Cardano Nodes as a Service

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Build a SaaS offering which will allow anyone to provision and access their own Cardano node on mainnet or testnet at a fair price.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

CloudStruct operates the CSCS stake pool and are proud members of the Armada Alliance. We also maintain several open source projects for the Cardano ecosystem. Our team consists of experienced software and systems engineering, cloud architecture, and DevOps professionals.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The Cardano ecosystem can benefit from additional node operators and a larger, more diverse, and geographically distributed collection of nodes. Individuals can benefit from having their own hosted node solution available for active development and testing against the Cardano blockchain.

Our proposal is to build a platform on top of multiple cloud providers where users can purchase an automatically deployed, maintained, secured, and updated Cardano node which they can access through a secured set of HTTP and web-sockets endpoints. These nodes will not be accessible over SSH or any other server login method and will not provide the ability to function as a stake pool.

Discussed in detail in this Bright Ideas On Cardano podcast as well

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Creation of a Node as a Service platform will enable those who wish to operate nodes and build upon the Cardano blockchain a fast and easy way to get started without having to learn the ins-and-outs of operating a Cardano node and keeping it secure and up to date. It empowers developers to focus on what they specialize in (creating applications) and removes the burden of having to host and operate their own node. Using economies of scale the project will also likely be able to offer this service at a price that would be competitive with a user running their own node. All of this will live within the Cardano eco-system as the application will leverage ADA for payment and the CIP-30 dApp wallet connector for user registration and login.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

We see this proposal as a relatively low risk initiative in terms of ability to deliver. There are potential risks to the ecosystem due to the solution being hosted on major cloud providers putting the network at risk of further centralization of nodes. We attempt to mitigate this risk by spreading across multiple providers and regions. There will also be no mechanism for direct access or uploading of files to these servers making them unusable for Cardano stake pool operations. Since the service is also at the mercy of economies of scale there is the risk that lack of up-take would cause prices to be too high creating a negative feedback loop.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The project will initially be divided into two milestones. The first milestone will focus on the initial back-end build out. The second milestone will focus on the user and front-end portion of the project.

Milestone 1 will include (Projected 200 Hours):

• Architecture diagrams and planning
• The ability to provision a node on the Cardano Testnet network
• A provisioned endpoint for users to interact with ogmios and submit-api on top of the Cardano node
• A portal for users to view metrics and telemetry of their Cardano node
• Open Source repos for building all of the above including but not limited to
• Terraform repository for full build
• Terraform repositories for sub-modules used in full build (Already in-progress)
• Ansible collection used for provisioning and configuring nodes

Milestone 2 will include (Projected 200 Hours):

• A usable and friendly user interface
• CIP-30 dApp wallet connector for logins
• The ability to take on actual customers and provision user registration and accounts
• Provisioning nodes onto Cardano Mainnet network
• End-User Documentation and Instructions on how to use the service and connect with popular wallets and/or API clients
• Scaling to multiple regions

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Milestone 1 is estimated to take 200 engineering hours to complete

Milestone 2 is estimated to take 200 engineering hours to complete

This estimate is multiplied by a rate of $100 USD/hour. We are asking for compensation for both the costs of development time and effort in addition to infrastructure / cloud costs to complete milestone 1 and 2.

In addition we ask for one years worth of funding for an AWS Bare Metal instance which we'll use to build ARM Cardano node instances on.

Config summary:

Operating system (Linux), Data Transfer Outbound: Internet (900 GB per month), Workload (Consistent, Number of instances: 1), Advance EC2 instance (r6gd.metal), Pricing strategy (All Reserved 1 Year All upfront)

AWS 12 months cost 19,988.80 USD

Total $59,988.80 USD

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

The project development will be completed by the CloudStruct engineering team. Our team includes Principal / Staff Engineers, with more than 60 years combined experience. This project will be primarily assigned to Jason Witkowski (https://github.com/jwitko) for development completion, with Chris Gianelloni (https://github.com/wolf31o2) and Andrew Gaffney (https://github.com/agaffney) providing code review and support.

There will also be the need to bring in an outside contractor/consultant for front-end/UI development.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

We will be participating in later rounds for additional projects. We believe in the Cardano blockchain technology and community and want to see it continue to grow.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Progress is tracked through public GitHub Issues and a GitHub Projects Kanban board (https://github.com/orgs/cloudstruct/projects/9/views/1). Our engineering team has weekly meetings on status updates.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Success for this project for Milestone 1 would look like the ability for someone with access to the back-end to provision any number of Cardano nodes using the open-source repositories that come as a product of this project. The Cardano node would be accessible securely and remotely for ogmios and submit-api services. Those Cardano nodes would also automatically be picked up and represented in a metrics, telemetry, and visualization system.

Success for Milestone 2 would include an arbitrary beta-tester to sign up and register an account, log in to said account, provision a Cardano node on Mainnet, and for that user to be able to securely access provisioned ogmios and submit-api endpoints to query said node. The user should also be able to view metrics and telemetry data about their node.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is an entirely new proposal