 So, okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about this. Okay, so I've given this talk before about a month ago, and I'll just quickly go through the slides because this is a different audience. This is, you guys are much more hardware focused, so I'll try to emphasize that part. And the hot topic that I wanted to, that sort of drove a lot of the issues in this is Intel versus ARM, right? I think it's hot topic in more ways than one. Something that came out quite recently is the performance per watt of these enterprise server-grade ARM processors. The numbers there are something like two to one, like an Intel CPU system takes like 300 watts versus some ARM processor taking about half that. And similar demos, the numbers always vary, but it's always like vastly in favor of the ARM-based server systems. And in fact, this person here is a CEO of Humbicle Cloudflare, which is another CDN that's proposed to speak about 10% of the internet, as they're playing. Anyway, they were like really looking into this to replace their, you know, whatever thousands of servers that they have with something more efficient. And so I was thinking, that sort of sounds really familiar. In fact, about 20 years ago, this thing came out, right? And some of you in your high school probably weren't even out, but this thing came out. And so one of the key things about Google when it launched was actually, not just the PageRank algorithm and all this, you know, index the whole web and all that, because there were self-turnouts out there. But one of the crazy things that I thought was revolutionary and stuck around, cause like PageRank's gone, but like what stuck around was the idea that you can post web stuff, web giant services on commodity hardware. At the time, it was these machines. In fact, most of these were donated to them. So like they were using back then Intel Pentium 2, which was sort of what you'd had in your desktop consumer-grade server, like a desktop machine, and they were using it for servers. This is in fact donated to them because they were like poor starting students at this university. IBM tried to donate them a bunch of like, you know, what was then like enterprise-grade, very expensive stuff, but it was too late because the idea was already out there that you can run, you know, systems that are designed for, you know, all the problems that come with commodity hardware like it's failing, it fails all the time. And sort of the big idea is you focus on not just like the most powerful servers, the most powerful processors, but you go for something that's the best performance per cost. So if I, so I was thinking about this and in today's context, I sort of feel that the, you know, this whole Intel versus ARM and sort of replacing that, what was then Intel versus, sort of Intel was the underdog versus like the enterprise systems of that day. And I feel like today, you know, maybe Intel has sort of become that now enterprise-class hardware so they're like, you know, the best CPUs out there, you can get these Intel Xeons, thousands of dollars, really powerful. ARM is sort of the new commodity because if everyone has it in their phone, or your Raspberry Pi's or all these things come out of that ARM commoditized market. In fact, I feel the best performance per dollar today is coming from phones, except for the latest generation phones. So if you look at the phones that came out like one or two or three years ago, they're the CPUs are basically trash. Like nobody's gonna put them in a phone or a tablet or anything today. So you can pick them up for scraps. And because there were so many of them made, if we all have phones, like there's billions and billions of phones, even if there's a few percent leftover capacity, there's just gonna be, you know, shops on, you can go to AliExpress or alibaba.com and buy them by the thousands. And they're super cheap. So they don't really expire as far as I know. You guys maybe felt no better, but silicon chips don't really degrade if you keep them in a sealed container on a shelf in China. It's kind of fine. So, there's only one here at the FOS Ader Conference, by the way. If you, you know, I had a really great time there and one of the most impactful talks to me was Bunny Huam's talk, where he sort of gave an overview of the Shenzhen landscape. Like all the hardware manufacturing happens there and it was really insightful views. One of the key things that, to me, it really struck me that it was the concept that some of these individual stalls in these electronic smalls in Shenzhen could have more inventory, more chips in their shop than like you find in all of North America on these online sites. If you just like, do the numbers, add it up and you go like, okay, then look at the website and you know, they have like 200 available and then the shop would have like, you know, thousands and thousands. So I thought that was really cool. Like they have this surplus stuff that's sort of left over in China. Nobody does anything with it. So it's just collecting dust sort of, I guess, yeah. And some other stuff is like, if you look at the number of CPUs being sold today, if you look at like servers, desktops and mobile, you see some interesting things, especially when you look at the absolute numbers. Like, you know, we all know like mobile phones is like growing up like crazy, but it's sort of flattening off because there's only so many people in the world and they all have phones now. Desktops, obviously, you know, we expect that it's kind of dropping servers kind of slowly still going up a little bit, not overwhelming. In absolute numbers, though, it's a different, like it's a different story. Like it's just, this is millions of units, by the way. It's only 11 million CPUs every year. Like Intel, Xeon, desktops, 100, laptops, 160, tablets, something like that. But phone is just kind of ridiculous. In fact, if you look at the number of phones that all have these ARM CPUs, it's 100 plus times the number of servers. So what is this ARM thing that's looked a little bit about? Stands originally for ACORN, RISC, machines, RISC meaning something else, but then they eventually changed that, now it's just ARM, okay? So this is like almost all mobile processors ever. Like not just in phones, you know, like there's a hundred billion of these things sold. And if you look at those other numbers, that's a lot. Right? And that's all ARM CPUs, they're everywhere. Like we all have multiple of them, you know, even in our laptops, there'll be some ARM processors doing some