UPDATED 20:00 EDT / AUGUST 06 2019

CLOUD

Neocortix launches edge-based cloud services for web testers

So-called “Cloud at the Edge” startup Neocortix Inc. will launch its cloud infrastructure services at the DevOps World/Jenkins World conference taking place in San Francisco next week.

Its main advantage is giving companies that need to run large websites and monitor information technology assets a significant price advantage over traditional, data center-based cloud services.

Neocortix can do this because its cloud infrastructure isn’t what it seems. The company doesn’t own or invest in any data centers itself, but instead taps into the unused processing power of people’s smartphones while they sleep.

The company offers a mobile app called PhonePaycheck to enable this. Smartphone owners simply install the app on their devices in order to make their hardware available to Neocortix during the night. Neocortix then aggregates the processing power of thousands of mobile devices from around the world to power its cloud services.

In return, device owners are paid $240 per year. That might not seem like much, but the company insists this is still a “substantial income” for many of its customers who are based in countries such as India and Indonesia, for example.

Proof of this claim is in the numbers. Neocortix reckons its app, which it says doesn’t drain batteries or increase phone bills, is running on more than 42,000 devices worldwide, and that there’s a growing waiting list to join in on the action.

Neocortix’s cloud services include such things as “last-mile load testing,” which is done to monitor application infrastructure, and “CDN tests” for checking the performance of content delivery networks. It also offers “network telemetry” services, which refers to data collection from network devices such as routers and switches, and “federated learning,” which is a form of machine learning.

“Neocortix has realized that for last mile and CDN testing, server infrastructure doesn’t need to be deployed in a distributed fashion, as it already exists with consumer smartphones,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “The company’s idea to pay smartphone users for serving as test engines for last mile performance is a novel approach to assessing performance implications that matter for customer and employee experience in an internet powered economy.”

Image: geralt/pixabay

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