TLDR; OnFinality is a leading IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platform providing mission critical infrastructure to the Polkadot ecosystem. We are proposing to run geographically distributed public Shiden RPC API Service on our platform, allowing free community access.
This service is currently online and can be connected to via these endpoints;
https://shiden.api.onfinality.io/publicwss://shiden.api.onfinality.io/public-ws
About OnFinality
OnFinality is a SaaS platform providing infrastructure services for some of the largest blockchain and cryptocurrency projects in the world, including Polkadot, Kusama, Acala, and Compound Finance. Our mission is to support all blockchain organisations in the world by providing core infrastructure so they can focus on their core businesses.
- Our API Service can be completely free (within fair usage limits)
- We’ve provided mission-critical (scalable, and reliable) services to Polkadot, Kusama, Karura, Compound Gateway, and other Substrate based networks.
- We are the largest IaaS project in the Polkadot/substrate community, serving over 150 million JSON RPC requests to our public API service every day.
- We provide a one-click-deploy node service that allows customers to deploy their own Shiden validator and collator nodes in our platform.
Motivation
Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive:
- It requires a level of server development expertise that many do not have. A Shiden node for example, requires knowledge of SSL certificate handling, websocket management, firewall configuration, and more to setup, run, and monitor a production node.
- It’s extremely costly to run a full Shiden node nearly continuously, especially when your traffic is low and inconsistent.
- Running production level infrastructure is especially tricky. You need to autoscale quickly to handle bursty traffic, and you want to provide services in different regions around the world to provide low latency services - all of this is incredibly costly, but comes with significant economies of scale for a provider.
- DevOps requires constant attention - time that would be better spent elsewhere building something.
“We’ve worked with other infrastructure providers but none come close to the reliability and performance of OnFinality - their team is an excellent and responsive partner to Acala. Ultimately OnFinality’s community API service allows me to sleep at night.” - Bryan Chen (Co-founder at Acala)
As demonstrated by us in the Polkadot domain and Infura/Alchemy in the Ethereum domain, a shared node API service helps mitigate these barriers of entry to trying out a new protocol or network by reducing all these costs to near zero. We manage all the nodes for our users and distribute them across the world (with intelligent routing) to achieve global scalability from day 1, we monitor each node and ensure that they meet certain service levels, and we have the expertise and scale to handle production workloads and high peak traffic.
The difference between what we are trying to achieve and what Astar already offers via it’s public Shiden nodes is that we are building these to scale for large production applications.
In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on a new network and minimise the costs of accessing secure and reliable nodes while for Shiden’s community.
Proposal
Scope
Firstly, we see this as a long term partnership between Astar and OnFinality. Over time, we aim to return insights and learnings from our experience running this infrastructure to Astar. Our goal is to become a trusted partner and a center of excellence for Astar.
OnFinality can configure and run multiple clusters of Shiden nodes for your community to access under fair use limits.
- This funding grant consists of two key components:
- Ongoing running costs of these pools of Shiden nodes
- Constant monitoring, scaling, optimisation, reviews of the infrastructure
- Currently we only have a single cluster in Tokyo. To achieve global distribution we recommend running at minimum of 2 clusters (choosing between North Virginia, Tokyo and Ireland), each with a pool of 3 Shiden nodes (public network with a full archive).
- We actively manage this, as requests and usage increase we will dynamically scale our infrastructure to maintain service levels to our users.
- You can read more about our infrastructure here
- We apply fair use limitations to our service to mitigate against DDOS attacks. This includes a combination of daily request and rate limits that can be removed for certain partners on request.
- We’ll maintain the one-click-deploy dedicated node access to Shiden Network for customers that want to deploy their own dedicated validator or collator nodes
Outcomes
There are three main outcomes we believe our service will provide the Shiden Community:
- Help new users enter the Shiden/Astar ecosystem by providing a free API service and one-click-deploy validator or collator nodes.
- Through a partnership with OnFinality, provide much needed redundancy for this important community service
- Improve the resiliency of the Shiden network by reducing the load on the current public Astar endpoints and therefore the effort that the core Astar development team is spending on managing this service (so they can focus on bigger things)
- Help scale existing production applications in the Shiden ecosystem by providing scalable infrastructure services that can be relied on
- Assist with the testing of the Shiden network by providing valuable data back to the community on how nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases, and what kind of requests are commonly made
Cost Breakdown
Ongoing Quarterly Costs
It’s important to note that the ongoing running costs are a current estimate. As part of our service we actively manage the clusters of Shiden nodes, scaling and managing them in real time to provide consistent and reliable service. OnFinality will be in regular contact to discuss usage and cost optimisations that OnFinality are carrying out.
The following table shows the forecasted price for a single cluster of Shiden nodes (all prices are in USD). The ongoing costs will be submitted at the end of each quarter and are based on the following prices.
| Type | Unit String | Unit Price | Monthly Hours | Quantity | Monthly Estimates (per Cluster) | Quarterly Estimates (per Cluster) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Node Costs | $0.15 / unit / hr | $0.15 | 730 | 8+4+4=16 | $1,752.00 | $5,256.00 |
| Storage Costs | $0.0005 / GB / hr | $0.0005 | 730 | 60*3=180 | $65.70 | $197.10 |
| Backup Management Fee | $30 / month | $30 | 1 | $30.00 | $90.00 | |
| Backup Storage Costs | $0.0005 / GB / hr | $0.0005 | 730 | 60 | $21.90 | $65.70 |
| Data Traffic | $0.15 / GB | $0.15 | ? | ? | ? | |
| $1,869.60 | $5,608.80 |
Total expected ongoing quarterly costs per cluster: ~$7,974.00
