I want to run a Cardano stake pool. Since Cardano is the best
I red a lot of tutorials the last few weeks and learned some linux.
However, some questions arose concerning the architectural setup for a staking pool and I would like your opinion.
Question 01:
I noticed 2 IP adresses are required to run the pool successful?
Therefor using an online service running the block producer node/server would be ideal.
But in my mind,this is against the principles for a decentralization system. When using for example an AWS server, Amazon can shut down their services, furthermore taking the stake pool offline.
Any thoughts about this topic?
Question 02:
If using a web service is fine, which one are the most recommended, cost-effective, reliable?
Question 03:
I also red a lot about running a stake pool on small computer modules, such as Raspberry Pi using ARM chipset architecture. Does someone has experience with this setup?
Question 04:
Do you really need 4 systems:
1 block producer node (running on an online service (AWS, …) → first IP address?)
You can run your pool on a single IP adresse.There is a lot of pools doing this. But you must have a strong businesse grade internet provider or a redondant connexion.
If it is your first try with Cloud Services, start with AWS Lightsail, it’s simple…but expensive.
Raspberry Pi are not powerfull enought. Not enought RAM.
You don’t need necesserly 4 servers, you can run a pool with, one blockproducer and only one relay. The best setup IMO is 1 BP, 2 relays, 1 spare node, 1 air grapped machine.
Since the relay nodes are the ones that should have good connections to other nodes, that should run 24/7, those are the ones I would put on servers in datacentres and the block producer is the one you could run at home if you want (since it only has to run and be online if you are scheduled to produce a block).
Also, a large part of the reason to have two relay nodes is to have some redundancy, so having them both at the same location spoils that part of the reason. Ideally, they should be in different datacentres by different vendors, if possible in different countries, on different continents.
Yes, air-gapped machine is strongly recommended.
Finally, just to prevent unrealistic expectations, you do know that you need to get a lot of ADA in stake to regularly produce blocks and get rewards, don’t you?
There are a lot of successful pools running on Raspberry Pi, nevertheless minimum RAM requirements is 16GB, so running on Raspberry Pi is quite advance topic. I would say it is possible, but probably is not recommended for beginner.
I just want to play around first before starting the real deal. I thought 1 million ADA is the min and 32 million the maximum to get good pool performance.
After a bit of digging I’m planning to use Contabo (cloud VPS M option) in combination with AWS Lightsail as LuckySlam suggested. To avoid beginner struggles and running/maintaining the bare metal myself.
