While my prior hardware was more than capable of handling the level of activity that the Peerplays network requires, I have made the decision to be make my infrastructure significantly faster, more efficient, and more secure.
I was able to seamlessly change my witness server earlier this afternoon, which gave me the ability to upgrade my primary witness server. I have yet to run into any major issues with my witness setup, but I came to the decision that making a proactive upgrade would give me a greater ability to give more attention and effort to other witness responsibilities. I am currently running a public seed node, and currently have a total of 2 servers for the specific purpose of running my witness node, with one of those being my primary server and the other one being a backup. In reality a primary server and a single backup server should be more than enough, but I would be ready to add additional servers in a heartbeat if the network required it for whatever reason.
I took extensive security measures with my new primary server, and I believe that it will be beneficial for the network in the long term. I have actually been working to implement this server for a few days, and I would never put make the change before I was completely confident in the security and safety of my witness node. I would never put my interests before the best thing for the Peerplays network as a whole, and I believe that the level of safety I take is well worth the additional effort, resources, and time associated with implementing that level of security.
New Primary Dedicated Server Specs.
64gb DDR3 ECC RAM
6c/12t Intel Xeon CPU E5-1650 v2(3.5GHz)
2x 240GB SSD
1gbit/s with 30 TB bandwidth
Hosted in Europe
In addition to upgrading my primary server, I have also increased the size, speed, and capacity of my backup server.
My backup server is now has 4 CPUs, 16GB RAM, and a 100GB SSD, which is more than capable of efficiently handling the level of activity that the Peerplays network requires. My backup server is hosted within the US and is hosted through a different provider, so the chance of both being down simultaneously is almost non existent. While I haven't had to utilize my backup server before today when I switched out my primary server, I believe that it is very important to utilize a powerful and efficient backup server. While the network doesn't require anywhere near these specs right now, having a powerful and capable infrastructure in place now will give me more time to focus my attention on other things instead of having to consistently scale my infrastructure. The hardware upgrades didn't come cheap, but I am more than willing to put forth significant personal resources in order to ensure that I do my part to increase the Peerplays platform's overall chance of long term success.
While I know that the position of a witness is a position to be taken very seriously, there have been very few prior projects that have given me the same level of enjoyment as the enjoyment I have received from being a Peerplays witness so far. I wouldn't ever let my emotions impact my decision making on the network, and would always remain true to my promises that I have made to the users and holders of Peerplays and PPY tokens. I think that we all realize that being a 'good' witness requires much more than simply proving server hardware and having the technical know how to securely run a reliable node, and I am eager for the opportunity to make other contributions to the Peerplays network in the upcoming future.
One aspect that many stakeholders are eager to hear about is providing the feeds.
Providing reliable and accurate sports feeds is a vital aspect of the Peerplays platform once it sees activity, and its an aspect that hasn't been talked about extensively. For a wagering platform to be successful, users must have complete confidence that the results will be accurately reported and verified. While this may seem like its as easy as doing a simple google search to determine the event outcome, when we consider the sheer range of different wagers that could be made it becomes clear that it would be incredibly hard to manually verify so many outcomes. There are various paid feed services that are trusted, reliable, and offer data in a computer readable format, but these services don't come cheap. The need for diverse sources is also important, because using a single source runs a higher risk of being inaccurate.
The idea that each individual witness would publish and subscribe to a paid price feed for their witness alone may prove to be impractical, which is why I believe that witnesses working together to cover the costs of numerous paid feeds will be the best approach in the long term. The costs of some of the paid fees can get to be very high which would make it hard for a single witness to justify, but if witnesses were able to 'split' this cost with other trusted witnesses then the ability to provide numerous different paid fees becomes much more realistic and practical. While I think that there will always need to be some manual confirmation at some point in the verification, being able to reach a majority consensus on a specific outcome through feeds will increase the speed of validation and the degree of accuracy.
When we consider a platform that can host such a wide range of different 'contracts' such as Peerplays, many events that individuals may want to wager on may not even have feeds. Of course sporting events will likely have feeds available through subscription, but when we consider a contract that evaluated the amount of rain in a region over a specific period of time it becomes clear why manual input will likely be required for some contracts. Its so early that there hasn't even been extensive discussion regarding feeds, but I assure you that I will be helping to improve and provide feeds when the time comes. The plans and methods for providing feeds will become more concrete as the need for feeds approaches, and I intend to support the subscription and publishing of feeds both from a monetary perspective and from a technical perspective.
I intend to maintain very good communication with Peerplays Stakeholders and users through the posting of updates, but I may soon begin to post Peerplays updates on a blog exclusively for my Peerplays information and updates. I would never want to overrun my Steemit feed with witness updates, but I believe that communication is important. I hope you enjoyed this update, and please feel free to leave any comments, questions, input, ect. in the comments below. Thanks for reading and any consideration for Peerplays witness cryptofreedom-witness!
