Funding request for multigateway servers, from jl777

[EvilDave]

Reposted from: https://nxtforum.org/infrastructure-committee/funding-request-for-multigateway-servers/new/#new

jl777: To get a production multigateway setup, I need at least 6 servers and another 3 for dev purposes. It is important to segregate the bitcoind's on different servers than the ones running the multigateway code, so the plan is to have the three multigateway servers each with a slave bitcoind server that it is hardcoded to.

10000 NXT per month would be barebones for my dev setup, but production servers would need to be run by someone else. On the high end, does that include NXTmixer and NXTcash guardian servers? If so, then the more the budget, the more guardian servers we will have to protect the main money servers.

My preference is to be able to continue dev work and supporting the actual gateway operators. But that requires three people to sign up for managing the money servers. I could do it, but it is not my forte and I think it is more effective if I could concentrate on adding more features instead of making sure all the bitcoind's are updated, etc.

I will use the dev servers to run a testnet version and could run small scale production servers until Infrastructure committee can identify and select the three independent multigateway operators. I might be able to make a "thin guardian server" that could be run on people's NXT nodes. This would eliminate or reduce the need for a large number of guardian servers and still get a similar (if not better) effect.

[EvilDave]

EvilDave:

So we are looking at 10,000 NXT for dev setup, lets triple that for a production environment and then add some more on top for extra costs. Brings me to 50,000 per month initially, which seems do-able. Might be easier (in terms of public debate) to get initial funding from a friendly whale, but i'm willing to take it on board as an InfCom proposal.

Could I have some volunteers who might be willing to take on the multigateway operator role?

Going to post this to InfCom Bitbucket, with a proposal to fund James with 50,000 for initial dev environment set-up and to make a start on a production environment.

[Ian Ravenscroft]

In principle no objection - we need someone to size a multi-gateway node - that will give us the cost - maybe one of us could install the SW spin it up and have a look at what drives its resource usage..

So just to be clear each gateway is a server pair - one server running the gateway code facing towards NXT and one server running xxx-coind copies facing to the other-coin-1.0 networks... and we need 3 server pairs to form a quorate gateway.

I like the idea of the 'guardian add on' to a nxt node rather than spinning up many more nodes - maybe only allow hallmark nodes to do this role - perhaps james can comment on this?

[EvilDave]

James would like a decision on this before the end of the month, so could we get back to InfCom duties and get voting ? I've been neglecting InfCom in favour of the A'dam conference, but I want to get some stuff resolved before I head off on holiday (28/04->8/05)

Heres J's last post on nxtforum:

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fanaticalfishing has been great and providing server resources, so I am assuming I wont have to worry about the multigateway production server costs. I will let him deal with getting the fundings.

Back to servers for my development. As you know I am working on a large number of projects and having a small server farm really helped me develop and test some pretty important things. I have been forced to scale things down dramatically and am currently down to 10 servers, but I will not be able to pay for all of them for more than a month.

With 10 servers, I can simulate hundreds and thousands of nodes, but if I have to scale down to 3 servers (the bare minimum), then it will impact development of things NXT and considering the difficulty in finding technical testers, if I cant create larger scale simulations, it could really affect time to complete projects.

So, I would like to propose 1 BTC per month equivalent of NXT for my development and test servers. This would let me continue trying out many things and deploying scalable testnet releases of experimental new features.

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I think we can afford 1 BTC (20,000NXT) per month right now, i'm tempted to vote yes immediately. Let's hear it from you lot......

[Ian Ravenscroft]

agreed

[ChuckOne]

I think he can use the Nxt Exchange to fund his efforts.