.
What is happening with JOHNAIC and this community is that we have taken a opensource software called discourse and deployed it on JOHNAIC. We used containers (and something like docker compose) to accomplish this. We then have securely exposed the network port running on the system to wider internet using a Cloudflare tunnel.
That’s it! The discourse server is now exposed to the whole internet to see and browse!
No need of AWS or Azure and what not. Just a computer in your office!
What do you need for this? Like I said, cloud requires constant power and network. We have installed a UPS (aka battery) that keeps the computer turned on during power outages. Network router is also on the UPS, so it’s on as well. We are in the process of installing backup internet provider at the P+AI office so that there’s no outage of network as well.
Why is this exciting?
This is exciting because we are not using cloud! We are doing what is called edge computing. It’s like next evolution of distributed computing. While cloud computing led to centralization of compute in fewer hands, edge computing is designed to democratize computing!
In fact, People+AI run this project called Open Cloud Compute to make computing accessible to all. A DPI approach with protocols is being taken to make this work. See the below video for details:
I personally believe edge computing will be key to challenge the dominance of the cloud providers. It’s both cheaper and more secure than cloud. How so?
Take this community for example. The data is not going outside the country or even outside the people+AI office. It’s private and securely stored. It’s also significantly cheaper because this server costs only one time 2.5 lakhs INR while same spec server in cloud would have costed 25 lakhs over 3 years.
Finally
We’ve been working with People+AI for last 6 months to make this happen. Many of the apps being developed at P+AI is hosted on JOHNAIC! We’ll be posting more about the tech and code that made this happen over the next few days. I hope you have a blast interacting with this community.
