Note: this proposal goes in addition to proposal 52 where the amount requested was incorrectly entered.

Proponent: 42PDjUSugisVhhNQg453fkDwLmg9QMzeWe9huR817xt7c3DW

Date: 17th January 2023

Total Requested PHA: 105,989.0975 PHA
Proposal #52 Requested PHA: 5,299.4600
Proposal #55 Requested PHA: 100,689.6375

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

Full Report Here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xg5w1JWqvveYJPRQsr7fCVyA0R3w2yDeJrDuv3hJ50k/edit?usp=sharing

Original Motivation

Setting up blockchain infrastructure is difficult, time consuming, and expensive:

• It requires a level of server development expertise that many do not have

• It's costly to run a full node nearly continuously, especially when your dApp's traffic is low and inconsistent. 

• Running production level infrastructure is especially tricky. You need to autoscale quickly to handle bursty traffic, and you want to provide services in different regions around the world to provide low latency services - all of this is incredibly costly, but comes with significant economies of scale for a provider.

• DevOps requires constant attention - time that would be better spent elsewhere building.

A shared node API service helps mitigate these barriers of entry to trying accessing a new protocol by reducing all these costs to near zero. We manage all the nodes for our users and distribute them across the world (with intelligent routing) to achieve global scalability from day 1, we monitor each node and ensure that they meet certain service levels, and we have the expertise and scale to handle production workloads and high peak traffic.

In summary, we try to reduce the pain of getting started on Khala and minimise the costs of accessing secure nodes while traffic from your dApp is low. When you grow, you can continue to use our shared API service, or we also provide access to one click deploy dedicated Khala nodes to any cloud of your choosing.

Service Details and Enhancements

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.

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.