Archipel

Welcome to Archipel monorepository!

What is Archipel ?

Archipel is a high availability solution for blockchain services.

Services Supported

Polkadot Validator Node

Why Archipel ?

Nowadays, many blockchain services are centralized on cloud infrastructure. For instance, around 70% of Ethereum nodes are in VPC and 63% of Ethereum Dapps use Infura Provider as this survey shows. We can imagine that in a few years some of blockchain services can be banned from public cloud providers.

The solution is to have a decentralized infrastructure at home. The problem is that it is challenging to maintain a good quality of service at home. You can have internet connection or power cuts. As a result, it is very unsafe to install a Proof-of-Stake validator at home. Your validator must be always up (24/7) and ready to execute its duty. If not, you will be slashed by the network and lose your money. To solve this problem, we are creating a solution to provide high availability for blockchain services. The first service that we target is Polkadot PoS Validator.

How it works ?

The idea behind Archipel is federating some nodes between friends and family. We are using DAppNode as the infrastructure layer for our solution. With DAppNode, you can launch a blockchain node (Bitcoin, Ethereum ...) or any P2P software. We would like to thank DAppNode Team for their amazing work. To achieve the high availability of services at a DAppNode, we are adding Archipel on top of it.

Archipel Components

Component	Description
Chain	Chain component is responsible for Archipel state synchronization between participants
Orchestrator	Orchestrator is the decision-making component in Archipel federation
CLI	CLI is a component that generates configuration and bootstraps an Archipel federation
UI	UI is the Archipel chain state visualization component
Deployer	Archipel End-To-End tests, build scripts and deploy tools
DAppNodePackage	DAppNode package wrapping Archipel

Please refer to the README instructions in the sub-repositories for more information on building, using, and testing each software component.

Archipel Chain

To federate several nodes and have a shared state to elect a leader, we created a specific blockchain using the Substrate framework.

Substrate is a Parity framework that allows creating application-specific blockchains.

We created a Substrate runtime that collects all nodes metrics and sets federation leadership. This helps Archipel orchestrator to select the best leader appropriately in the federation. We call this specific blockchain the Archipel Substrate Chain or Archipel Chain.

All nodes inside a federation, run Archipel Chain. In the current implementation, an Archipel must be composed of 3 nodes. That means that to operate, you have to set up 3 nodes. Try to set up nodes in different locations.

The idea is that in the Archipel federation, all participants are trusted. They can be friends or family or other trusted social links. That allows us to have a fast chain consensus.

More information on chain/README.md

Archipel Orchestrator

Orchestrator is the component that is responsible for decision making in an Archipel Federation.

External services modes

Active mode - the service will be launched in active mode only on the leader node
Passive mode - the service will be launched in passive mode on all other non-leader nodes

Archipel Orchestrator Workflow

Launch external service in passive mode
Send node metrics to Archipel Chain
Retrieve other nodes metrics from Archipel Chain
Retrieve current leader from Archipel Chain and determine its availability
If the current leader is alive, do nothing and ensure that the service was launched in passive mode
If the current leader is not alive, try to take its place by making a transaction to Archipel Chain
If the transaction succeeded, the current node becomes the current leader of the federation
Do supplementary checks (anyone other is alive, Archipel Chain Node has any peers...)
If supplementary checks pass launch external service in active mode

Archipel Orchestrator for HA Polkadot Validator Setup

The first service targeted by Archipel is Polkadot Validator.

The Polkadot node can be launched in two modes:

Active mode - Polkadot node in with validator option
Passive mode - Polkadot node in the sync-only mode

We are also planning to support other services.

More information on orchestrator/README.md

More information on DAppNodePackage-archipel/README.md

Additional Documentation Resources

Keys Initialization doc

Testing doc

Deployment doc

Acknowledgements

The bootstrap development of Archipel is financed by WEB3 Foundation's grant program Wave4. Thanks a lot for support.

w3f-grants-archive / archipel Goto Github PK

archipel's Introduction