IC Side Services enables canisters to automatically deploy the off-chain services they depend upon. These services are usually hosted on AWS and so they depend on the developers’ ability to keep paying the bills. Therefore, dapps with off-chain components cannot be fully controlled by DAOs.
By enabling canisters to deploy off-chain services, dapps with off-chain components can still be fully controlled by DAOs.
We developed the integration with the Akash Network so that Akash providers can run the services specified by the canisters.
Web3 advantages
Dapps can be entirely governed by communities even if they are not fully hosted on a blockchain (due to current constraints).
How is it built
IC Side Services consists of a canister called Orchestrator which receives deployment requests from other canisters and interacts with the Akash providers to deploy the specified services. We also developed a console so that developers can test deploying services on Akash by paying in ICP.
Internet Computer superpowers
The Orchestrator canister uses tECDSA to sign transactions that are then broadcasted to the Akash Network (a Cosmos chain). To send transactions to the Akash Network, the Orchestrator canister uses HTTP Outcalls.
Monetization
Canisters pay a fee in ICP to the Orchestrator canister to deploy off-chain services on the Akash Network
Status of the project
The project is in beta. We recommend developers to start experimenting with it but it is not ready for DAOs.
Wow, just want to say that you guys are killing it with important infrastructure work for the IC. Keep it up
One question:
Im not familiar with the Akash network, so im assuming you need to continue to fund akash for running your docker container. Is it like ICP where you keep it ‘topped up’?
Congrats on the awesome work with IC Side Services and the Akash Network integration! This is a huge step forward for decentralization, and I love how it makes DAOs more powerful and less dependent on traditional cloud services.
The Orchestrator canister and developer console sound like game-changers. Can’t wait to see this go from beta to a full-fledged product. Here’s hoping we see more projects like this soon!
It’s similar. You have a minimum amount of AKT that you have to deposit to keep the service up and running for a while. If you want to extend the deployment you have to make further AKT deposits.
The nice thing is that you don’t need to worry about Akash stuff because the orchestrator canister handles it for you. You only need to send some ICPs to the orchestrator and it will take care of doing the AKT payments. We don’t have yet a proper pricing in place as we are still experimenting with various options but we are trying to make the interface as similar to the IC as possible.
What we do so far is send a bunch of AKTs to the Akash address of the canister. Each deployment on Akash requires a minimum deposit of 0.5 AKTs in a dedicated escrow. We require the ICP equivalent of 0.5 AKTs + transaction fees (the exchange is done via the XRC canister). When the orchestrator canister receives the payment it associates to 0.5 AKTs to the principal of the sender so that they are reserved for the deployments made by that principal.
When a principal wants to deploy an image, 0.5 AKTs are deducted from their balance and sent to the escrow on the Akash Network. Then the orchestrator takes care of the other transactions to actually deploy the image on one of the Akash providers.
For offloading training and inference to Akash for some of our use cases. We would like to have this fully controlled by the DAO so we thought this was a very exciting project.
Hopefully someone can pick it up where you guys left off.