random thing, like controlling your touch pad or whatever, right? So the ARM ecosystem exists, this is not just one company, like Intel, would just be Intel selling them, or AMD, but actually a lot of companies license their chips from ARM. And they license two things, primarily, which is the instruction set, like for instance, ARM 8, or ARM 7, or ARM 6 before that. And, but also entire designs of the CPU cores. So when you're just assembling a CPU, you can either say, I want these instructions, and I'll go and design my own circuitry and everything, or I can go and just say, I want a license for this core design, and just how many do you need, and how powerful they need to be, how much performance you have, and how much it's gonna cost. And you can figure out with them, and they help you build all that stuff. So there's a lot of companies doing that. One of the cool things to me, as a web developer, is that the newer ARM CPUs aren't really that risk anymore, where it stood for reduced or something like that, where it was very simple CPUs and therefore cheap. Nowadays, actually, people are paying good money for phones and stuff like that, so the cost of them actually has gone up as well. And definitely the performance of them has gone up. So now they've got harder accelerated cryptography, which means that when you're doing something like what I'm doing with the web, it's all HTTP2, it's by default all gonna be encrypted. And so when they can do that in Silicon, it's gonna be much more efficient. There exists also some of these server CPUs, actually. So I made these slides up maybe a month ago. One of these companies has now sort of pulled the plug on their project. I don't know if you're familiar with the whole Qualcomm story that happened a little while ago, where there was a big takeover attempt by some other company. And I think one of the things is that they kind of put back on their research spending for a little while. I don't know, I'm just hypothesizing, but they're still the other one. And I'm sure lots of companies have shown interest in this idea that you can run ARM servers. So I'm sure that will continue to evolve that landscape. Anyway, back to what I'm doing with them is sort of looking at like Netflix and... I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Okay, anyway, that's it. That was not part of my slides, just to make it easier. Anyway, so I'm a web developer and I host websites, I make single page apps and things like that. And I want them to be fast for everyone in the world. So when I look at traditional CDNs, like a company like Netflix, which we're all familiar with and I'm not trying to say anything about Netflix per se, it's just a good reference that everyone can relate to as a CDN. They serve huge amounts of traffic, like a third of all traffic in the United States at peak times is what they've been claiming for years. So it's mind blowing. So I've created something now that I like to call comments host. This is a project that I've been working on for about a couple of years, like started off as a little side project, experiments and stuff like that and I sort of consumed my life now. It's world's smallest CDN right now, sadly. I guess I'm using really, really small little servers, VPSs, it's all built on Node.js, which is another thing that kind of makes people scratch their head because why would you ever do something that's supposed to be about performance with Node.js, which is not like, I think it's pretty good, but like some people are like, oh, you have to write assembly code or like etch your instructions in silicon or something, I don't know. I also designed everything to be HTTP2 by default, but that was actually what got me into it first place. A couple of years ago, I was like really into like SPD and the SPDY protocol thing and I became HTTP2. So I've been really, really passionate about that and it's all open source, every single line of code that I write is open source except for my sort of security tokens and environment card, things like that, obviously. And what I'm trying to actually do is build a ridiculously huge number of POPs, like a point of presence for a CDN is critical to have low latency to everyone in the world. You want to get as close to as many people in the world as possible. And I think all the aforementioned stuff is critical to achieving that. So, okay, this is the hardware component of the talk. I did not build this, but kind of it. Okay, so, thank you, thank you. Yeah. Show it closer to your camera. Oh, here you go, here you go. I mean, it's the slides right there. You can just make the slide to the screen the same. So anyway, this is actually a little ARM-based server, which a lot of you probably know. It's made by a company called HeartColonel in Korea. It's called Odroid. In fact, this is an Odroid HC1. That's why I say I don't make these things. It's just open hardware that I'm using for my open source CDN. The only thing, but pretty much that I did do it was to spray paint the cover, white, because I think it looks pretty. And I put a little sticker on there. That's really pretty much it. It's inside, it's just an extruded aluminium case with a little board. This is the entire board. There's nothing behind, this is the SSD hard drive. And this little board, at the bottom, has a little like Exynos, Samsung Exynos chip from a phone from like the Samsung Galaxy S4-5 or whatever it was. It's got eight CPU cores, a couple of gigabytes of RAM, and a gigabit ethernet port. And like I said, I just paired it with an SSD. You could take any 2.5-inch SSD. There's a 2.5-inch model as well. There's a little bit thicker. Costs about a dollar or more or something. I mean, I pick them up for like 49 USD or something. It's really, really affordable. And what I do is I load Node.js on there. Because my code is written in JavaScript, it actually runs just fine because Node.js is supported by ARM. So I'm just running Ubuntu on there and I have my Node.js code on there and it just runs quite well. And in fact, in the last couple of years, a lot of optimization has gone into making stuff work better on ARM, like server stuff, to the tradition. So what the bigger players are doing in terms of optimizing for their server-grade ARM is sort of really benefiting everyone else who's running on Raspberry Pi's and equivalent systems. So that's the little hardware thing. In terms of specs, like a traditional CDN server or a traditional big server in a data center would just be like an 8-core Xeon processor or above. This is like an 