Polkassembly - OnFinality High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q4 2022) #1541

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 --- a new security feature to help you securely manage access to your OnFinality API endpoints
Detailed Error type breakdowns on your API Insights dashboard
A new Integration tab to help you get connected quickly
Support for more Polkadot parachains
New enhanced deployment automation processes to allow our network partners to automate deployment of their networks with OnFinality
Support for Ethereum
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 is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBjcxgdhu6NnfhtrprJcnqvr-KM8H2Twq45rgJ9mDkM/edit?usp=sharing