The Grid Project and?Vision

As you may know, I am the co-founder and lead architect of the https://vstack.co project. My friends and colleagues have asked me several times what it is, and if we will ever finish it. Both questions are valid, but not that easy to answer, but I will give it a try here.

The project started as a backend as a service concept (BaaS) where we wanted to reinvent a lot of the standard services in use to day, rather than just use standard products which were not designed to work together. However, we soon realized that we needed to reinvent the network protocols too, to be able to achieve our goals for the product. And - that was not the last scope change of our project.

18 months into the project the goal is to produce a set of standards and software that make it easier to create faster, more versatile and more intelligent distributed systems. There are many use cases in the Internet of Everything (IoE) which HTTP and web technologies do not properly support.

The result of the project will be:

1) A set of proposed standards targeting common distributed system use cases.
2) An open source platform that implements the standards
3) A book describing the vision behind the project, and the proposed standards
4) A hosted version so users don't have to host their own hardware.

So far the standards are beginning to stabilize, and we have designs and proof-of-concept implementations for many of the core ideas. We have begun to share these ideas in a book - called the The Grid Vision. The book is available at LeanPub here:

As you might suspect, the extended scope of the project will inevitably slow down the progress - but we are fully committed to the project, so we will get there sooner or later.

I will post about the project in the future too. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

- Jakob Jenkov