Dear Node Provider Community.
I’m happy to update you about our progress on the M1 milestone of the IC platform decentralization roadmap.
We published a wiki article describing the current decentralized onboarding process for node providers and asked an existing node provider in the US to onboard himself once again to verify that this process is working for external parties too. As we explained before, the first generation of node providers was onboarded by us. You will see the corresponding proposals in the NNS in the next few days. Just be aware that this isn’t actually a new node provider and therefore all changes will be reverted once the verification is done.
We also implemented a CI job that checks that this process is working with every change on depending components and that’s almost every component of the IC 
The instructions show a lot of potential for improvements and there will be a lot of changes to that process in the next months. We are already working on adapting the process to the new node remuneration process that only considers contributing nodes instead of the full node allowance of a node operator.
We are also working on implementing the onboarding process to the NNS Frontend Dapp to provide a UI supported onboarding process for node providers. This will include some simplifications like creating node operators without the need of a proposal.
The first parts are planned to be rolled out by latest end of June. The full feature coverage is currently planned for end of Q322.
Another huge effort is the decentralisation of the datacenter setup. The same node provider that is running the verification that I previously explained will also doing the first acceptance test for the new data center setup instructions. The requirements listed in the instructions above already give a hint how trivial our datacenter setup is planned to be in the future. We really minimized to the max. All the equipment that we needed since launch to gather metrics in order to improve the protocol isn’t needed anymore. The acceptance test that this node provider will run is to verify that the instructions are allowing the removal of the equipment in order to reduce the setup to what’s needed in the future.
In the next days you will see many proposals in the NNS replacing and removing of all nodes in TP1 (Tampa) in preparation for this acceptance tests.
What’s next?
Assuming that all acceptance tests passed we are going to notify all existing node provider that haven’t onboarded their nodes yet (~800 nodes) and ask them to follow the corresponding documentation. Depending on the progress we will use new data centers to replace old data centers in order to get them redeployed in the same decentralized way. We are assuming that this will take the rest of the year and will end with ~1300 nodes running in the IC.
Somewhere in the next months we would like to announce the specification for the node type supporting AMD Milan to ensure that the network is growing with nodes supporting SEV-SNP attestation.
I was asked to build up a DeSRE team (Decentralized Site Reliability Engineering Team). This was never done before and I’m super excited that I got the chance to work on that. There will be a separate post about this but in short this means that we are planning to decentralize the way the IC is currently maintained. Not on the governance layer, that’s decentralized since launch, but from the operational side.