Proposal: High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q3 2022)

Proponent: 12mRyiCp9zdh1wEVW5gLLiFBxDPKks72rRXmSupyEK3VAMLf

Date: 6th October 2022

Requested DOT: 16,274.212 (USD $112,454.80)

Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint and Westend.

Previous Discusson: <https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1325>

Raw Data: <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q9eXw78E-VDkHmCl1nLSGwOfxlG6jc-6CsvrUMHOskE/edit?usp=sharing>

Full Report: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hxT4LMvntD3aV5PlmF3MnddDFhca8UnpH1sRSQu-nGY/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hxT4LMvntD3aV5PlmF3MnddDFhca8UnpH1sRSQu-nGY/edit?usp=sharing)

* * * * *

## Original Motivation

Over the last 3 months (July, August and September 2022) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend nodes. This provides the following three outcomes:

-   Grow the ecosystem by reducing the barriers to entry to access a high performance nodes

-   Help scale existing projects in the ecosystem by providing infrastructure  services that can be depended on

-   Assist with the testing of all networks by providing valuable data back to the community on how validator nodes are running and scaling as the network traffic increases (we've made GitHub issues based on behaviour we've observed)

## Service Details

During the last quarter, we've focused on three key areas for the development of OnFinality - cost optimization, network expansion, and providing more value from our Ultimate API service.

The bear market has made many of our customers more price sensitive, and as such we've been working with them to optimise our services to provide more for less. We've reduced prices for our larger customers between 30 and 40%, and created products designed to target and onboard new chains with entry level pricing. We've also been working on new rate limiting capabilities to progressively restrict abusers of our public APIs to upgrade to paid API plans.

In the past quarter we have succeeded in our goal of onboarding two new networks, with the addition of Avalanche and Juno to our API service. This was a large amount of upfront work, extending OnFinality to allow chains outside of Polkadot/Substrate, but now that it has been done we should be able to move faster and onboard new chains each week. We hope that this means that we will be able to invite as many new ecosystem participants into Polkadot as possible with this expansion. 

Finally, providing move value from our Ultimate API service has always been a priority, and in this space we've added new API specific paid plans at competitive prices to our competition. We have also delivered the ability for our customers to better understand and learn about their users, with API Insights that tell you where your users are, what they are requesting, what methods are failing (to find bugs in your dApp), and where optimisations can occur.

We continued to execute on our efforts to provide unprecedented service stability and reliability to this ecosystem. All supported networks exceeded our 99.9% target, including 99.94% uptime for Polkadot over the last 90 days . At this stage, OnFinality is operationally striving for a minimum of 99.99% availability, which means less than an hour of downtime each year.

Between 2022-07-01 and 2022-09-30 our Polkadot API service has:
-   **Served almost 100% more traffic with only a 10% increase in cost**
-   Served a total of 21.4 billion responses
-   Accumulated over 100 TB of data egress 
-   The highest daily total was 517 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Polkadot only
-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 157 million responses each day.
-   Westend had almost 167 million API responses in the period
-   Statemint had over 172 million API responses in the period
-   All time totals for Polkadot is 86,820,238,239 (86 Billion) since November, 2020
-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime for Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend was 99.94%, 99.99%, and 99.67%

## Enhancements

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

-   [API Insights](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-introduces-api-insights-so-you-can-analyse-and-learn-about-your-applications-faster/) so you can analyse and learn about your API applications faster and find bugs with your dApp
-   [Cost optimisations](https://blog.onfinality.io/go-further-with-more-affordable-pricing/) to reduce pricing for our customers by up to 40%
-   [New API plans](https://blog.onfinality.io/get-ahead-with-onfinalitys-new-api-endpoints/) for our high usage customers and a way to allocate resource to [move towards a more sustainable funding model](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1270)
-   [Support for Alibaba Cloud](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-collaborates-with-alibaba-cloud-to-provide-a-premium-experience-to-web3-builders/) to provide more decentralised cloud hosting options for our customers
-   [Updates to our website](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-announces-a-new-ui-to-help-web3-developers-build-smarter/) to include a new Network marketplace so [you can see what networks are supported](https://onfinality.io/marketplace)
-   Support for new layer 1s - [Avalanche](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-beta-api-support-for-avalanche/) and [Juno](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-launches-api-support-for-jun-c3-b8-network/) (in Cosmos)
-   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](https://status.onfinality.io/) and [analytics page](https://analytics.onfinality.io).

Full Report is here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hxT4LMvntD3aV5PlmF3MnddDFhca8UnpH1sRSQu-nGY/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hxT4LMvntD3aV5PlmF3MnddDFhca8UnpH1sRSQu-nGY/edit?usp=sharing)

Approve a proposal. At a later time, the proposal will be allocated to the beneficiary
and the original deposit will be returned.

May only be called from `T::ApproveOrigin`.

# <weight>
- Complexity: O(1).
- DbReads: `Proposals`, `Approvals`
- DbWrite: `Approvals`
# </weight>

- The proposal is about funding the ongoing costs for running high performance public infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend.
- The infrastructure helps grow the ecosystem, scale existing projects, and provide valuable data on how validator nodes are running.
- The service has focused on cost optimization, network expansion, and providing more value to customers.
- They have onboarded two new networks, Avalanche and Juno, and have added new API plans and features.
- The service has achieved high uptime and served a large amount of traffic.

#284 OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q3 2022)