Private Platform Network: pooled compute from hardware you already own

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---
schema: foundry-doc-v1
title: "Private Platform Network: pooled compute from hardware you already own"
slug: ppn-small-business-compute
category: infrastructure
type: topic
content_type: topic
quality: complete
status: active
audience: vendor-public
bcsc_class: current-fact
language_protocol: PROSE-TOPIC
last_edited: 2026-06-13
editor: pointsav-engineering
paired_with: ppn-small-business-compute.es.md
short_description: "A Private Platform Network assembles machines a business already owns into a single encrypted compute pool. WireGuard network isolation is operating today; host-level isolation via seL4 is planned."
cites: []
---

A PointSav Private Platform Network (PPN) is a private, encrypted compute network
assembled from machines a business owns or leases. Each machine — an old laptop in a back
office, a rented server in a data centre, a virtual machine at a cloud provider — runs
the same operating layer, [[infrastructure-os|os-infrastructure]], and joins the same [[ppn-mesh-architecture|encrypted mesh]]. Once
joined, the machines stop being individual computers and become nodes in a single pool of
compute capacity.

The design goal is straightforward to state: workloads running inside the network should
not be accessible to anyone outside it — not the cloud provider hosting one of the nodes,
not the data centre leasing another, not a person with physical access to the hardware.
Parts of that goal are operating today; parts are planned. This article is explicit about
which is which.

## Three node types, one network

A PPN node can be any of three things:

1. **Bare metal** — a physical machine the business owns. In June 2026 tests, these were
   consumer laptops several years old, running ordinary Linux.
2. **Leased server** — a dedicated or virtual private server rented from a hosting
   provider.
3. **Cloud VM** — an instance at a public cloud provider, such as Google Cloud.

Once os-infrastructure is installed, the three are operationally identical. The network
does not distinguish a laptop from a cloud instance; each node reports the same
information — available memory, virtualisation capability, a periodic heartbeat — and each
can host workloads. The differences that remain are physical facts: a cloud VM is reachable
from the public internet and is useful as a relay point; a laptop behind a home router is
not, and contributes capacity instead.

## What pooled resources means

A business using a PPN does not assign work to specific machines. It requests a virtual
machine from the network, and a [[service-vm-fleet|fleet controller]] decides where that VM runs. The
controller's placement logic is advisory: it examines the current state of every node —
reported memory, whether hardware virtualisation (KVM) is available — and selects the node
best able to take the work. The request is then delegated to that node, which creates the
VM locally and reports back.

The caller never needs to know which physical machine was chosen. In the June 2026 test,
a request submitted to the fleet controller running on a cloud node was placed on a laptop
in a different building, because the laptop had the most free memory and the hardware
virtualisation the cloud node lacked. The requester saw only a record of a new VM entering
service.

This is what makes aged hardware useful. A laptop too slow for daily desktop work still
has memory and a capable processor. Pooled behind a single interface, several such machines
amount to a small private cloud.

## The isolation model — current and intended

The isolation model has two layers, and they are at different stages of maturity.

**Network isolation — operating today.** All traffic between nodes travels through
WireGuard, an audited, kernel-level encrypted tunnel. A cloud provider hosting a PPN node
sees only encrypted UDP packets. It cannot read the contents of inter-node traffic, observe
which workloads exist, or inject itself into the mesh.

**Host isolation — planned.** Encryption protects data in transit, but the operator of
the physical machine can in principle inspect what runs on it: a cloud provider controls
its hypervisor, and a person with physical access controls a laptop. The intended answer
is the [[sel4-microkernel-substrate|seL4 microkernel]], a formally verified kernel designed to enforce strict partitions
between workloads and the host environment. The target state is that os-infrastructure
boots seL4 as its isolation layer, so that the owner of the hardware — including a cloud
or hosting provider — cannot inspect the memory of guest workloads. This capability is
planned and is not running on bare metal today. Until it ships, host-level isolation rests
on conventional Linux and QEMU/KVM boundaries, and a party who controls the physical
machine should be assumed able to access workloads on that machine.

## Who controls admission: the role of os-network-admin

An encrypted mesh is only as trustworthy as its membership. [[os-network-admin]] is the
PPN's routing authority: it decides which machines may join the mesh, approves or denies
join requests, and is intended to manage the WireGuard peer configuration across all nodes
automatically. Peer admission control matters because the threat to a private network is
rarely cryptographic — it is an unauthorised machine being accepted as a peer. Centralising
admission in one auditable component keeps the membership list deliberate.

A design question is open: where should this authority live?

**External mode.** os-network-admin runs on a node outside the PPN, typically a cloud
machine, and manages the peer table from outside. This is simpler to bootstrap, at the
cost of depending on an authority the PPN itself does not contain.

**Internal mode.** os-network-admin runs as the first VM on the PPN, inside an isolation
partition on the founding node — under the planned seL4 layer, a partition the hardware
owner is intended to be unable to access. The network would then govern its own membership
with no external dependency. This is harder to bootstrap, because the founding protocol
must designate the first node as the initial authority.

Both modes are considered valid for different deployment profiles, and the platform is
being designed to permit either.

## The economics for a small business

The cost structure of a PPN differs from renting cloud capacity. Most of the network is
hardware the business already owns: retired laptops and desktops contribute real compute
at near-zero marginal cost beyond electricity. The one recurring cost in the reference
configuration is a small cloud VM acting as a publicly reachable relay — on the order of
US$15–20 per month at current pricing. Everything else — the operating layer, the mesh,
the fleet controller — runs on owned equipment.

For a small business, the practical proposition is this: three or four machines that would
otherwise be recycled can be assembled, with a simple install on each, into a private
network that provisions virtual machines on demand. The intent is that this network is
one the business alone controls.

## What the June 2026 test demonstrated

In June 2026, a three-node PPN was assembled and exercised live:

- A cloud VM at Google Cloud, a MacBook Pro running Linux, and a MacBook Air running
  Linux formed a working WireGuard mesh, with the laptops contributing hardware
  virtualisation the cloud node lacked.
- The fleet controller performed advisory placement across the mesh: presented with a
  VM request, it selected the laptop with the most available memory and hardware
  virtualisation, and delegated the spawn to it across the node boundary. The laptop
  accepted and created the VM.
- VM creation itself was verified end to end: copy-on-write disks backed by a standard
  Ubuntu cloud image, automated first-boot configuration, and QEMU launch, with two VMs
  confirmed running concurrently on the cloud node.
- Converting a consumer laptop into a PPN node required three short manual commands;
  the remainder of the setup was automated over SSH.

What the test did not demonstrate is equally important to state: host-level isolation
through seL4 remains planned, and automated peer admission through os-network-admin is
not yet in service. The June 2026 test established the pooled-compute substrate; the
sovereignty layer is the target the project is building toward.

## See also

- [[os-totebox]] — the operating system that runs workloads inside the PPN
- [[pointsav-private-network|PointSav Private Network]] — infrastructure overview; small-business compute is a PPN workload class