Go Cloudless: 6 Reasons to Build with Fluence
Decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) has been growing in popularity, as technology has finally reached sufficient maturity to allow the creation of reliable networks from multiple independent parties. What makes Fluence different from the existing cloud providers like AWS, and from other new decentralized computing projects?
In this blog post, we outline the main differentiators and competitive advantages our decentralized cloudless computing platform has over other computing projects – centralized and decentralized alike. Let’s dive in.
Serverless
Serverless compute is a $9 billion market today, and the fastest growing segment of the overall computing market, estimated to reach $90 billion by 2032. To date there have been no decentralized solutions in this segment.
Fluence is the first project to create a decentralized serverless solution. You can think about Fluence as a decentralized alternative to AWS Lambda, combining the advantages of scalable, on demand serverless compute with the benefits of censorship resistance decentralization.
CPU network
Unlike nearly all other decentralized computing projects that focus solely on GPU resources, Fluence aggregates excess CPU capacity from top tier data centers around the world in a global, resilient, always-on DePIN platform.
The vast majority of applications run on CPUs including all the ones you interact with daily (think Netflix) run on CPUs.
While GPUs are the best fit for use cases like AI training and visual rendering which are growing quickly, GPUs remain a small segment of compute overall and even with fast growth will not supplant CPUs for the foreseeable future. As a serverless platform, Fluence is going to allow running and composing a variety of services including GPU-heavy computations, so GPU and AI support is on our roadmap.
Resilience
While most decentralized computing projects act solely as compute marketplaces, Fluence has a full software stack of services that enables it to serve as a global, always on DePIN network.
Fluence spins up subnets for every application, ensuring that there are always several replicas ready to serve the computations. These subnets provide load balancing, failovers, consensus, or any custom fault tolerance algorithms. This resilience is a necessary component of any decentralized system but is missing in other providers who require the re-provision of compute jobs in case of hardware failure. This feature also reduces reliance on any single provider, driving compute to the lowest price.
Auditability
Fluence provides an inexpensive, auditable alternative to developers who want to build safely and without platform risk. Auditability comes from cryptographic proofs of all computations. Providers generate proofs for their computation and customers pay only for the work accompanied by proofs that the work was validated and correct.
Aqua, the core Fluence protocol, generates audit trails for all computations and enforced verification of it by network peers. Some of the jobs are validated on-chain, adding another layer of security.
One important use case is providing decentralized, verifiable compute to prove that AI engines are trained on specific data, and to prove that queries are executed without manipulation. As AI is getting increasingly regulated, Fluence can help with verified data provenance better than any other cloud provider.
Powerful Development Stack
Many web3 computing projects are built for narrow use cases and can only run specific jobs. Fluence is flexible and powerful for developers. It introduces Cloudless stack, which allows to run computations securely cross-servers, data centers, geographies, or networks, and compose a variety of web2 or web3 data, blockchains, and applications.
Low cost
By creating a competition of compute providers and adding FLT rewards, Fluence drives prices significantly down compared to centralized platforms. The protocol doesn’t extract any fee from user payments for compute, compared to big cloud platforms that take 30-70% margin.
Additionally, providers submit cryptographic proofs to confirm their capacity is connected to the network and available for customers, so it can be used right away. For this, protocol rewards them with FLT.
Let’s build the cloudless future together
- Start building permissionless, serverless apps: get started with Fluence Docs today
- Become a delegate or participate in governance
- Apply to become a compute provider
- Join the community