8-core ARM processor, which is like the big little thing. So it's like four really low power cores for when you're running on 10% of your battery remaining and it's trying to save your battery life. So it has four little cores in there, four bigger cores, but when you say big core, they're really low performance still. But I managed to benchmark it and actually saturate like a one gigabit connection. So that achieves my goal. Anything more than that is wasted. So I was happy with that. It uses very little power compared to a traditional server as well. This comes with a five volts, four amp power supply. So it's like, and then when you're even under full load, I'm not even attaching like any external devices to it. It's just taking maybe like five watts, 10 watts max. You know, you could run a Bitcoin mine run it and not hit like 10 watts probably. So it's actually like 20 watts is very generous. To the storage, yeah, like you can, if you put like a 3.5 inch model drive in there, you can get like 10 terabytes plus. So it's pretty decent capacity performance wise. Any hard drive today, especially SSD will saturate a gigabit connection. So like I see no real issues with that. Oh, yeah, you can stack them. I had like five of them at home. I should have included that photo. It's quite cool to see and then you have like all these different ethernet cables in there because you're limited to one gigabit each, right? Good sort of commodity networking hardware. Anyway, okay, so you could stack a whole bunch of them. People have done this to do, I don't know what. But I don't think the point of like building CDN servers is to have like really gigantic servers. I think it's better to just go for a lot of servers when you have like different hardware cost structure instead of deploying one big server in a big data center with a hundred gigabit or whatever connection to it. I want to deploy like a hundred of these with one gigabit each across the world or across a city or a country. So the cost of these is like orders of magnitude less so I can have orders of magnitude more of them so I can actually hopefully deploy them closer to more people in the world. That's sort of really my goal. I look at the number of pops of existing CDNs. It goes from a couple of dozen to the biggest one is less than 2,000, which sounds like a lot, but that's because they're big servers and more or less in data centers. Some of these might be like in a closet in a university campus where they have like a big user base, but like a lot of them are just gonna be in data centers like professional stuff and I'm like totally not designing for that because I feel like that's already a solved problem. Like these guys have done a fantastic job. Again, I don't mean to like hate on anyone. It's just that that's not where I can contribute my value. I'd like to deploy these and so far I have done that now in the last month or so I've deployed them in places like in Malaysia. You deploy something there without knocking on the door of a data center and paying thousands of dollars a month. I just go to my friend's house and say, you have Fiverr, okay, can you plug one of these things in and you're done, we have a pop for the CDN and we remotely administrate and deploy and manage it and secure it and it works. So yeah, that's actually essentially there's a lot of places in the world where they could use something like this, I feel and you can't just put like a billion dollars into building a million or a thousand big servers and for the money of like one or two of those servers you could have a thousand of these pops and that's sort of my goal. Okay, so in fact, I started off with this sort of realization that if, what if data centers were kind of like HDBs? Or the idea of like we live in Asia, we live in like most of the world today is like new housing is coming up as big apartments and they all have Fiverr and it turns out that's not just true in Singapore, it's actually true across Asia. Like that was something that I just kind of was really fascinated by the last six months that I found out Fiverr is so cheap to install that all the new business parks and condos and new developments across Asia and we're talking China, India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Far East, Central Asia. And in fact, now places in Africa too that I've been talking to friends there, like they all just have Fiverr ISPs. Like you look at kind of like Myanmar which is like kind of economically only opened up very recently, but there's like half a dozen ISPs that offer Fiverr more than Singapore. Not saying that they have full coverage but they're available and they're growing so fast. And same thing in the Philippines which is originally known for having like some of the slowest internet in the world. So ran the picture, right, same thing. Okay, so blah, blah, blah, talked about that. We're out of time and kind of really skipping through, sorry. Okay, so if you wanna, if this has at all been interesting to you check out the website, comments, I'll post. Check out my Twitter, you know, get in touch with me but try to just deploy your website to it. I really need people to give me feedback on the usability. I really wanna make it super easy for developers like myself who are front-end developers to just deploy static websites. It's kind of, if you're using, you know, something like GitHub Pages or Netlify or one of these sites or S3 Bucket and you know, this is supposed to be the same functionality but slightly easier, slightly more open-sourced and actually with Pops in the places that we probably have our users like Southeast Asia. Like in the coming days I'll be deploying Pops friends in Vietnam, looking at Indonesia deploying some servers there. So if you have users in those countries this should be like lightning fast compared to going back to the S3 server in Singapore. You just have it with someone on your same ISP locally or within the country at least. If you're like the idea of how this could be kind of cool let me know if you could host one of these not if you're in Singapore because I already have several of them here but if you have friends in like other countries that could benefit from something like this because they don't have like a local copy of AWS Data Center then get in touch or if you wanna sponsor one of these things they're very cheap, couple hundred bucks for like the entire setup with the hard drive and everything. Let me know. And otherwise just like tell your friends about this project if you like it. Thank you.