Buddy - new approach to apps development

Introduction

I have a friend who is a software developer in the railway industry. He recently told me how his work looks like, as they must meet the highest security standards, because human life depends on their software. There are really a lot of things which can go wrong. For example, they have to use different programming languages and compilators to ensure that it will not have some unexpected impact on the final software performance, and the code needs to be tested very precisely. If several developers cooperate with each other, they have also to ensure that their components collaborate perfectly.

What is the problem?

As you can see above, software developing and editing is rather boring and tedious process. Developers spend hundreds hours of their work neither for creative thinking nor developing innovative solutions. Instead of that they are wasting time for testing, creating routine algorithms, integrating with the work of the rest of the team and adapting to changing technologies.

Now, let's take into consideration that there are companies which editing frequency is really high. Some of them perform 10 implementations per day! Obviously, there are already existing solutions on the market, but they are expensive, complex and usually require 24/7 maintenance.

But don't worry, Buddy comes with an appropriate solution!

What is Buddy?

Buddy is a blockchain application which aims to revolutionize the way that applications and services are built. They want to automate every routine process to load off developers, and provide them opportunity to creative work and a real development. But how do they want to achieve that?

History of the company

I have to surprise you, because they have already done that! Buddy is a working project, currently operated by a centralized system, but nowadays founders are bringing it to the blockchain, to solve some problems faced in the past. Moreover, they are already very respected and valued in the IT environment. In 2015, they established their vision and goal, and started to making it real. They quickly became a partner of leading companies such as Google, Github and Microsoft. Nowadays, they are standing in front of the next milestone - they are integrating with blockchain and starting to sell their tokens, which probably will give them big financial boost.

Buddy solutions

DevOps Marketplace

Imagine that you are a professional chef and you have to prepare important supper. Obviously, you will not plow a field, seed a grain, wait until it grows and then harvest it, in order to make a bread. You probably will just go to the shop and buy all necessary ingredients. In that case, why don't we use such methods in the IT industry?

DevOps Marketplace works just like a shop for developers. It is a database of over 80 already working automation scripts, provided by Buddy. Additionally, every user can submit their own actions, free or paid.

Here are some examples of actions:

Action Category	Use Case
Security	Encrypt application secrets and sensitive data in Git repository on every build
Security	Scan apps looking for sensitive details left accidentally
Code quality	Automatically fix code style according to the selectedcode style
Performance monitoring	Run performance tests on newly built apps
Visual Testing	Highlight visual changes in user interfaces that are introduced by each push

All table contents comes from the Buddy Whitepaper

What is shocking, almost a half of Ethereum contracts are potentially vulnerable. Yes, that means if you keep some smart contract tokens, your money is probably endangered. Therefore, ready security solutions for developers are very necessary.

Securify is a platform which provides automatic security analysis, in order to detect weak points of the project. When it will be published as an action on DevOps Marketplace, it will provide very revolutionizing tool and majorly improve the quality of smart contracts.

Private Automation GRID

This feature enables users to create their own Buddy instances. DevOps cannot fully depend on Fog Computing, because of high latency times, reliability and security issues. Instances provide highly available and auto-scalable infrastructure, where user is able to decide what is trusted.

Users can run instances in several ways: using their own bare-metal infrastructure, a private cloud, or IaaS.

Interesting fact about GRID is that it is really smart. When new Buddy instance is created, it automatically decides on their function. The first two instances create a master-master replication in order to provide high availability for the system. The task of each subsequent instance will be to run more pipelines in parallel.

Buddy is also able to manage the number of instances, which means when the load demand is higher, it replicates itself outside the private network and when demand returns to normal, it kills unused instances. Such efforts maximize the network efficiency.

Shared Automation GRID

But what in case if we don't have enough resources in private GRID to run required task? If only this task don't demand a trusted infrastructure, you can commit it to the other nodes (users) in the network.

