Flora Swarm
Proposal Rationale
Flora has been around for quite a while now but has never been established as other swarms. After our exponential growth, we are in the necessary to enforce and improve all of our infrastructure and services to keep up with demand.
For those who don’t know about Flora, this swarm works deploying and maintaining secondary services, such as validator nodes, notification services, graph node, network nodes, etc.
Servers are something that can’t be decentralized just yet since some of the core services rely on private keys and all of this has to be handled encrypted in an environment with relatively high-security measures (cloud providers). Thus, some trust needs to be delegated to community members (in this case, Flora members) to maintain all of it.
The current members of the Swarm are @crisog, @anisoptera, @lkngtn, @gabi & @onbjerg.
All services are running using Google Cloud (even before the new user wave in September), so we are probably sticking with it unless there is a major reason not to do so.
Servers also imply service costs (paid with a credit card), maintenance costs, etc.
Service costs: they have been covered by Luke for several months. This should no longer come out of the pocket of any member, rather from the funds of the swarm.
Maintenance: this is not covered by anyone, since Flora has been maintaining all of this without any return.
Proposal Funding Information
This swarm has never requested funds in over 6 months of operating. At this time, this is no longer sustainable and we need to create a proposal.
Ideally, this proposal also includes reimbursement for past unpaid work & payments from credit cards out of pocket.
1. Google Cloud billing reimbursement (luke’s cc).
Reimbursement:
$900 spent since May 3th last year.
Projection:
$250-350/mo.
Services running:
- Zonal Kubernetes Cluster (4 nodes, 8vCPUS/16GB RAM).
- Two BrightID Nodes (2 vCPU + 4GB RAM each, 120GB)
- Github Actions Runner (for Pollen, 2vCPUS/10GB RAM)
3. Postmark billing reimbursement (luke’s cc).
Reimbursement:
$30 for three months.
Projection:
$10-50/mo for 10-50k emails a month.
This is being used at Celeste/Forums.
5. Vercel billing reimbursement (luke’s cc).
Reimbursement:
$60 for three months.
Projection:
$20/month for all of our static site deployments.
6. Ani’s work (setup & maintain xdai validator node)
Ani's Infra (currently running xDai Validator, but we can use it for more stuff)
$200/mo.
3 months since xDai validator is running, 16hrs (8hr/mo).
Rate: $50/hr
Reimbursement: $1400
7. CrisOG work (setup & k8s cluster/deployments & omnibridge)
Our services/cluster have been running for quite a long time without having any funding,
I tried to estimate a reasonable amount of hours spent doing that work.
A while back I configured/deployed a few token bridge contracts, updated Omnibridge UI so we could bridge $HNY to mainnet, as well as verifying our token on Etherscan and this was supposed to be included within Flora despite not being directly related to infrastructure.
40hrs incidents/maintenance over several months (maybe 7?).
$200.00 flat fee for HNY on Mainnet task.
Rate: $50/hr
Reimbursement: $2200
What’s next?
One of the reasons for this proposal is that there are some big plans regarding infrastructure and we didn’t want to move forward without showing up to the community.
- Graph node.
- xDai node (rpc endpoints)
- Monitoring dashboards for most of the services.
- Omnibridge & xDai Bridge validator node.
- Migrate a BrightID Node + Github action runners to Ani’s servers.
However, all of this needs to be always working and if they fail, the community expects it to be fixed in a reasonable amount of time. This availability can’t be measured by hours of work.
$100/week - Ani (Own Infra, xDai Validator Node)
$200/week - CrisOG (K8s Cluster/GCP, rest of services mentioned above)
for incidents availability/monitoring health checks.
All these plans are also subject to security measures to set all of this infrastructure to ensure the safety of our services since some of them involve key management.
10 HNY ~ 7,500 USD for planning & implementation
This amount will be allocated in hours of work.
Totals Reimbursements (billing/past work) - $3,600 ~ 4.8 HNY
Projection of Flora operation costs (8 weeks) - $1,780 billing & flat rates + $5,000 work ~ 9 HNY per 4 weeks, 18 HNY in total.
HNY Price at the moment: $750
Amount of HNY requested: 32.8 HNY
Vote for this proposal: Honey Pot Proposal
We decided to go with a bi-monthly proposal since a monthly one is really overwhelming, and 3 is most likely a lot given $HNY volatility.
We have a Flora multisig to hold the funds and distribute accordingly.
https://xdai.gnosis-safe.io/app/#/safes/0x91d8116fA60516Cf25E258Ef14dEaAcAf7a74127
We will also create a Kanban dashboard/Github project for visibility.