Discussing ThreeFold Grid 2.8 Release Highlights

Hey all, this is a quick post to share some details on our recent ThreeFold Grid 2.8 release. You’ll find a link to the full announcement below, where you can find all of the technical details and individuals features that are included.

With this release, the ThreeFold Grid now supports general purpose virtual machines, enabling smoother migration for many users of traditional cloud services. VMs are an industry standard solution for hosting multiple operating systems side by side on a single physical server.

Up to now, the Grid has only supported Kubernetes VMs. Kubernetes is the leading edge of cloud based tooling, but it has not been adopted by all users of cloud services. Generic VMs round out the Grid’s offerings and are a commonly requested feature from those looking to adopt Grid services. We are excited for the community to test this feature and report their experiences. You can already try deploying VMs from the 3Bot solutions menu, with Ubuntu being the first variety available for now.

This release also includes several updates to support the new farming 3.0 model, as well as improvements around the management of public IPv4 addresses for Grid workloads. Users are now able to maintain the same IP address even when moving their VM between different nodes, allowing for greater flexibility when providing public access to solutions running on the Grid.

If you’d like to check the full release notes for yourself, they are available on the wiki. This 2.8 release brings us one step closer to the major upcoming milestone of Grid 3.0 which includes a blockchain based reservation system to bring even greater decentralization and security for Grid users.

Questions? Thoughts? Please drop a reply below :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @scott,

thanks for the post, I was glad to see VM integration in ZOS :slight_smile:

So I decided to try it myself, pulled out last js-sdk from github, poetry install and launched the threebot and indeed there is a new Virtual Machine solution ! Nice !

I’m launching the solution, chose no external IP, 1 vCPU 2 GB of RAM VM, and deployment failed due to strange error message (something like no log…)

Is it working for you ? Did you manage to launch an Ubuntu VM on your node ?

VMs are an exciting addition indeed :slightly_smiling_face:

I haven’t yet had a chance to test the VM functionality within 3Bot on Grid 2.8. If you’re on Github, opening an issue on the SDK repo would be helpful so the developers can look into this.

What I can say is that the VM deployment on Grid 3.0 with Terraform works great :sunglasses: If you’re interested in testing this as part of our closed beta, please join us in the Grid Testers Telegram group: https://t.me/threefoldtesting