There are many cases, where Shared Automation GRID may turn out to be necessary, such as stress testing or performance monitoring. Users can manage whether they want to run a task on Private or Shared GRID. For example, they may use Private GRID to build and deploy an application, and then delegate testing to the nodes in the Shared GRID. Thanks to this, they can greatly reduce the time of the entire operation.

Shared Automation GRID is self-controlling. Network is moderated by Buddy's DAO to which nodes can report any technical issues or dishonesty.

Basic Compute Unit

The basic entity of the Shared Automation GRID is a Compute Unit, which can fulfill a function of network node.

Minimum unit specification: 2 vCPUs, 2GB of RAM and 4GB of SSD storage.

Compute Units can be rented in exchange of Buddy tokens. Owner will be awarded once commissioned task is completed. Supplier can also decide when and what price he want to sell his Units. This means when demand for computing power is higher (for example during a day), he may decide not to sell any Units or sell them expensively, and when demand returns to normal, he may rent all his Units at low price.

To increase demand for Compute Units, Buddy has implemented 3-layer parallelism system:

Projects divided into Pipelines
Pipelines divided into Actions
Actions divided into Tasks

For example: Running 2 pipelines with 2 concurrent actions with 2 tasks each, requires 8 Compute Units.

Buddy for Blockchain

BlockchainOps

Buddy also comes with revolutionizing and time-saving solutions for blockchain developers. With BlockchainOps they can simplify their work, by using ready-to-go actions, which are related with whole spectrum of blockchain app development stages.

Here are some examples of BlockchainOps actions:

Action Category	Use Case
Security	Test solidity contract for common security issues and antipatterns
Optimization	Analyze Solidity contract execution flow to find optimizations to reduce gas usage by suggesting removal of unnecessary computation steps
Testing	Run smart contract tests against a dynamically created testnet
Deployment	Build dApp assets and deploy them to IPFS
Code Review	Look for backwards incompatible changes in Solidity and warn developers accordingly

All table contents comes from the Buddy Whitepaper

BlockchainOps is already supported by EOS and they are working on integrating it with other major platforms, such as ETH, NEO, ICX, TRX, NEM.

dAppOS

Buddy provides dAppOS, which is a ready to use development environment for dApps - decentralized applications based on blockchain. dAppOS is similar to Sandboxes, so it can be integrated with additional services such as MySQL, Redis, Mongo or Elastic databases.

dAppOS can be used in the major spectrum of work with dApps: from development up to feedback. Every branch gets its own dAppOS instance, which provides them automation and fully-isolation of the stack. Buddy also provides a marketplace for Sandbox & dAppOS templates. It will definitely reduce potential problems connected with testing and experimenting with new blockchain technologies. To guarantee decentralization, dAppsOS will be scattered worldwide using Shared Automation GRID.

BUD token

BUD Token powers decentralized economy of the Buddy ecosystem. It will allow users to earn and pay for the services. Therefore, if your automation will be bought from DevOps Marketplace or you will rent your Compute Unit, you will be rewarded in BUD Token.

Use Case

James is passionate about programming. He wants to develop his own application, but he don't know if he will be able to provide enough security. He hears about DevOps Marketplace, and uses Security actions to ensure his app is safe. Thanks to that, he saves a lot of time and spends it to create his own premium action. He puts it up for sale on the DevOps marketplace and earns BUD Tokens.

Summary

Buddy is definitely one of the most interesting projects I have seen recently. DevOps Marketplace provides opportunity for developers not to waste time and fully dedicate themselves to creative work. I think it will have great impact on results of their work and for their personal development. Private and Shared GRIDs provide powerful decentralized network, which is cheap and adapting itself to the current demanding.

Using blockchain technologies will also be simplified - average person will be able to create new blockchain with single click! Moreover, Buddy will provide tools to ensure that your application is secure, optimized, efficient and your code is quality.

But primarily - Buddy has an already working product. This is really great advantage from the investors perspective, so I suppose that their Token Sale will be very successful.