RFP-7: Node Deployment Tools

Summary

Anyone building (or interested in building) node deployment tools should submit a PEP to the DAO for POKT grants, because these would be a much welcome addition to our tooling ecosystem.

Background

We are at a stage in our ecosystem where several community members (known and most likely unknown) are working on tooling that will help with node deployments. We should promote these efforts and foster an ecosystem of tooling that is available to everyone, so I think anyone building (or interested in building) these tools should be made aware that they can submit a PEP to the DAO and get substantial POKT grants for their contributions.

In general, we want to promote a diversity of nodes in our network, because this will enhance the resilience of the network to outages or failures of specific platforms or configurations. Therefore, any tool which unlocks new node configuration options, or makes specific node configuration options easier for everyone to use, will directly benefit the health of the network.

For these reasons, this RFP is open to multiple PEPs. We should allow for multiple deployment solutions to be funded in parallel, because this promotes diversity.

Objective(s)

Promote the diversity of node deployment options, to make it easier for community members to run various node configurations and boost the health of our network.

Objective Key Results

  • There are more node deployment options available
  • Existing node deployment options (e.g. Docker) are easier to use
  • We have greater node diversity / more self-hosted nodes

Budget

I think the DAO should be generous with budget, for a few reasons:

  • Node deployment tooling will bring a lot of value to our ecosystem
  • We would benefit from setting an example about the opportunities available in the POKT ecosystem, which should attract more community contributions
  • We would benefit from talented contributors having more skin in the game

It would be impossible to standardize a recommended budget across all of the tooling options, but in general I believe the DAO should be willing to spend at least 2X the typical dollar value of the project (in POKT). That said, ultimately the DAO will be deciding whether a requested budget is reasonable or not.

If a contributor can’t accept a full POKT payment, Pocket Network Inc may be able to supplement the DAO’s grant with a $USD payment from their Docs/DevRel budget, but this will be at their discretion.

Examples

  • User-friendly GUIs that make self-hosting easier
  • VMs/images that enable 1-click deployments
    • Cloud images: AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, …
    • VMs: VirtualBox, VMware, …
  • Non-custodial hosting solutions, which opens up the market to smaller third-party service providers who may be deterred by the responsibilities of custodianship
  • Enterprise cloud tooling: Kubernetes configuration files, Ansible playbooks, Packer deployments

How to Propose

Reply to this thread or DM me on Discord (@jackal) and I’ll assist you with the proposal process.

3 Likes

I would love to love to run the node on my AVADO :smiley:

We should also be adding support for DAppNode

I would love to see a mainnet version of a Pocket DappNode Package (DNP)

This is our submission in response to this RFP - PEP-6 Node Pilot - A new node deployment solution