How does Socbay.io use Crust Network to decentralize videos sharing platform
In the effort of bringing web3 to real world, we created Socbay.io which is a hybrid decentralized video sharing platform, all videos and images on Socbay.io are stored in a decentralized storing platform — Crust Network.
Crust Network offers a new solution — decentralized storage to reduce the power of centralized storage companies. Some advantages of Crust Network that centralized clouds don’t have:
- Unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is costly in centralized clouds because the centralized clouds have limited resources therefore the bandwidth should be limited by charging customers. Contrary to centralized clouds, Crust Network is compatible with public IPFS network which has currently over 200k nodes (number on https://protocol.ai/ — creator of IPFS), Crust Network could ask these nodes to keep partial data on their cache for a short time if there is a file request to Crust Network. The more requests a file receives, the more nodes hold that file therefore the retrieving speed of a file will be faster if there are more requests.
- Redundant replicas. In the normal condition, Crust Network can create more than 100 replicas for each file. The information of files is transparent, user can check which node is holding their file and how many nodes are doing so.
Socbay.io structure
As showings in the diagram, the heavy part of a sharing video platform is storing videos and streaming videos to users with high speed, Crust Network completely handles this mission for the platform.
Besides Crust Network, Socbay still uses a centralized cloud to store dynamic/ private databases and processes the user’s request.
Conclusion
After running Socbay.io for 5 months, we appreciate decentralized storage for some points:
- Easy to manage: we changed the centralized cloud providers 3 times but the process of changing cloud providers is very simple, we just need to copy the existing database to the new cloud, the database only contains IDs of videos so it’s easy to move.
- Unlimited bandwidth: bandwidth is the variable cost of a centralized video sharing platform, but in the case of Socbay the bandwidth is free so we don’t have any variable cost to manage.
- High retrieving speed if high request: it’s a plus point of IPFS network.
But there is still an issue we are waiting for IPFS to release the solution:
- Long first-time request: if the file is not requested for a long time, the first request could last more than 10 seconds to touch the video, IPFS is developing some solutions for this issue. Knowing that IFPS and Crust Network are very young, there will be many changes in the future and we are excited to see the world in the next few years.
