We've been incredibly busy over at RTrade in preparation for our first production release at the end of the year, and we've got an amazing amount of updates to share!
TEMPORAL
The bulk of work to TEMPORAL has been refinement of existing tooling, as well as addition of a few new features all of which are available to try right now through the API. We now have full private IPFS network integration, allowing users to create, and manage multiple private IPFS networks, while also leveraging existing API calls to have all the same functionality we offer with the public IPFS network.
While not immediately noticeable, the underlying code-base has been undergoing a major cleanup, allowing for performance optimizations, bug fixes, and general code-hygeine. Another major pain-point due to the vast amount of libraries TEMPORAL, and IPFS in general uses was maintaining compliance with our open-source licenses. However as of this week, we are now fully compliant with all the open-source licenses of the projects we depend on.
On-top of all this, we are incredibly happy to announce a major turning point for TEMPORAL, as of this posting we have 2000+ commits on the main code-base, and 50+ stars!
Lens
Our PoC (Proof-Of-Concept) search engine and IPFS indexing service was extremely rough around the edges, and our talented DevOps engineer has been making waves with the enhancement of Lens allowing for more optimizations ultimately giving a much better using experience. In order to expand the types of data we can index, and make searchable, Tesseract-OCR is now being integrated.
Previously we would solely rely on Tensorflow to index images, which is sufficient for most cases, however it would fail hard when the information contained in an image was text. Tesseract remedies this, allowing for us to have an in-depth chain of analysis, especially useful in PDFs, or other document and data types for which there is a mix of text, images, and images with text.
Infrastructure
From the very start we've been adamant about realizing decentralization, and taking back control of data. Part of this, involves not relying on third-party cloud providers like AWS, or Google to host our data, and virtual machines. To realize this, we have now begun the final steps in acquiring hardware to build out a production environment for TEMPORAL. While the current beta environment does live in our own datacenter, it is not sufficient for production usage. We anticipate the hardware will be ordered within the next 2 weeks, and we are still on-track to have the production environment online by the end of the year
Keys
We do our best to extend privacy and security protections for our users where-ever possible, and one area we saw room for massive improvement was in the way IPFS keys are handled. Current methods are suitable for casual usage, but are awful for anyone wishing to run IPFS as a service, or run their IPFS nodes over long periods of time, as all private keys are stored on-disk, or in memory in plaintext regardless of what IPFS reference implementation, or tools you use. This was unacceptable for us, so we released an open-source tool called krab which allows for the management of IPFS keys from an encrypted keystore. krab adheres to the Keystore interface that IPFS uses, which means it can be used in place of the filesystem, or memory keystore manager which IPFS uses, without requiring any special integration.
Additionally, we believe in giving full control as much as possible to users, which we've extended to the IPFS keys created within TEMPORAL. Should users wish to use the same keys for publishing IPNS records on their own, or whatever other tasks you may like to perform with the keys, they can now be exported as mnemonic phrases through the API!
Web Interface
The web interface has under-went a mass amount of usability improvements, allowing for searching the Lens index, but also for revamped upload and file management. Users may now upload up to 5 files at once; management of your uploads is now more stream-lined, and can be sorted by categories such as images, documents, or videos. Usage of the web-interface and all functionality is entirely free for the remainder of the beta! So sign up here and give it a try!
Pricing
We are commited in ensuring that everyone has a chance to use IPFS, and our services. Part of this means providing a quality level of service at a "free tier". We are pleased to announce that we will be allowing users to store 2GB-3GB of data a month for free. Closer to the production release (slated for December 31st 2018) we will be announce more in-depth pricing structure, and ensuring that the free-usage tier will also be able to use additional services such as IPFS key management. We intend for this pricing to be extremely competitive compared to the rest of the market.
What benefits do you get whether or not you use the free-tier, or a paid tier?
- Private/Public IPFS usage
- Private IPFS network management
- Secure IPFS key management
- IPNS record management
- PubSub usage
- coming soon Private/Public STORJ usage
- Dedicated infrastructure in a facility RTrade has built from the ground up
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! We have several places to stay up to date with all of our developments: