Presenting EOSphere as a Founding EOS Block Producer Candidate

EOSphere would like to officially present ourselves to the EOS community for consideration as a founding block producer candidate in the community launch of an EOS.IO based blockchain.

     ^{EOSphere Team Left to Right: Ric Smit, Ross Dold, Shelley Dold, Ken Hall, Walter Bevacqua}

We are incredibly excited about the new wave of decentralised innovation that only a scalable EOS.IO based blockchain can help deliver, and are confident that both our professional and blockchain experience would be relevant in helping launch such technology.

The core team are career professionals in data centre, cloud systems integration and operations, having worked together over many years to build data centre solutions for public hospitals, government and banks. Three of the team are dedicated full-time EOSphere employees.   

EOSphere’s co-founders, Ross and Ken, have supported Dan Larimer’s work since late 2013, have contributed to Bitshares and Steemit community projects and have experience in operating the equivalent of ‘block producers’ for both the Bitshares and Steem blockchains.   

Over the last few months, EOSphere has participated in the ‘EOS.IO Community Testnet’, developed EOS.IO technical video tutorials, published an EOS news digest, and more recently, produced the ‘Explaining the role of an EOS block producer’ animation to help in educating the community.

We’re also helping to bring together Australia’s EOS community by organising and presenting at a series of EOS Meetups in Australia’s five largest cities, in a three week, 12,000km meetup tour where we communicate regularly with the block.one team for support and guest appearances. 

                                               ^{EOS Perth Meetup 27th March 2018}

The meetups have already identified a need for local expertise and advice for potential DApp developers and blockchain start-ups assessing if an EOS.IO blockchain is the right solution for them, and we intend to support our region with these types of community services as a block producer.   

Professional integrity, transparency, commitment, cooperation and independence are all characteristics that the EOS community can expect from EOSphere.   We believe our proven experience will inspire confidence in EOS stakeholders, DApp developers and EOS based blockchain businesses for the community launch and ongoing operation and governance of an EOS.IO blockchain, while supporting our region as a global member of the EOS community.

Although based in Australia we aim to serve the entire EOSphere!

Core Block Producers Services

Our core responsibility to the EOS community will be to help govern and manage an EOS.IO blockchain.

To effectively provide the block producer services required to support thousands of commercial scale DApps requires not only an agile enterprise scale infrastructure solution, but a mature operational structure to monitor, maintain and manage that infrastructure.

Proposed EOS Blockchain Infrastructure & Service Architecture

EOSphere will initially be using hyperscale cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to host our EOS blockchain infrastructure. Actual EOS block producer requirements are likely to become apparent and evolve rapidly over the early life of an EOS blockchain. The ability to upgrade and scale servers in minutes, rather than days or weeks, for a typical enterprise server class hardware procurement cycle will ensure our agility.

Additionally, we will be preparing for the worst, our ability to defend against sustained network attacks will be enhanced with cloud, allowing us to quickly ‘relocate’ servers to other regions and networks if required. We are considering Sydney and Singapore as our initial two Data Centre sites and will finalise this decision once latency tests have proven these locations suitable

The majority of the world’s web applications are serviced from cloud, but we do intend to use both our professional expertise and the relationships we’ve developed over many years with the likes of Cisco Systems, Juniper, DellEMC, NetApp, Imperva, Checkpoint and local datacentre providers such as NextDC to migrate to our own full managed data centre infrastructure when the business case is justified.

We are also extremely conscious of the resiliency and low latency demands that are required from the network and internet access layer and have catered for this by procuring enhanced networking services including DDoS Protection.

Our initial Virtual Private Cloud nodes will be built on instances that are optimised for high memory performance to cater for demanding databases, and databases that run in-memory, as well as enterprise applications that are memory intensive. We will utilise X1e class instances in our AWS VPCs, these instances are able to scale to 128 vCPUs, 3.9TB RAM and 3.8TB of SSD Storage; and we will utilise n1-highmem-X or n1-megamem-X instances in our GCP VPCs which are able to scale to 96vCPUs, 1.4TB RAM and 3TB of SSD Storage.

Our initial IaaS specifications are summarised in the points below and may scale tenfold depending on demand:

Provider Amazon Webservices (AWS)
• Primary and Secondary Block Producer Node:
  • ^{Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)}
  • ^{Enhanced Networking (High PPS throughput and low latency)}
  • ^{AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)}
  • ^{Intel Xeon 8 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD} 
• Public Full Node:
  • ^{Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)} 
  • ^{Enhanced Networking (High PPS throughput and low latency)}
  • ^{AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)}
  • ^{Intel Xeon 4 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD} 
Provider Google Cloud Platform (GCP) 
• Primary and Secondary Block Producer Node 
  • ^{Google Compute Engine} 
  • ^{Premium Tier (Primarily for high performance networking)}
  • ^{Google Infrastructure Security (DDoS Protection)}
  • ^{8 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD} 
• Public Full Node
  • ^{Google Compute Engine}
  • ^{Premium Tier (Primarily for high performance networking)} 
  • ^{Google Infrastructure Security (DDoS Protection)}
  • ^{4 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD}

We intend to scale our cloud platform footprint as the EOS blockchain resource requirements become clearer, for instance we know that the provisioning of an IPFS solution isn’t an option on day 1 and will be implemented by EOSphere once EOS.IO finalise the technical details. We estimate our initial IaaS specifications will be more than adequate at launch, but expect to increase our RAM and Storage footprint shortly before the first DApps are deployed and adopted.

