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Akash means “open space” or “sky” in ancient Sanskrit. The sky is where the clouds meet. |
Akash is an open network that lets users buy and sell computing resources securely and efficiently. Purpose-built for public utility.
You can get started right from the command-line or use the web app****
- Define your Docker image, CPU, Memory, and Storage in a deploy.yaml file.
- Set your price, receive bids from providers in seconds, and select the lowest price.
- Deploy your application without having to set up, configure, or manage servers.
- Scale your application from a single container to hundreds of deployments.
The Akash Marketplace is where users lease computing resources from Cloud providers before deploying a Docker container on the Akash Container Platform. The marketplace stores on-chain records of requests, bids, leases, and settlement payments using the Akash Token (AKT). Akash's blockchain is a Tendermint based application based on the Cosmos SDK.
The Akash Container Platform is a deployment platform for hosting and managing containers where users can run any Cloud-Native application. Akash is built with a set of cloud management services including Kubernetes to orchestrate and manage containers.
The cost of hosting your application using Akash is about one-third the cost of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. You can check the prices live using the Cloudmos.io price comparison tool.
If you're new to Akash, start with our deployment guides and go from there. Akash's community has written several more advanced guides for learning about Akash: a node operator guide, a validator guide, a cloud provider guide, and several deployment guides for running various apps on Akash.
The decentralized cloud is a shift from computing resources being owned and operated by the three large Cloud companies (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) to a decentralized network of Cloud providers running open source software developed by a community and creating competition in an open marketplace with more providers.
Like Airbnb for server hosting, Akash is a marketplace that gives you control over the price you pay and the amenities included (we call them attributes). Akash gives app developers a command-line tool for leasing and deploying apps right from a terminal. Akash taps into the massive market of underutilized resources sitting idle in the estimated 8.4 million data centers globally. Any cloud-native and containerized applications running on the centralized cloud can run faster and at a lower cost on the Akash decentralized cloud.
Akash hosts containers where users can run any Cloud-Native application. There is no need to re-write the entire internet in a new proprietary language, and there is no vendor lock-in to prevent you from switching Cloud providers. The deployment file is transferred over a private peer-to-peer network isolated from the blockchain. Asset transfer occurs off-chain over mTLS to provide the security and performance required by mission-critical applications running on the Cloud.
You can define the deployment services, datacenters, requirements, and pricing parameters, in a "manifest" file (deploy.yaml). The file is written in a declarative language called Stack Definition Language (SDL). SDL is a human friendly data standard for declaring deployment attributes. The SDL file is a "form" to request resources from the Network. SDL is compatible with the YAML standard and similar to Docker Compose files.
Networking - allowing connectivity to and between workloads - can be configured via the Stack Definition Language (SDL) file for a deployment. By default, workloads in a deployment group are isolated - nothing else is allowed to connect to them. This restriction can be relaxed.
Do I need to close and re-create my deployment if I want to update the deployment?
No. You can update your deployment. However, only some fields in the Akash stack definition file are mutable. The image, command, args, env and exposed ports can be modified, but compute resources and placement criteria cannot.