In addition to the short- and mid-term items listed for the first quarters of 2022, the following topics will be addressed in the next few years. The ultimate goal for all node provider-related improvements is sustainable network growth. While the short- and mid-term items focus on improving the autonomy of node providers, the items listed below aim at operational improvements and automation, a prerequisite for an ever-growing network.
Note that work described in the Motion proposals on Trusted Execution environments, Secure OS, E2E Security, Malicious parties, Scalability and Tokenomics is required to be integrated into the release and operational processes to achieve these goals. We will not describe or discuss them here in detail though and suggest questions regarding them to be asked in the corresponding forum threads.
Operational Maturity
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Decentralized monitoring: Currently, the health of the nodes is measured by collecting and analysing logs and metrics on a third-party cluster. When deviating from the expected indicator values, the respective node providers and data centers are notified manually to fix the situation. In the next generation of the internet computer protocol, the monitoring tasks will be carried out by the nodes of the network themselves, in a fully automated fashion. To this end, the architecture of the nodes and their components needs to be extended. the interaction between the different types of nodes and subnets needs to be adapted and . A mechanism to deal with faults within and outside the control of the node owners and data centers must be explored. In particular, it should be possible for any party to collect information on the health and contributions of any node without additional trust assumptions.
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Decentralized backup: To ensure that even in the presence of a deadly bug in the node software the content of subnets is not lost, a backup mechanism shall be implemented to collect the state and the messages sent to a subnet off-chain. Using subnet recovery, the state of the subnet can be re-generated. In order to do this in a decentralized manner, mechanisms trading off replay speed, memory complexity, and privacy concerns have to be devised. Furthermore, the backup mechanism must be integrated in the NNS-driven
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Decentralized boundary nodes: As elaborated in a separate motion proposal, boundary nodes will become fully NNS-managed and use the same update mechanisms and operating system as regular nodes. This will allow the inclusion of boundary nodes in the new node provider deployment process with slight variations in the configuration process.
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Extended node remuneration: The previous items will lead to refinements and improvements of the node remuneration process. Insights gained through the decentralized monitoring will allow automated adjustments to payments based on the performance of nodes, or rather the lack thereof. Backup services and boundary nodes will be new categories to be included in the remuneration process.
Automation
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Automated node and data center allocation and rewards: In a future version of the Internet Computer protocol a lot more tasks will be automated and executed by NNS canisters. In particular, the computation of how much rewards a node in a specific location should be granted, will be taking the current local costs for electricity, wages, regulations and risks into account and combine this with the measurements obtained from the decentralized monitoring infrastructure. The future versions of the NNS will be designed to reflect the dynamics of compute and storage demand and supply, integrate decentralization metrics and balance the amount of tokens in circulation.
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Automated subnet creation and healing: With a continuously increasing number of nodes and subnets, it will become untenable to manually propose removal of unhealthy nodes and addition of new ones. Instead, the NNS will be extended to propose and execute node replacements based on data collected through decentralized monitoring.
Note: In the upcoming Decentralized Node Management motion proposal (see Motion Proposals on Long Term R&D Plans) we plan to combine the initial post in this thread, these additional points and some reactions and adjustments based on the conversation here.