Machinery

Forests require various kinds of automation to run in the background. A prime example of this is the ==syncing service== which is tasked with ensuring that all storage backends connected to any given container are in sync.

While it might be tempting to delegate such a task to a client machine, such as a laptop, this would would be problematic, since syncing storages might require a large data transfer. Consider e.g. a situation when a user adds another storage backend to a container which already contains lots of TBs of data -- it would simply not be feasible to expect that the client should download all this data to the user's end-point device and the upload to the new backend.

Another example of forest automation might be the various integrations which create WL containers to represent information produced in other services (e.g. Note-taking apps). See the usecases section for a further discussion as well as examples. These integrations can be used in place of the old "smart backends", which are no longer considered part of the Wildland core.

The Wildland protocol is agnostic in terms of who provides and hosts the cloud machinery, but we expect that specific products based on WL, such as Golem Foundation's Cargo, will offer hosted solutions to bootstrap quick adoption.