Taubyte aims to make edge computing and serverless easier

According to Samy and Ash, the Taubyte platform has been built to dynamically provision serverless services, including compute, storage, database, ledger, and message brokers. The software stack is typically being deployed in last-mile datacenters, and there’s a version that can go into IoT gateways or any device that can run a Linux distribution. All stacks are linked together, with each node offering almost all available services (some devices such as IoT gateways may not have enough storage to spare, for instance, and wouldn’t need that component). Services run on top of a Taubyte’s partitioning resistant distributed system, giving them true off-line and self-healing capabilities.

Taubyte recently announced that Mark Thiele and Scott Collison have joined as advisors to the company. Thiele is an industry spokesperson and expert in edge computing, cloud, and IT adoption strategies. Collison held a variety of executive positions at VMware, Salesforce.com, and SourceForge, as well as startups like Signio, which was acquired by VeriSign in 1999. 

Meanwhile, executives have started seeking a seed round of fundraising, but haven’t stated any details about how much they are seeking.

Addressing complexity first with IoT and edge 

“We’re also trying to address the spectrum [of edge devices] – the device edge, the IoT gateways, all of that falls into our network, and we interconnect (those services) into one big network,” Samy explained.  Taubyte has focused on enabling serverless services rather than running containers or Kubernetes on edge platforms. 

Part of the reason is complexity. Kubernetes is known to be a challenge to manage at scale, for example, and Samy points out that managing updates, having an audit trail, knowing what code is being executed by which version of the enterprise application is also part of the operational management challenge.

Taubyte’s answer is to ensure that the company’s platform is being designed to help developers get edge applications up and running more quickly. 

“We’re getting rid of the complexity of software at the edge, specifically for IoT use cases. Apart from having to develop with a wide array of devices in mind, Samy noted that managing traffic flows to edge applications is also a challenge for developers, not the least of which is dealing with network downtime while trying to maintain operations. This is a challenge Taubyte is addressing by ensuring data can be versioned and replicated accurately even in less than ideal conditions (such as high latency and unstable links).

Taubyte’s platform isn’t yet publicly available, but there are pilot projects underway. The company is closely collaborating with customers on these projects, including an IoT-related project to record telemetry readings. The client wants to make sure the data is securely stored and is leveraging blockchain-like ledger services to ensure data hasn’t been tampered with.

Working with customers has resulted in a key realization for Samy.

“Our platform leverages a mix of versioning, caching, and conflict-free replicated data types (CRDT) to ensure merging back to the rest of the networks is seamless and with no human intervention. In our case, code deployment takes advantage of those same principles as well. – answering ‘What if my IoT gateway goes offline, how to sync telemetry, and  how to deploy code to all those sites?’” according to Samy. “We perfected that by running experiments that take advantage of Web 3.0 technologies and concepts.”

Article Topics

cloud infrastructure  |  containers  |  DevOps  |  edge computing  |  edge computing platform  |  edge platforms  |  IoT  |  Kubernetes  |  serverless  |  startups  |  Taubyte