TON — The metacloud

Most developers and companies today use cloud solutions. Devs are busy creating products and apps, while servers and other places that store data and computational power rent space from cloud services. 

This is convenient, but buying and maintaining servers and providing uninterrupted operation is a huge separate job.

If you’re not a developer and simply want to launch a website, you also use hosting services, meaning you don’t buy your own hardware.

Cloud companies have become unbelievably popular and in demand. In fact, about a dozen leading corporations host a substantial slice of the internet.

These are commercial companies with centralized operations, and this causes particular risks for the global network.

Incidents of breakdowns in a cloud service that lead to almost half the internet going down and becoming inaccessible have been happening at a higher frequency.

Last year, there were such cases with Amazon Web Services, Akamai, CloudFlare, and others, while the consequences and scale of these crashes are becoming larger and larger.

To increase the cloud’s stability, developers have been trying to create a similar yet decentralized service by having data centers in different locations around the world.

However, in every data center, there are tens of thousands of servers that, in a critical breach, may all fail at the same time. Splitting data centers into smaller segments is not economically profitable for cloud companies.

By hosting a significant part of the internet, cloud companies wield control, in a sense, over the internet. Another problem that arises is how cloud companies are legal entities and must follow the law where they are located or registered; meanwhile, sites and services hosted on a cloud could be from other countries with varying laws. 

Let’s suppose that modern cloud solutions will be replaced by solutions based on decentralized networks and blockchains.

The Open Network has all the tools to play a pivotal role in this transition because, in addition to its underlying blockchain technology, it harbors all the necessary components: TON Proxy, TON Sites, TON DNS, and TON Storage.

TON Proxy can be used as a decentralized analog to CloudFlare, which can conceal the addresses of your servers and protect them against DDoS attacks. Encrypted traffic will be routed through a chain of independent network nodes.

TON Storage allows you to store large volumes of data with a given number of reserve copies. It’s something like a new generation of torrents — but that use cryptography. This is reliable and safe because your data is automatically duplicated and encrypted.

TON DNS replaces centralized domain registries.

The TON blockchain comprises network nodes (TON Proxy servers or TON Storage) where any user can run one and automatically earn Toncoin for their work directly from other users.

Of course, at the first stage, these nodes will primarily be hosted by those same cloud companies. But the economic model still allows server holders to receive payments directly and TON’s distributed architecture will initiate more decentralization, allowing more smaller players to take away a share of corporations.