EOS Cafe as a Block Producer Candidate

Organization

EOS Cafe (http://eos.cafe/) was founded by Troi Bryan from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. Troi envisions EOS Cafe to be both a digital space and physical cafes where people can meet and can exchange ideas especially about growing Decentralized Applications (DApps) development on EOS platform and contributing to EOS platform adaptation. Thus, the EOS Cafe memberships or Bean token holders are expected to be global as it grows. EOS Cafe is a Decentralized Autonomous Community (DAC) and its token holders are expected to guide and to be engaged in its development and its governance.

Introduction

EOS Cafe is currently working toward becoming a Block Producer (BP) for EOS Platform. As of now, this is still an ongoing process because some issues are still discussed internally and other technical details, e.g. failover software, storage and hardware requirements, etc., are still awaiting more published guidance from EOS.IO. Thus, we will keep this as a living document until further announcement of its final state. As an example, some of the token holders are still exploring the format of the EOS Cafe BP entity. It is still being discussed whether the BP entity will be under EOS Cafe DAC or as a separate entity. Moreover, other technical details of the BP infrastructure can still evolve to accommodate better infrastructure design and cost consideration.

BP Infrastructure

The initial BP infrastructure will utilize cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Initially, EOS Cafe will have one primary and one secondary BP nodes located in a local IaaS provider in Calgary. By using an established local provider, EOS Cafe wants to achieve two things. First, it is to avoid concentration of BP nodes in a global IaaS provider such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Second, by using cloud-based IaaS EOS Cafe can leverage the inherent redundancy provided by such provider. Network and physical security, network bandwidth, network availability, power redundancy and backup storage redundancy will prohibitively incur high cost for early BP producer with on-premise infrastructure in mind. Thus, minimizing such cost early on as EOS Cafe learns to be a trustworthy Block Producer will allow EOS Cafe BP to have still capacity for future growth or improvement. Currently, there is no fixed guidance on hardware requirement for BP and by having initial infrastructure in the cloud, EOS Cafe can provision additional IT resources as needed quicker compared to on-premise solution.

Although EOS Cafe can leverage some of the needed redundancies provided by IaaS provider as mentioned earlier, the BP infrastructure must also accommodate other redundancies such as processing nodes and geographic colocation to ensure that the EOS Cafe BP can reliably produce blocks. In order to achieve that goals, the BP infrastructure design as seen in Figure 1 below includes two virtual machines stored in a high throughput storage with failover mechanism and an additional BP site located in another country or continent. EOS Cafe is currently looking for other Bean token holders who are interested in working together as a BP.

Figure 1: EOS Cafe - Block Producer Infrastructure

EOS Cafe BP will utilize cloud load balancer to distribute the work load globally. Currently, several solution providers are being explored. A few companies that provide such services are Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Other option is to use software-based load balancer such as NGINX deployed in AWS or other global cloud services.
Hardware requirements are currently a moving target. However, there are some discussion about it during the BP Q&A sessions led by Thomas Cox and from EOS Block Producer Telegram group (https://t.me/EOSPros). EOS Cafe BP will provision the following hardware at the time of this writing and any additional computing resources as needed can be discussed:

Primary Node
CPU : 3 - 4 GHz
Core : Up to 16 cores
RAM : 128 GB
Storage : 1 TB SSD
Network : 100 – 200 Mbps

Secondary Node
CPU : 3 - 4 GHz
Core : Up to 8 cores
RAM : 64 GB
Storage : 1 TB SSD
Network : 100 – 200 Mbps

Community Support Initiatives

EOS Cafe is working toward building a successful DApps under EOS platform. Naturally, the EOS Cafe goal to be a gathering place for DApps developers and supporters is aligned with EOS.IO goal which is mass adoption of the platform. Therefore, EOS Cafe BP plans to spend the profit as BP for the following initiatives:

1. BP Infrastructure update for future expansion
2. Support initiatives to create added value for Bean token
3. Support local DApps meetup to create awareness
4. Attract local developers to work on EOS Cafe initiatives to add more value to the ecosystem

Notes:
Initial Revision: 19 March, 2018