Decentralized Compute Marketplace
Akash is an open network that facilitates the secure and efficient buying and selling of computing resources. Purpose-built for public utility, it is fully open-source with an active community of contributors.
Common Questions
How to use Akash?
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.
What is the Akash Compute Marketplace?
The Akash Compute 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 built on the Cosmos SDK.
What is the Akash Container Platform?
The Akash Container Platform is a deployment platform for hosting and managing containers, allowing users to run any Cloud-Native application. Akash is built with a set of cloud management services, including Kubernetes, to orchestrate and manage containers.
What is the cost to use Akash?
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 price comparison tool.
How do I use Akash?
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.
Why is Akash different than other Cloud platforms?
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, leading to the emergence of a new cloud computing model. This model takes the shape of an open marketplace made up of many providers, all of whom are competing to provide resources.
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 containerized applications running on the centralized cloud can run faster and at a lower cost on the Akash decentralized cloud.
Why is Akash different than other decentralized platforms?
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.
What is the Stack Definition Language (SDL)?
You can define the deployment services, data centers, requirements, and pricing parameters in a “manifest” file (deploy.yaml), which effectively acts as a form for requesting resources from the network. The file is written in a declarative language called the Stack Definition Language (SDL). SDL is a human-friendly data standard for declaring deployment attributes. SDL is compatible with the YAML standard and similar to Docker Compose files.
How do I configure Networking for my container?
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, and env can be modified, but compute resources and placement criteria cannot.
