Welcome!

This is a cross-post from Dash Forum

This proposal is meant to finally address the minimum ongoing infrastructure requirements of the Dash project. Coming out of our recent review of our needs, infrastructure was one area that clearly required some investment. Critical Dash assets are being hosted on
private servers, donated servers, etc. In addition, the provider of our Bamboo Cloud – which we use to compile all versions of Dash – announced on May 24th that the product will be discontinued. Needless to say, as the project grows and matures, our infrastructure needs are changing.

In an ideal scenario – and hopefully in the long-run – we would like to host Dash infrastructure on dedicated equipment, but that would be cost-prohibitive at our current scale. However, there is much that can be done to improve our infrastructure without a great deal of
investment.

First, we need to replace the functionality of the discontinued cloud Bamboo service. After evaluating our options, we propose purchasing our own hardware. By owning our own server, we can compile new versions muchmore efficiently, which accelerates our automated testing (continuous integration).  This will make all of our development teams more efficient, especially during the testing phases of each release. As the development efforts ramp up the second half of this year, having a
dedicated Bamboo server is becoming only more critical, and will address a pain-point for our development efforts.

For other infrastructure needs, we feel that we can continue to operate using cloud-based infrastructure, which has lower upfront costs, more flexibility to add or remove capacity, and yet is still hosted in a professionally managed datacenter. It would also ensure that these assets are under the control of the project, as opposed to individuals who are presently donating capacity.

A special thanks to @moocowmoo for leading this effort and taking on our infrastructure planning and management.

Here are the details on the hardware and services we propose as part of our minimum ongoing infrastructure needs. Please note that when 12.1 is deployed a separate proposal will be needed to fund the ongoing costs. This proposal covers only one-time costs and first month’s expenses.

Compile/Deploy/Backup server
Budget:
   $3000 for hardware (one-time cost)
   $150 per month for co-location and replacement parts
Server’s roles:
     - Continuous Integration (Bamboo slave)
     - Private Docker Registry (generate/deploy production images)
     - Online Incremental Backup (first tier hourly backup)
Specifications:
(subject to change according to available deals at the time of purchase
and USD available based on the Dash exchange rate when paid)
     1U enclosure, redundant power supply
     1x Motherboard (TBD), 2x 1Gb NIC
     2x 8-core AMD Opteron
     128G RAM
     2x 1TB SSD
    2x 6TB HDD

Cloud infrastructure costs
Budget:
     $250 per month for AWS and Google services and administration
Roles:
     - AWS : Route53 DNS zone management
     - AWS : EC2 web server instances
     - AWS : S3 for web server instances
     - AWS : Backups and auditing
     - Google: Gmail for domains

Requested funding is as follows for the July 6th budget cycle:

• 362.67 Dash for Bamboo server ($3,000.00 USD @ $8.272 per Dash based on June 18th average rate at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/price-dash.html)
• 18.13 Dash for first month’s Bamboo server colocation hosting and parts ($150 USD)
• 30.22 Dash for first month’s cloud infrastructure ($250 USD)
• 5.00 Dash reimbursement for the proposal cost

Total: 416.02 Dash

Note: Should any funding remain after the project is complete, we will apply those funds toward future infrastructure funding needs