High Level Topology

Below is a topological representation of our High Level Block Producer Design for our Initial Public Cloud State:    

                                   ^{High Level Block Producer Design for Initial Public Cloud State}

Our Initial public cloud state makes use of two separate service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), to ensure provider, geographic, cloud compute platform and internet network access redundancy.

One of our cloud providers will operate live operational blockchain nodes with the other cloud provider utilised as failover. Each provider is separated into two network zones so that we have the ability to isolate the Layer-2 networks if needed and provide a degree of security policy implementation ability and flexibility across the two zones. Each of these zones are also shielded from the public facing internet with Firewall, Web Application Firewall and DDoS protection infrastructure.

VPC Zone 1 runs the Primary Block Producer primarily required to sign blocks timeously, and the Full Public Node which will have a published public facing identity that will be used to bootstrap peer databases and potentially a platform for us to implement required blockchain governance and configuration. VPC Zone 1 is also the location of a Testnet Node for validating new configuration and or code; and is where we will host an administration and monitoring server to use as a jump platform to monitor the healthy operation of our services.

VPC Zone 2 runs our Secondary Block Producer which will be used for local failover and seamless Primary Node code upgrades. VPC Zone 2 is also the expected location of our Primary IPFS Storage Node and will be until EOS.IO finalises the operation of the EOS blockchain IPFS function. IPFS will be used to provide operational storage and file hosting to DApps that require it.

Proposed EOS Blockchain Infrastructure Operational Framework

Availability of services is intrinsically linked with the operational processes used to manage the supporting infrastructure solution. EOSphere intends to develop a mature operational framework for the block producer services we will provide, to ensure the very best service in terms of availability and DApp responsiveness.

Ahead of the community launch, we intend to have a fully operational 24x7 support capability where we can be alerted to, and react to, any global EOS blockchain service or governance issue requiring our immediate attention.

Monitoring, Alerting, Reporting, Incident, Change and Capacity Management are all key operational processes that will be undertaken and are summarised here.

                                                ^{Proposed Block Producer Operational Framework}

Our blockchain infrastructure solution design highlights that we intend to provide resources to contribute to an EOS blockchain testnet in addition to mainnet. A resource that we believe will benefit both block producers and DApp developers.

EOSphere recognise that we intend to be part of a decentralised co-operative and intend to part-fund any independent services that would be in the common interest of all block producers. An example of this may be funding toward a global incident co-ordination centre, or specialist Block Producer monitoring tools.

Governance, Values and Community Services

EOS Blockchain governance is another critical core service that EOS token holders delegate to Block Producers.

We believe the inbuilt governance mechanisms are a defining feature of an EOS.IO blockchain and should enable rapid evolution of the EOS blockchain itself, as well as DApp and blockchain business development, knowing that there are strong well defined governance mechanisms in place.

The EOSphere team have experience in assessing difficult subjective decisions that decide the direction of a blockchain through our involvement with Steemit and it’s early contentious hard forks.

EOSphere will vote on all issues, and intend to be ‘DApp developer and blockchain business friendly’. Meaning for example, where an edge-case bug results in trapped funds or errant behaviour that affects the DApps end-users, we will likely provide support using the governance mechanisms to freeze accounts or update defective applications.

Values - The entire EOSphere team are career professionals and parents of young families. We are united in the possibilities that decentralisation offers to help realise a more equitable world. In other words, we are what you might consider good, socially responsible individuals who are invested in orchestrating change.

Professional integrity – The entire EOSphere team are 15+ year career professionals with outstanding community and industry reputations. For us, this means conducting ourselves and representing EOS stakeholders in a professional, respectful, honest and ethical manner. 

Transparency – EOSphere intends to publicly provide regular reporting and activity statements to the EOS community, as well as expenditure reports in its operation as a Block Producer. EOSphere is a registered company in Australia, with a registered office/HQ in Perth and may be required to submit financial reports to ASIC – the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. EOSphere will also aim to make itself available to any reasonable request from EOS community groups.

Commitment – EOSphere’s current operations and expenditure are entirely funded by our team members’ personal funds with no team member currently receiving a salary from EOSphere. It is estimated that our expenditure by June 3 will have reached $140,000 AUD, half of which will have been directly related to cloud infrastructure and app development costs, and the remaining being mostly related to the national EOS Meetup tour and legal and accounting expenses. Three of our current team members are dedicated full-time to EOSphere, and if voted in as a founding block producer we expect to expand the team with further full time operational members.

