Hey all, I recently started working on a new network testing service called Globalping and wanted to gather some feedback before it goes into a beta state.

You might be familiar with my previous work at perfops/dnsperf/cdnperf. Unfortunately those services were commercial with VC backing and inevitably they failed.

Yet I still think that there is a place for such a service, but this time without the limitations that come with a for-profit company. Specifically:

• Free*
• Open source
• Superb user experience

I am aware that RIPE Atlas also exists but I never was a big fan of it. I believe we can build a nice competitor with modern technologies, a better API, improved UX and move and iterate much faster without the bureaucracy of such large organizations. At the end of the day the more competition the better for the user.

It consists of a few components:

The API itself that users will use to interact with the network. We will build a large amount of tools as well, so no need for everyone to interact with the REST API itself - https://github.com/jsdelivr/globalping

The probe container. The code that connects to the API and waits for commands to execute - https://github.com/jsdelivr/globalping-probe

Explore it all now https://github.com/jsdelivr#the-globalping-platform

Current status:

• Lots of testing and building based on previous experience and assumptions
• The backend is in place and working. We have around 450 online probes ready to run tests
• The website is in progress, we have a designer preparing the first web tools
• The CLI tool doesn't have a dev yet but its a high priority
• Firmware for hardware probes is being tested. Hardware probes are a fun project that I hope will motivate people to become GitHub Sponsors to get a cool metal ARM device.

Why this time it wont fail:

This time it's being launched as a project of jsDelivr, a CDN that has existing for 10 years now, used by millions of people daily. There is no pressure of x10 growth year after year and we will rely on the community to help us out.

Instead of renting thousands of VMs we will seed the network and will work with sponsors and regular users to get as many people as possible to run our probes in the networks they have access. e.g. own VMs or home labs.

We will offer very generous free plans but will also introduce limits that can be bypassed by becoming a GitHub Sponsor https://github.com/sponsors/jsdelivr

This way we hope to motivate people to directly contribute to the development of all of our projects and help us sustain our activities.

Demo and testing

The system is in alpha state, stuff will break and APIs will change, I want to gather as much feedback as possible early-on while we can still make huge changes without impacting any real users.

Simple demo by devs for devs (designs are coming soon) - https://api.globalping.io/demo/

Check out the "magic" location type too. You can enter almost anything in there and get an output. e.g. hetzner, germany, california, eastern europe...

I invite everyone to join our GitHub projects and open issues with ideas, bugs, feedback and command on existing issues.

TL:DR: I made a new service that runs ping/mtr/traceroute/dns/http commands from globally distributed probes. It's in alpha state, please test https://github.com/jsdelivr#the-globalping-platform

Thank you!