OnFinality's High Performance Public Infrastructure (Combined Q3 2022, Q4 2022, Q1 2023)

Proponent: a3byawr54JPxf1RpvnbLZPkZN2Q9Ry7gg5CXiqcvEtgPWvQM8

Date: 20th April 2023

Requested KINT: 33,501.5242

Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Interlay's Kintsugi Network.

The service details outlined in this proposal specifically reference Q1 2023 however the costings combine Q3 2022, Q4 2022 and Q1 2023.

FULL REPORT: OnFinality Q3 2022, Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 Combined Interlay Report

For further detail on previous quarters, please find individual treasury reports:

Q3 2022: Interlay - Treasury Report/Proposal - Q3 2022
Q4 2022: Interlay - Treasury Report/Proposal - Q4 2022
Q1 2023: Interlay - OnFinality Treasury Report/Proposal - Q1 2023

Original Motivation

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive:

• It requires a level of server development expertise that many do not have

• It's costly to run a full node nearly continuously, especially when your dApp's 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.

A shared node API service helps mitigate these barriers of entry to trying accessing a new protocol 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.

In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on  Kintsugi Network and minimise the costs of accessing secure nodes while traffic from your dApp is low. When you grow, you can continue to use our shared API service, or we also provide access to one click deploy dedicated Kintsugi nodes  to any cloud of your choosing.

Service Details and Enhancements

During Q1 of 2023, we've made a large number of stability improvements to our Ultimate API service to allow us to add a large number of new parachains over the last quarter as well as support for multiple chains outside of Polkadot.

For customers that do sign up for paid API keys, we've been adding more and more features to provide a better experience. Geolocation insights provide statistics about where in the world communities are to help influence decisions around where to expand infrastructure and to view the effectiveness of regional BD initiatives.  We can also now automatically upsize the storage on nodes to prevent the risk of any downtime.

Our customers are building cross-chain wallets, running some of the largest block explorers, and are indexing multiple networks - they've all benefited from these API access restrictions, improved monitoring, and the larger number of supported Polkadot chains.

Enhancements

Additionally, we are proud to have delivered some key service enhancements that benefit the Polkadot ecosystem in the last quarter. This includes:

• Auto Expand Storage - When the node's storage reaches 85% utilisation, the storage size will be automatically increased by 10%. Saves developers and devOps time on having to constantly check on and manually upgrade their node storage size

• Partnership with POKT network to bring in more external developers into the Polkadot ecosystem

• Geographical Insights - API key owners can view statistics about where in the world your community are to help influence decisions around where to expand infrastructure and to view the effectiveness of regional BD initiatives

• Clarify our IP address handling - OnFinality does not, and will never, correlate or link specific wallet addresses to the IP address or request origin making the RPC request

• We're testing access to various unsafe methods like traceBlock and subscribeStorage that will help developers create applications that utilise XCM - contact us if you would like to be part of the beta

• Reduced our exposure to any single cloud provider - Progressively migrated resources away from AWS to other cloud providers for lower cost and exposure.

• Expanded our OnFinality for Startups Programme to support teams from the Substrate Builders Programme and Scytale Ventures

• Added support for a number of new networks, including Ajuna, Unique, Clover, SORA, Composable Finance, Collectives, xx network, as well as Polygon, BNB, Fantom, Gnosis and Evmos from outside the ecosystem. OnFinality is a new one stop shop for all of your RPC needs from multiple ecosystems.

• A variety of improvements to our health metric collection tools and automated recovery scripts to ensure our 99.9% SLA is exceeded.

• Scale improvements to our team, processes, and systems to allow us to provide this same service to any  substrate team

You can always see live data on our API service on our public status page and network analytics page.

FULL REPORT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--eurmLTzS5bk9_jdvBJXKyFq4RBO0sQjNn7Vl5Ufcg/edit?usp=sharing