Lucky Friday | Cost-Effective Proposal for High-Performance Bare-Metal RPC Nodes
Proponent:
- Lucky Friday Labs
Requested Allocation:
- Initial Provision of xxx KSM (USD – $11,200)
Recipient Address:
- HPUEzi4v3YJmhBfSbcGEFFiNKPAGVnGkfDiUzBNTR7j1CxT
Short Description:
The Lucky Friday team is seeking funding to provide RPC services for the Kusama and Statemine networks. We are well established within the ecosystem, operating numerous geo-diverse validators, collators, miners, and vaults on Kusama and Polkadot.
Our team intends to provide RPC services at our SOC 2 Type 2, CCSS-compliant facilities, co-located on dedicated bare-metal servers. We are investing significant capital upfront, believing we can offer reliable and secure unmetered service to the community at a fixed and reasonable cost.
Our decades of data center experience – and desire to encourage ecosystem growth – means that we recognize and are concerned about the risk of centralization happening due to the haste of quickly turning up nodes in AWS, Google Cloud, and others. Hetzner has already begun shutting down crypto-related activities.
Lucky Friday does not believe in easy; we believe in right.
We desire to leverage our high-performance, high-availability infrastructure and scalability to support the Dotsama ecosystem by providing the enterprise-level connectivity needed to serve an ever-growing userbase and influential applications like Polkadot.js, Talisman, PolkaGate, Nova, and more.
Providing that the proposal is accepted, we will seek initial funding of $11,200. Upon successful completion of milestones as set out in the proposal, we will provide a report on our undertaking and details on load tests. We would then further engage for monthly recurring costs of $14,920.
The complete proposal is available for review and comment here. We greatly value and appreciate any feedback. 🍀
Updates
For the sake of transparency and open communication, we will be providing periodic updates on this page. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment below or reach out to us directly.
• info@luckyfriday.io
• @luckyfriday:matrix.org
November 18, 2022
- Upon approval and execution at block #15354720, the Lucky Friday account (HPUEzi4v3YJmhBfSbcGEFFiNKPAGVnGkfDiUzBNTR7j1CxT) received 402.95 KSM from the Kusama treasury. The EMA7 price at the time of submitting Motion 572 was $27.795 ($11,200). However, due to market volatility, the value at the time of sale was $23.75 ($9,570.06) with a transaction fee of $9.57. Per the motion, the difference of $1,620.37 ($11,200 - $9,570.06 - $9.57) will be included with our subsequent request.
January 22, 2023
- Dear community, we placed sizable orders for servers, storage, memory, and processors. However, due to procurement issues during the holiday season and global supply shortages, we are experiencing a delay in the rollout of our service. Judging strictly from the project schedule, this shifts us back by eight weeks, giving us a new target completion date of April 7, 2023. These problems are unique, as we are provisioning new racks with new hardware, but we are making every effort to reduce delivery times as much as possible. We appreciate your patience and will continue to keep you posted.
February 14, 2023
- All equipment has been received. It is racked, wired, and powered. The insurers are analyzing the devices and setup and making assessments. Once complete, we will move ahead with node installation. We are still on track for April 7, 2023.
March 23, 2023
- We have spent the past few weeks load-testing the servers using various-sized payloads from various pallets. Tests were done at multiple geographic locations, all to our satisfaction. We also invited community members to load test the endpoints, and neither has broken. The polkadot-js team has advised we run for ~2 weeks on Westend before inclusion in the polkadot.js app.
Comments (4)
Seems to be a real risk of servers being run on third party infrastructure especially in light of the recent news about Hetzner and seeing 20% of Solana go down, a move to more bare metal servers especially on RPC seems like a good step forward for the network. How many RPC nodes are currently run on Bare-metal?
I support this proposal, and the team behind it have the necessary competence required to operate a public RPC endpoint successfully IMO. We need to reduce any reliance on RPCs hosted on Hetzner / OVH servers. These providers have a track record of shutting down services related to cryptocurrencies. Even I am at fault of this with some of my parachain nodes. Public RPC endpoints are a key part of our infrastructure which must be maintained to a high standard, especially for the relay chains IMO. RPCs will continue to be a key part of our infrastructure for a very long time, even as we transition into the light client era (which at the moment have a habit of breaking with changes to Smoldot :/ ).