Attila and Gergely have been ideating on the idea of a SaaS solution to inventory cloud compute resources, tooling for selecting the optimal instance type and settings for batch jobs, with additional services to monitor and auto-scale jobs etc for years; but due to other full-time commitments and lack of resources, we did not have a chance to take it seriously.
This changed in 2023, when we learned about the NGI Search project with the promise of funding open-source projects for a full year, with enough budget for part-time/full-time dedicated dev work, legal and design tasks, and experimenting with the tech stack at various cloud providers. So we decided to submit a proposal for the 3rd Open Call in Q3, which seemed like a very good fit: NGI stands for the Next Generation of Internet that is an EU initiative to support research and innovation about Internet-related technologies.
The application process was a breeze — hats off to the NGI Search team! It was also useful for us to review and clearly articulate what we are actually going to build.
We were super excited about this opportunity, and started planning right away, with the hope of being selected and getting funded in 2024.
Time passed quickly, and in November 2023, we got the great news: Spare Cores was selected as part of the 10-team cohort out of the 94 applicants! Find more details at the OC3 winners announcement, and the NGI Search booklet on all NGI Search projects (from overall 5 open calls).
We finalized the required paperwork, and knowing that the project is actually happening, we started to prepare with more detailed designs for the Spare Cores ecosystem. Stay tuned to learn more in the coming months, and in the meantime, consider following us on social media (see below in the footer of the page)!