Hi everyone,
This is @deathwing. Many of you may remember my proposal from last year, where I sought funding for a global API node infrastructure. Thanks to the tremendous support I received, the initiative has been a massive success!
You may have noticed one peculiar difference between this post's subject and last years, namely I have changed the "Global API Node" to "Global Hive Infrastructure" -- more info below :)
A Quick Recap of Last Year
The infrastructure has grown exponentially, reaching more users and regions than I initially anticipated. Thanks to your support, api.deathwing.me has been able to serve over 180k (up 38%) unique users, sharing over 6TB worth of data in the last month! While the unique user count has increased, thanks to Drone (a new API middleware written by me) and Cloudflare, the amount of data being transferred has actually gone down (I believe rate limitations also have an effect on bad users).
The New Challenge: Image Server
As you may know, most of us rely on hive.blog, belonging to @blocktrades' infrastructure, while we are uploading images. Since the majority of users are using the same image server, any sort of technical problems (or outside factors) sometimes results in almost all images throughout Hive being unavailable and/or returning errors.
So far, not a lot of people have invested in a potential image server. The reason is actually quite simple - the cost. After reviewing the data at hand, an image server capable of redundancy (with several disks failing and data still being retained without a problem) locally as well as backed up (replicated data) would cost about $10,000 -- ten thousand USD.
Actually, it is relatively cheap enough to get the server itself, costing at about $3000, however, the real cost stems from the disks. With spares in mind, it would be around $7000. Of course there are other misc costs. Taxes, setup costs and necessary hardware such as cables etc.
On top of the hardware itself, there are ongoing costs for significant bandwidth usage as well as back up, drive replacement and other factors... the costs add up. Nevertheless, increasing the overall decentralization and adding onto the sense of security that the images uploaded are kept safe and secure and available for a very long time, in my opinion, is worth it.
That sounds great but, how does it work?
When an author uploads any picture on any Hive frontend, it gets a signature and is uploaded to the image server. Most of the time, this is hive.blog. I have spoken with @asgarth (@peakd) about the potential to introduce a way to choose an image server. The reasons to do so may differ, be it faster upload/download, diversity in the location of online assets for better availability, or accessible redundancy in the case authors are unable to utilize a specific image server at a given time.
In the long term, I would love to have a unified platform. This would be a high availability environment, the images will be uploaded to all accessible image servers and load balanced in accordance with the resource usage, latency to the end user and capacity. If this is achieved, all images uploaded on any frontend would be decentralized, yet almost always accessible with lots of servers. I am currently in the process of drafting such a system, but it is too early to promise anything.
Evolving Nature of HAF -- A Playground and Easily Accessible Environment
HAF has been improving over time and more apps are slowly being developed. As HAF matures, it will only continue to be more and more popular. To accomodate this, as I mentioned in various places before, I am a supporter of HAF and HAF apps in general.
I intend to set up an environment where most "needed" HAF apps are publicly available throughout my infrastructure. Developers and end-users would be able to experiment and get some starting knowledge before having to commit any resources they may or may not have.
The current apps planned for this are:
- HAF Block Explorer (https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/haf_block_explorer)
- HAFSQL (https://gitlab.com/mahdiyari/hafsql) by @mahdiyari
- Balance Tracker (https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/balance_tracker)
Some of these apps are still a very much a work-in-progress, so it may take some time until they are mature enough to be publicly hosted.
With this idea in mind, I am also planning to host "large files" that are necessary to get started with hosting a Hive node such as a publicly accessible block_log, regular snapshots for lite nodes and potentially entire HAF DB dumps depending on the situation.
The Renewal Proposal
Continued Support for API Node Infrastructure: Given the increased traffic per user and increased use case scenarios, the proposal will help fund necessary expenditure ranging from regular maintenance, disk failures, ongoing datacenter costs and ongoing miscellanous costs such as load balancers, GeoDNS and further upgrades and additions.
Incorporation of the Image Server: With a cost of about $10k for a single server, the increased daily rate of the proposal will help funding this expenditure while accounting for potential disk failures and so on. Achieving this proposal will help with the decentralization and the stability of a major social aspect of Hive, images.
Budget Request
For this ambitious undertaking, I'm requesting 150 HBD/day from the DHF for the duration of one year, starting on October 31, 2023 and ending on October 31, 2024. The increase from last year's proposal is mainly to account for the addition of the Image Server and its associated costs such as increased colocation costs, ever-increasing power/electricity costs with more additions to racks and most importantly, the bandwidth cost.
Your Feedback Matters
Your support and feedback over the past year have been invaluable. As always, if you have questions, concerns, or suggestions regarding this renewal proposal, please share. Let's continue making Hive a robust, and user-friendly platform!
Vote for the proposal now!
To vote through PeakD: Click here
To vote through Ecency: Click here
To vote through Hive.blog: Click here