Into the Gateway-verse: Bootstrapping a Multi-Gateway Ecosystem

[shane]

I’m excited to see the gateway space moving forward! OS-Gateway looks like a great start to this budding ecosystem.

@JackALaing

• Dispatcher Management: they’ve set up their own dedicated Pocket dispatchers to enable better scaling of traffic through to POKT
• Load Balancer between Nodies and POKT: Nodies has the ability to serve endpoints from their own nodes as a backup, so they have built an internal load balancer to enable dynamically shifting between their own nodes and POKT
• QoS Checks: they’ve implemented basic QoS checks within their own systems, including a height checker, a latency checker, and a simple node registry
• Observability: they’ve implemented observability on all their backend and frontend systems to allow them to determine how a request is performing in terms of success rates, requests per second, per chain, etc. This allows them to be alerted whenever there is an issue and to ensure a high standard of QoS. They’ve migrated their observability away from postgres and into a more purpose-built time-series database using Prometheus, Influx DB, Posthog, and Grafana. These are all open source technologies that anyone can integrate and will lay the foundation for the Observability Service within the OSS Gateway Stack, as well as upgrades to the data provided to customers in their frontend.

All these are great accomplishments, however they don’t translate into anything tangible for the community or other gateways, since these are only relevant to the setting up of Nodies own gateway.

I understand that more modules are currently being built to address some of these areas, but it’s not clear what the full stack of a gateway will look like with these modules in a production environment. Very basic info has been shared, but none of that is actionable or detailed enough to fully understand how a production stack is suppose to work.

@poktblade could you provide more insight? My starter questions are similar to what was asked in July:

1. What is the flow of a relay in your architecture?

2. How does this stack lay out? (Example: Does OS-Gateway go right behind your firewall, or does it go through an LB, or call filter, etc?)

3. Where do future modules expect to be placed in your stack? (Example: Will the QoS module connect into OS-Gateway, or does is interface directly with an LB like HAPoxy?)

4. What dependencies will these modules have?

5. What tech will these modules interface or integrate with (HAProxy, Promethius, etc)?

@JackALaing said last month

I replied that without code being openly developed and without technical details on what how this stack is supposed to work, contributors like myself cannot get involved. I’m trying to understand the envisioned architecture and see where folks like myself can get involved.

Open-sourcing OS-Gateway is an awesome start, and from my understanding all future development will be in public repos, which will be great as well, but folks like myself need specifics so that we can participate.

Today it was mentioned that a forum update is in the works from Nodies, so I wanted to get my questions out ASAP