Name of Project
Decentralize Harmony DAO Compute Workloads
Proposal overview
Hello, my name is Wes Floyd and I’d like to propose a grant to help further “decentralize” Harmony’s DAO community compute workloads. Specifically, I would like to help Harmony build a plan to migrate less sensitive compute workloads from centralized cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS) to a decentralized crypto based alternative, such as Akash (built on Cosmos).
Grant goals:
- To further decentralize Harmony DAO (The Way of Harmony DAOs. This year, the Harmony Foundation is… | by Li Jiang | Harmony | Medium) by migrating less sensitive compute workloads off AWS to a more decentralized cloud infrastructure service.
- Reduce monthly cloud costs for Harmony.
- Promote the development of critical Web3 core infrastructure built on Harmony EVM.
Specific Plans:
- Work with DAO operations team to inventory less sensitive compute workloads that would be good candidates for migration to a decentralized service, e.g. documentation, discourse forums.
- Measure the value to Harmony of migrating the services in terms of monthly cost savings, reputational benefit, service uptime availability etc.
- Implement a proof of concept to move an initial small workload to a decentralized service
Justification for Grant
Why decentralize further?
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Regulatory risk: KYC (Know Your Customer) and de-platforming risk of cloud services (e.g. AWS) due to ever changing crypto regulatory environment.
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Financial risk: downtime (outages) caused by cloud providers prompting a shift (or backup planning) to decentralized providers.
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Reputation risk: decentralized services and organizations cannot market themselves to users as “fully decentralized” if their core services rely on centralized IT.
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Security: reliance on public cloud providers (AWS, Cloudflare) entail outage and hacking liability. While any system is exposed to outage and hacking risk, reliance on centralized cloud providers is a very different mode than decentralized providers in regards to transparency and censorship resistance.
Note: as of today, the only viable decentralized compute services are Akash and Flux. If Harmony has concerns about deploying to these non-Harmony based solutions then your feedback alone will help justify whether there is enough demand for me to build a more Harmony native (Akash bridge) solution in the future.
Proposal ask
Inventory plan: 8 hrs
Migration plan: 16 hrs
Proof of Concept: 16 hrs
Rate: $125/hr
Total: $5,000 USD (or equivalent in any cryptocurrency/token)
*In addition to the hourly rate, I would like to request to use Harmony DAO members as professional references if they are highly satisfied with the work performed.
Metrics for success
Inventory of current centralized compute workloads to include the following for each:
- Cost per month (USD).
- Deplatform/Outage Risk (high/medium/low) to Harmony if the workload were to be deplatformed or experience an outage.
- Security Exposure Risk (high/medium/low) of the workload.
Migration plan to a decentralized compute cloud for each workload including:
- Effort (hrs) require to migrate each workload.
- Specific steps required to migrate the workload or to make it available as an active standby on the decentralized cloud offering, such as: active data backups, DNS forwarding, load balancing, and credential management.
Proof of Concept:
- Migrate 1 low risk workload to a decentralized cloud provider to validate the migration plan.
- Deliver a custom runbook with all steps required for Harmony to launch the workload.
External links
References:
My crypto/Web3 newsletter: https://wesfloyd.substack.com/
Contact:
https://twitter.com/weswfloyd
Discord: checkyourself#6104
Cheers!
