**Proposal**: OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q4 2022)

**Proponent**: 12mRyiCp9zdh1wEVW5gLLiFBxDPKks72rRXmSupyEK3VAMLf

**Date**:  17th January 2023

**Requested DOT**: 13,735.06 (USD $67,459.73)

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

**Raw Data**: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z5ayTVPj_cbw9ewQPUQIsE3EmM9fHAadVKJgWoVwuPo/edit?usp=sharing

**Full Report**: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBjcxgdhu6NnfhtrprJcnqvr-KM8H2Twq45rgJ9mDkM/edit?usp=sharing

Original Motivation
------------

Over the last 3 months (October, November, December 2022) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, and Encointer 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 Q4 of 2022, we've made a large number of stability improvements to our Ultimate API service. We've finished significant work on advanced rate limiting on behalf of our customers. This means that we can continue to provide generous public API endpoints for over 40 different networks for common-good applications, but restrict access to high volume users that abuse this free service. We've been able to manage our costs significantly on behalf of our customers as a result.

For customers that do sign up for paid API keys, we've been adding more and more features to provide a better experience. API access restrictions allow our customers to restrict their API keys to work only from 'Allowed' origins and/or IP addresses, preventing unauthorised consumption of their service. We also provide more detailed monitoring of failed requests through our service to help customers identify and fix bugs before they get to production.

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.

Between 2022-10-01 and 2022-12-31 our Polkadot API service has:

-   **Reduced cost to the Polkadot treasury by almost 50% from Q3** (Q4 was a slower period however our continued infra optimisations have had a significant impact on costs)

-   Served a total of 6.7 billion responses

-   Accumulated over 79.6 TB of data egress 

-   The highest daily total was 126 million responses in a single 24 hour period for Polkadot only

-   Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 73.5 million responses each day.

-   Westend had over 175 million API responses in the period

-   Statemint had over 160 million API responses in the period

-   All time totals for Polkadot is 93,192,546,788 (93 Billion) since November, 2020

-   At the end of this period the 90 day uptime for Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend was 99.86%, 99.99%, and 100%\
Note that we have added support for the Encointer common good parachain for the first time in this proposal. We have supported Encointer since the 9th of February 2022 but as a contribution to the ecosystem, we've been proud to provide over 7 months of free support at our own cost. From subsequent quarters, we expect to support more common good chains and include them in these proposals.

Enhancements
------------

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

-   [API Access Restrictions ](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-rolls-out-three-new-features-on-its-enhanced-api-service/)--- a new security feature to help you securely manage access to your OnFinality API endpoints

-   [Detailed Error type breakdowns](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-rolls-out-three-new-features-on-its-enhanced-api-service/) on your API Insights dashboard

-   A new [Integration tab](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-rolls-out-three-new-features-on-its-enhanced-api-service/) to help you get connected quickly

-   Support for more Polkadot parachains

-   [New enhanced deployment automation processes](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinality-delivers-new-network-automation-tools-for-web3-developers-to-build-smarter/) to allow our network partners to automate deployment of their networks with OnFinality

-   Support for [Ethereum](https://blog.onfinality.io/onfinalitys-highly-scalable-rpc-api-helps-ethereum-scale-faster-than-ever/)

-   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 [network analytics page](https://onfinality.io/networks).


**Full Report is here**: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBjcxgdhu6NnfhtrprJcnqvr-KM8H2Twq45rgJ9mDkM/edit?usp=sharing

- OnFinality is requesting funds to continue running high-performance infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, Westend, and Encointer.
- They have provided a free public API service for the past 3 months to help grow the ecosystem and assist with testing.
- They have made stability improvements and added features for paid API users.
- They have reduced costs and served billions of responses during the last quarter.
- They have also delivered enhancements such as API access restrictions, detailed error breakdowns, and support for more Polkadot parachains.

#1541 OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q4 2022)