The Story Behind Liqo
The idea for Liqo grew from a struggle we had at our University
We had plenty of powerful computers in our labs, but there were always some students complaining about their laptops not being powerful enough to run their jobs.
Our idea was straightforward: let’s transform our labs, including student laptops, into opportunistic data centers, so that heavy tasks can always be executed on the best resource among those available.
However, students didn’t want to give up the control of their laptops nor compromise in security. Here is where Liqo comes in: a way to share resources and services, while each user retains the full control on his/her box, whether it is the lab IT admin or the student, deciding what to share, how much, with whom. Controlled, secure sharing.
While working on this project, we realized that the capability to share Kubernetes clusters has much greater implications. Liqo can not only solve our student’s problems but also become the enabler for applications that rely on the democratization of edge computing such as Autonomous driving, IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart cities.
In fact, Liqo allows to run services on multiple clusters without even having to provision, build and operate your own distributed edge infrastructure. This project could optimize utilization of currently available resources and kickstart a first scale up of edge computing.
The Liqo name
Liqo stands for Liquid Computing: a new form of computing in which we do not care where our task is executed. In fact, do you care where your application is executed? Likely not, as long as your application runs securely and with the quality you expect.
With Liquid Computing, your app will be free to float in an infinite Kubernetes ocean, made by people who share their resources and services. You can focus on your application; the liquid infrastructure will take care of executing it at its best.
Liqo pronunciation stems from the beginning of li-quid co-mputing, hence li-co.
The LiqoErs
Liqo is a project started by a group of passionate computer engineers from Polytechnic of Turin, Italy.
We truly believe in open source and welcome contributions from anyone.
Get involved
Take a look at our GitHub repository for documentation, roadmap, feature requests, open issues, and more.
Get in touch
Shoot us an email, we’ll get back to you immediately!
Follow Liqo
Stay tuned on Liqo by following our Twitter Profile or “Liqo Announces” Mailing List!
Contribute
Join our Slack workspace and drop us a message.
Contact Us
Contact details
For more information, feature requests, possible customizations, or just to visit us, here are our contact details.