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Referendum#311
Discussion#1986

Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Polkadot & Westend & Rococo & Statemint & Rockmine Networks (from January to September 2023)

userSUBSCAN_IO
2 years ago

This is a follow up proposal to what we submitted before:

#151 Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Polkadot & Westend & Rococo Networks

#20 Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Polkadot & Westend & Rococo & Statemint & Rockmine Networks (from July to December 2022)

Subscan is an essential block explorer and analytics tool for the Polkadot network, providing valuable insights to the Polkadot community. However, the maintenance and operation of Subscan requires a significant investment of resources, including server infrastructure, security, and personnel costs. Therefore, we propose reimbursing the operation and maintenance fee for Subscan for the period January to September 2023 from the Polkadot treasury to ensure its continuous operation and maintenance.

We highly value feedback from our community users, and over the past few months, we've made substantial efforts to reduce infrastructure costs. The results have been both effective and gratifying. Starting from July 2023, the operational expenses have gradually decreased and have recently stabilized. As an illustration, taking our GCP bill as an example, the costs for the past week have decreased by **more than 50.52% **compared to their historical peak.
For specific parameters and billing details, please refer to the "GCP Bill" section.
For our specific development efforts, please refer to the "Operations and Maintenance Cost Reduction Plan" section.

The growth of Subscan is intrinsically tied to the support of our community, which we deeply appreciate. We aspire to enhance community involvement in Subscan's decision-making processes. As a result, we propose a gradual shift in Subscan's development approach, starting from November 2023, towards a community-developer collaborative model. In this new framework, Subscan's development will be guided by the community's needs and feedback. Features with the highest demand from the community will be prioritized for development, aligning more closely with the ecosystem's requirements. While we have implemented some of these principles in the past, we recognize that they have not been as open and transparent as desired. Our aim is to continually improve upon this aspect. And the specific plan will be officially announced in December!

Please view the detailed proposal here.

Comments (4)

2 years ago

I am abstaining here: Subscan obviously deserves being funded for the service, but GCP bill is astronomical and there is no plan for exiting the cloud. I will happily switch to Aye if Subscan proposes a plan to switch hosting for the future. Cloud services cost is not sustainable for this ecosystem.

2 years ago

@bLd Nodes | ChadStakeKing 
As a DevOps engineer at Subscan, I get your concerns about our team sticking with cloud services.

We chose cloud services because they give us the stability, security, and scalability we need.

I get that the cost of cloud services might be higher than running our own servers.But when you think about all the costs of hardware, security, upkeep, and staff for self-hosted servers, cloud services could be more cost-effective.

We're not blindly optimistic about relying on cloud services, though.We're on the hunt for ways to cut costs and boost efficiency, like tuning our service use, going for more cost-effective services, and talking to GCP engineers about how to save money.

If you've got any better ideas, we're all ears.

2 years ago

Expensive

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