Cooperation – We recognise that successfully running and governing an EOS.IO based blockchain is a community effort. EOSphere are committed to allocating a proportion of Block Producer rewards to ‘all-of-community benefit’ and/or ‘all-of block producer’ style initiatives and projects. Examples might be funding joint development of Block Producer specific monitoring tools, or facilitating an independent team to provide the community with reporting on relevant Block Producer performance metrics. 

Independence – Although running and governing an EOS.IO based blockchain will be a co-operative effort, it’s important for the decentralised nature of the EOS blockchain governance mechanisms that EOSphere is not influenced by a vested interest and is free from any constraints that would prevent it from taking the correct and proper course of action. EOSphere will take any necessary steps to maintain that independence.

Community Benefit Services

Although not a core block producer service, EOSphere feel strongly about contributing to the EOS ecosystem in our part of the world and continuing to be a focal point in rallying the Australian EOS community.

We have already been approached by local DApp developers and blockchain start-ups keen to learn more about EOS and get assistance in understanding if EOS might be the solution for their blockchain businesses.

EOSphere can see many ways, in addition to core block producer services, in which we can add value to the overall EOS ecosystem by investing in our region and with global initiatives.

For example:

• Help to bootstrap a thriving local EOS developer community though education, conferences and hackathons, while developing partnership with universities and business.
• Actively participate in the Asia Pacific blockchain community, representing EOS, while promoting awareness and the opportunity with EOS to business, start-up and developer communities.
• Support local enterprise, blockchain start-ups and DApp developers to understand the suitability EOS for their projects, offering advice and support.
• Direct blockchain start-ups on how they may access the EOS VC program.
• Invest in global BP Operations, Governance, Architecture initiatives.
• Be accessible to the EOS community and blockchain media.

It must be stressed EOSphere will always have core block producer and governance activities as it’s priority; any community service would simply be assessed by asking the question, “will this community activity provide a clear and direct benefit to the entire EOS ecosystem?”

There are three community service activities which EOSphere are currently working on completing before an EOS.IO based blockchain launch in June.

1. Exploring the feasibility of organising a global ‘Block Producer’ candidate conference where we discuss and explore the process for a community blockchain launch, understand and mitigate any potential risks and define communication channels for a co-ordinated launch.
2. Development of an open source web app which will allow EOS ERC-20 token holders to find out their EOS balances as will be used in a community blockchain launch based on EOS.IO software. This is essentially an extension of the work EOSphere has done with “How to setup and run the EOSIO Genesis Snapshot Generator” and is an app that block.one is unable to host themselves without a geowall. EOSphere will make this app available, as open source, to the community for verification, and to facilitate multiple independent sources for the community to check their allocations and key mappings.
3. EOSphere intend to provide a simple open-source web app which will allow community members to easily vote for their preferred block producers on a community launched EOS.IO based blockchain. We expect this app to be available ahead of the community blockchain launch.

EOSphere would welcome any discussions on collaboration in any community-wide-benefit initiatives ahead of the community launch in June.

Meet Team EOSphere

Ross Dold - Co-Founder
Over the last 20 years Ross has worked as an IT integration professional primarily in the networking and security space. Ross became interested in crypto currency and blockchain technology in 2012 and has garnered experience with graphene blockchain technology in Bitshares and more recently Steem, where he currently runs a witness and seed node. Ross has a professional skill set and experience in Business Management, specifically Professional and Consulting Service Management where he has been the State Services Manager for a $100M integration business, as well as Technical and Solution Architecture Certification.

Ken Hall - Co-Founder
A seasoned data centre professional of over 15 years who has successfully managed $20M annual revenue practices servicing both public sector and enterprise clients who is now dedicated to EOSphere. Angel investor for Bitshares in 2013, going on to develop and manage the ‘MineBitshares’ project which was personally sponsored by Dan Larimer and supported by Bitshares Witnesses. Founding witness of Steemit and sponsor of multiple steem projects including Streemian. Ken is competent with AWS and GCP cloud DevOps and is proficient in node.js and python.

Walter Bevacqua - Principal Architect
Walter entered the industry in 2002 as a C# and SQL developer before establishing a career in solution architecture. Over the last 15 years Walter has architected and delivered solutions across verticals such as Banking, Health Care, Education and Mining. He is a pioneer and advocate in webscale architectures and cloud infrastructure solutions, a subject matter expert in information management and business continuity and has a wealth of experience working for some of the worlds largest global tech corporations. Walter has been passionate about blockchain technologies for nearly two years and looks forward to being a significant contributor to the EOS community.

Ric Smit - Community Manager
A business owner for the last 15 years, initially as a IT infrastructure provider then establishing an entertainment company and developing a 30,000 strong Western Australian community membership. Ric is passionate blockchain community member and is focussed on using his community skills to bringing together the Australian EOS community.

Shelley Dold - Event and Marketing Manager
Shelley has multi-year experience in marketing and event co-ordination including managing and executing on a few of South-Africa’s largest private and corporate events, some with as many as 300 event staff. Recently Shelley has put her energy into engaging with the EOS community and facilitating our Meetup Tour across Australia in five capital cities.

      Follow us @eosphere - twitter @eosphere_io - YouTube EOSphere