Dear Node Provider Community.
It’s about time for the next update on our platform decentralization roadmap. A few weeks ago we published the node deployment runbooks for the Dell and Supermicro nodes. In the upcoming 8-12 weeks the node providers will start redeploying their nodes with this process. You will see many node replacement proposals freeing data centers in preparation of this redeployment. Per data center we need 14 or 28 (depending on the data center size) proposals to add replacement nodes to the corresponding subnets, another 14 or 28 to remove the nodes from the corresponding subnets and one last proposal to remove all nodes of a DC from the inventory. That’s 29 or 57 proposals per data center that is going to be redeployed.
Quick reminder, since launch the node deployment procedure was as follows: (1) DFINITY pushed the latest binary to the node machines, (2) the node provider locked down the node, i.e. updates are only possible through the NNS, (3) the node provider initiates the key material generation. At launch this was the only deployment method available. In order to increase the platform decentralization node providers can now set up their nodes completely independently.
We are using this redeployment to also complete the storage upgrade of some nodes. Some data centers already have type 1 nodes, others still run type 0 nodes that need the storage upgrade from 3.2 TB to 32TB in order to become type 1 nodes.
First EU NP will be @awrelll 's data center in Bucharest (BU1). First US datacenter will be in Miami (MM1). First Asian data center will be in Singapore (SG1). The order afterwards is not determined yet and depends on how quickly the previous badge managed their redeployment.
What’s next?
As I promised in my previous status update we are almost done with the specification of the next node type. I’m expecting to get the specification published by the end of this week. The new node specification is now generic. The first three node types at launch were specified based on BOMs of Dell and Supermicro. This was necessary to avoid too much diversity on a platform that we first need to prove that it runs stable. We proved that and specifying a specific server model from a specific manufacturer adds a centralization that we now can remove.
The decentralized data center setup is also ready. This basically means that we will publish a node connectivity specification until the end of the week for new node providers and a migration runbook for existing node providers some weeks later. In addition we started working on a best practice white paper to allow node providers to access their nodes remotely and securely. Once the node providers rolled out that remote access we reached the milestone to implement decentralized SRE procedures. Stay tuned for more details on my next status update.