Hello, I have been very busy with a number of up and coming and exciting use cases on the grid. This post will be about a project which has been testing on the Threefold grid and has been pushing the utilization numbers @scott presents for quite a bit the last couple of months.
I started chatting with DWS mid last year. Just to get things started, Decentralized Web Services in a nutshell is a UI-friendly platform that unites a set of decentralized infrastructure and application services that enable developers to run virtually everything in the decentralized cloud, from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.
They have been researching how to use the ThreeFold tech stack as one of the pillars to build their platform on and are very happy with what they have seen so far, and have integrated the stack to provide a part of their service portfolio, mainly the CPU virtualization and networking part of the ThreeFold grid.
They are we really excited to launch on TF (mid 2023)! In our last call there were some questions that are unclear at this point in time and I asked for their permission to
Just a quick summary of what questions DWS asked during our last call. Also - please use the comments to this post to reach out and get in touch with DWS / DWS to get in touch with the Farming community 
:
1. How pricing is working? Why dedicated node is cheaper then shared node?
Pricing policy and discount levels are explained here.
2. What is the hardware used on ThreeFold? Where intel, where amd? can we filter by that? where to see CPU stats?
Information about 3node is stored in the TFChain, and the TFChain is exposed
through a grahpql interface. This does not store / provide specific information on the nodes, but the information can be queried through the Reliable Message Bus (RMB). @scott has done some effort in creating a python script to query the Zero-OS’s and get that information. Please reach out to @scott to share this script if you are interested.
3. Any plans for Intel SGX?
Not my personal expertise, I have opened up this question int he ZOS repository
4. What is the channel speed each node have?
Network connections vary. Some 3nodes are in locations where broadband speeds to home are still limited, others are installed datacenters with 10G+ connections speeds. So it’s hard to provide a generic answer to this question. I think this warrants a feature request to start reporting on connections speeds in the dashboard.
5. How often the price for the VM change? can we fix the price for dedicated node for a year?
The pricing for VM’s is calculated in used resource units, as described here. This pricing has been static for quite a while. As you can see the discount levels applied if you keep an amount of tokens in your wallet is substantial. Due to the nature of how the TF grid is built and operated pricing will always be very competitive (and please also remember that the Threefold foundation BHAG is also to deliver (all of) a persons digital needs for less than a USD per month…).
6. Current bridge model is so complicated. is there any easier way to change USDC to TFT in TFChain?
This will become a lot easier in the future. TF Tech is working on a new major release of the ThreeFold tech stack and this will make a digital currency conversions a lot easier. Please have a read and request for input here
7. Could you please share names of farmers and node ids, so we can better understand what hardware is used?
Yes, I will, but here a shout out to the Farming Community to make themselves know and based on you specific requirements / needs. Also - the dashboard allows you to filter based on farm types. For Enterprise use cases the gold type farms are perfect, but other farms are also well serviced and datacenter based. For those farmers, please let DWS know you exist!
8. Could you please confirm if there are any plans to get the Intel SGX? And how we can filter nodes which already have SGX?
Opened an issue in the ZOS repo, see ^^^
And one more question - do you guys have any roadmap in mind for extending the nodes count?
As per the grid 4.0 announcement the regional internets will start. This is a great incentive for farmers to create capacity in sovereign nation regional internets, Enterprise wide (and private) internets, community internets etc etc. I expect a lot of uptake and new farmers as a result of this.
Hope this helps, I am looking forward to seeing DWS launch on the grid, expect some updated on this soon!