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RE: Steemit Update
I'm in favour of Witnesses taking more responsibilities regarding APIs.
However, just a side note: Steemit Inc.'s API & infrastructure costs are in the millions of dollars per year. A "normal" API node costs max 1000€ per month, so roughly 12,000€ per year. If we really take this approach seriously, this will require a lot of funds, which might be difficult to come by in this bear market.
12,000€ (CAN$18,000) per year is more than @anyx paid to buy a 512 Gb full node server with an Xeon Gold CPU!!
Why would you pay more per year than the total capital cost of the item?!
Not to mention my server was absolute overkill.
However, it does have a monthly cost for collocation hosting, but this is a fixed cost of only a couple hundred/mo, but that also buys things like redundant power, cooling, etc. But indeed, in the long run, purchased assets are the way to go.
The last 5 items are only necessary because of huge centralized data centers. They are not needed when running less than 10 machines as part of a decentralized system. Redundant internet is easy and cheap to add and redundant power supply is only necessary in places with regular power outages. Once in ten years is typical for central Tel Aviv where I live. 24 hour monitoring is automatic if server is in your home and you also work from there.
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Well, I have around 120 desktop (in my office), software routers instead of hardware routers etc. All of them custom made - so I tend to agree to what you say. But with these expensive hardware and network speeds (read QoS, BGP poisoning avoidance, DDoS protection) etc, its not quite possible to handle them the servers in our home. For example @anyx I am sure can handle most of the hard ware/CPU/memory related aspects. I can't. But I can handle lot of the network aspects - which others may not be able to. The witnesses are a mix of sysadmins, researchers, programmers and marketers - so we can't expect them to run the 17 + 2 + 2 servers in their home office. Even if everything including BGP is taken care of, I don't think DDoS is something we can monitor and retaliate that easily (unless we have a OpenBSD box and we are very handy with firewall rules).
Being said all this, I don't think we need to really host all the witness nodes in our backyard to save costs. Proper AWS cost optimizations can save a lot of costs. Personally I don't see any reason why the full nodes are on AWS where every disk access is billed. Once the development is done, those instances can be moved to data centers. AWS and cloud as we know is for elastic needs (CAPEX) and in the case of steem full nodes that kind of "elastic scaling" is not possible. (due the architecture.) May be sharding like NEAR protocol ( https://nearprotocol.com) is the way to reach there - but its not in the near term.
To conclude, its very much possible to run the infrastructure in traditional data centers at much lower costs than AWS. Steemit.com's workload is not something that needs cloud computing.
If Steem Monsters was able to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, both on Kickstarter and Fundition, why wouldn't that be possible for Steemit? They can easily give out delegations as rewards, which wouldn't have too big of an impact of the Steem price.
Also, won't Steem receive around 20 million USD in funding from Global Blockchain Technologies? Source
Look, I obviously haven't spent that much time thinking about this, it just seems that budget problems are somewhat easy to solve in this day and age.
Yeah.... A small part of me wants to believe that firing 70% of the team was done because they realized they hired the wrong people and the low market cap was just a good excuse.
This is insane and I guarantee you it's due to massive inefficiency. No website with this level of interaction costs that much. Yes -- we need to improve second layer (and primary layer) solutions to take the load off actual steem machines, but it's really not that hard.
The problem is the high cost of a single node, and the fact you need lots for scalability and redundancy, then you need a few that do nothing but create state files for the active ones and you need backups and staging ones. It adds up quickly.
It would be far Simpler if it was just a typical database.
Not even. The problem is poor first and second layer solutions on top of a full node.
Yeah, full nodes also suck. A lot. But the whole stack is worse.
No Arguments here. I hope this crypto drought encourages some good innovation that handles this. Sometimes loss is required to kickstart innovation.
Agreed - though maybe it depends on where the line is drawn around what is and isn't classed as infrastructure.. Or maybe someone is misleading ned.
Few mis configured EBS volumes with crazy IOPS values, Cloudfront, heavy usage of Docker based builds etc can be the reason for the high costs. AWS is not the right solution for something like steemit.com which has no per-visitor or per-user revenue model or challenges with capacity.
i'm in favor too. and eventually maybe more than APIs.
What do you have in mind?
nothing specific lol i'm just a gamedeveloper.
as for the cost of running a node i have no idea i'm sorry. but maybe that cost should've been steemit inc's only priority instead of trying to do everything on their own.