Yesterday was a very busy day for me at ADA North Pool. We created the staking pool ANP on the main net at 20:45 Eastern Time the 29th July or the “fork of July” as some of the SPOs have started calling it. I was also on the 100th episode of The Cardano Effect where I said little sensible things and cheered with my Cognac. I was quite tired at that point with 2 weeks of hard work and driving home to operation center. We registered ANPNL on the 29th but had some problems and some users reported not seeing the pool so we resigned it (sceduled for resignation in epoch 209 one epoch from the current 208 epoch). A new pool was registered today the 30th and this is the one you should delegate to. I hope this has caused little trouble for delegaters, but it was better to do it now early than later. Also I made a small video to the community about the dawn of Shelley:
In preperation for main net we will cancel two Hetzner servers from 1. august. Instead of two 16gb ecc ram servers ANP have ordered a single 64gb ECC ram server with much higher cpu power and datacenter ssd. This means we will have a single German relay (but roughly 4x the power of the previous two servers in Germany) and instead use the google cloud vm’s to spread our relays more across the world. This also actually helps us cut costs so we remain competitive and well within the minimum cost structure that is currently proposed for the Shelley main net.
In preperation for main met Shelley staking pool operations ADA North Pool is making new introduction videoes that will be used as a way for new delegators to the staking pool to get to know me as a pool operator. This video here is about the hardware and will showcase the servers in the home location while also briefly looking at the hybrid model with rented servers in Germany through Hertzner and with Google through its compute engine.
In order to increase redundancy of our services we have migrated our webserver to a dedicated google cloud vm while also keeping local home server copies. This will allow the home server to be even more dedicated to the pool operations. ANP will make regular backup copies of the website to make sure we can post the website anywhere else in case the google vm where to fail.
This also means we are next going to rewamp grafana data services so for the time being they will be none working until a new rewamped service will be revealed later.
LiveView of the 3 relays in the 3 different continents we are now also covering on top of our Norwegian home servers and German remote dedicated servers.
ADA North Pool and ANP Northern Lights take network infrastructure as serious as we can and we try to evolve whenever we get a chance to do so. In this case we now are using the IOHK nix docker images that we deploy through a docker swarm across the world. We now have 5 public relays in Norway across two different computers with seperate fiber connections and 2 internal private relays handling incomming request to our cores. This on top of 1 ITN pool and 1 ITN relay. We have redundancy through using a mikrotik router (can handle 5 million 64kb packets per second of routing) for a 2nd internal LAN network across the home computers so even if one of the internet is down we can still reach globaly through the other. On top of this we have 2 servers in Germany handling 4 relays (and 2 ITN relays). Finally we have now expanded outside europe with a single google cloud vm (1cpu 4gb) individually in each with premium network infrastructure tier in USA (US WEST) and Japan (Tokyo) while a regular network infrastructure tier in Australia (Sydney) as well. We hope this will mean we can contribute even more to the overall network health of Cardano while also benefitting our own two core pools in our homeservers in Norway ANP and ANPNL.
Full list of relays: norway1-relay5.adanorthpool.com norway1-relay4.adanorthpool.com norway2-relay3.adanorthpool.com norway2-relay2.adanorthpool.com norway2-relay1.adanorthpool.com germany1-relay1.adanorthpool.com germany1-relay2.adanorthpool.com germany2-relay1.adanorthpool.com germany2-relay2.adanorthpool.com uswest1-relay1.adanorthpool.com japan1-relay1.adanorthpool.com australia1-relay1.adanorthpool.com On top of this we have: 3 ITN relays and 1 ITN pool. 2 Private relays in Norway. 2 pools in Norway.
After considerations and something I have deliberated for the last 3 months I have decided ANP is going to have a 2nd staking pool called ANP Northern Lights. While we are supporters of decentralization and certainly we will not be going massive amount of 1%pools on you guys like 1percent did during the ITN, for competitive reasons we believe a model with 2 pools allow us a lot more flexibility in what cost structure we can offer our delegators. One main reason is we are not in this for charity in itself (but certainly will support charitable efforts if we can afford it like we have done so far with Kiva lending and folding@home) and we are trying to be profitable to such a degree we can continue do do supportive causes like patroning pooltool.io and developing the ecosystem further with our own projects in the future. If you think this is terrible you are free to delegate to others. If on other hand you can see the value I am trying to contribute to the ecosystem like for example my latest presentation during the Cardano Virtual summit we hope you will consider delegating to us or remaing a delegator with us if you have so during the ITN.
Main logo for ANP Northern Lights2nd logo for ANP Northern Lights (Possibly subject to revision)
