CoCore

Hello! My name is Devin and I've been an engineer for 17 years. Nearly everywhere I've worked, and nearly everything I've worked on, has, at some point, involved a computer that had monthly costs and wasn't fully utilized. I wanted to come up with a way to put that idle compute to good use. To do that, I've put together an experiment I'm calling CoCore. CoCore is an experiment that connects friends with idle compute to friends who'd make good use of it - if they dare. CoCore is a two-sided network where users can be Hosts, Clients, or both simultaneously. Users can add the CoCore VM to their idle machines, which starts up a process that will soak up idle compute and provide it to a serverless pool for Clients. Clients, in turn, can send work to those servers, provided that both users mutually consent to be in a Host-Client or Client-Host relationship. Clients are charged for work they conduct on Host servers, but at a drastically lower cost than typical serverless solutions (because, after all, the Hosts have to run these servers anyways, and any postive return on a sunk-cost good is of some benefit). We are aiming to be at least half the price of traditional serverless, but still return a ≈20% discount on your existing cloud bill for servers that achieve ≈50% utilization of the CoCore VM. There are still some huge hurdles left, but I wanted to get this out to a larger audience to see what folks think. Importantly, we have two major milestones that need to happen to make this a fully realized product: 1. Payment processing, and 2. Security guarantees. Payment processing will happen shortly, and we have all the measurement in place for tracking what billing will need to be sent out by the end of this month anyways, so we're rolling out to folks now. The security questions are much more difficult and are a long term project, so for now, we defer decisions about whom to trust with work (and in turn, whom to entrust your code and its execution with) to individuals on the platform, though we also provide a CoCore "official" backplane of servers that anyone can use securely (i.e. CoCore controls those servers and takes measures to protect those machines in turn). We're really excited to get this experiment out in public and see what people think! Feel free to get in touch here or over on the site.

I've seen this model tried in the past, but the timing seemed to be a bit off. Or there wasn't a compelling use case. This product seems to be both well timed and a compelling use case. I'll definitely be watching this one. Congrats on the launch!

I've tried to build a product to utilize unused compute in the past, and for a variety of (good) reasons, it just didn't work. CoCore's approach eliminates all the problems I faced with my startup in the past. Rooting for this to take off!

Airbnb for servers 😏