Active EOS - Block Producer Candidate

We at Active EOS are happy to announce our EOS block producer candidacy. We are an independent Los Angeles, California company dedicated to building out the EOS software tools ecosystem. Our team has built and delivered server infrastructure projects for some of the most successful tech companies in the LA area. We believe we’re uniquely prepared to run block producers with world-class reliability.

In addition to hosting EOS block producers, we aim to accelerate the growth of the EOS ecosystem. The EOS platform is young, therefore it’s missing many of the software tools required of mature software projects. Thus, we pledge to keep all of our technology open-source. Our infrastructure buildout includes innovations that enable high availability, cross-cloud block producer configurations. Any block producer will be able to harness this technology freely.

We at believe that the EOS project will change the world in an incredible way, and we will do our part in advancing that mission.

Thank you for your consideration.

David Huie
CEO of Active EOS

Candidate information

Company Name: Active EOS

Website: https://activeeos.com

Twitter: @ActiveEOS

Telegram channel: Active EOS Forum

Telegram account: @ActiveEOS

Company headquarters: Los Angeles, CA, US

Technology

Server locations

Oregon and California, US

Type of servers

Cloud servers distributed between Amazon and Google clouds

Testnet nodes

Node name: Marilyn

https: https://marilyn.activeeos.com

p2p: marilyn.activeeos.com:9876

Team

David Huie - CEO and Infrastructure Architect

David is an experienced engineer and technologist, with a background in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems. David has worked at companies such as Dollar Shave Club, Yelp, and Splice. David studied computer science at Harvey Mudd College.

LinkedIn

Github

Eleanor Demis - Full-stack Development Lead

Eleanor is a chemist-turned-software engineer, specializing in backend software. Eleanor currently works at Dollar Shave Club in Los Angeles, CA, and has a master’s degree in chemistry from UCLA.

LinkedIn

Github

Abraham Huie - Community Lead

Abraham is a seasoned technical and customer support manager. Abraham currently works for NationBuilder in Los Angeles, CA, and has a degree in political economy from UC Berkeley.

LinkedIn

Technical Specifications

We will initially run block producers in both Amazon (AWS) and Google (GCE) clouds, with planned support for more. Our initial buildout will feature technology that enables block producer failover between different clouds. This ensures that cloud computing providers are never single points of failure. The system will build upon the state of the art in cloud infrastructure, using technologies such as Kubernetes and Etcd. Kubernetes is a platform for managing containerized applications. It will unify the software deployment experience between clouds and provide us with features, such as block producer auto-healing, that help with redundancy. Similarly, Etcd is a database that will hold our internal block producer state of the world, allowing for failover when block producers go down.

We will initially run two AWS EC2 i3.16xlarge instances and two GCE n1-highmem-64 instances. At any given time, just a single node will be a block producer, with the other three standing by.

AWS i3.16xlarge instance

CPU: 64-core Intel Xeon E5 v4 @ 2.3 GHz

Memory: 523GB

Hard drive: 15.2 TB NVMe SSD

Network performance: 25 Gbps

Cost: $4.992 per hour

GCE n1-highmem-64 instance

CPU: 64-core Intel Xeon E5 v4 @ 2.2 GHz

Memory: 416 GiB

Hard drive: 3 TB NVMe SSD

Network performance: 16 Gbps

Cost: $3.7888 per hour

Cost estimate

We estimate that these servers, along with the additional servers needed for our Kubernetes and Etcd clusters, will cost about $25k per month.

Scaling plan

Our initial plan is to monitor the EOS network usage and scale accordingly. When using Kubernetes, the process of scaling and upgrading nodes is straightforward and simple, which makes it the perfect system on which to run EOS block producers. Once we have attached new, more powerful, nodes to the cluster, Kubernetes can automatically move our block producers onto them.

Community benefit projects

Open source

Active EOS plans on open-sourcing all of the tools used to create our redundant, Kubernetes-based infrastructure.

EOS Helm charts

We are developing Helm charts for running the entire EOS platform, including block producers and wallets, on Kubernetes. This will become a vital tool since Kubernetes can be used in workflows from development to production.

EOS cross-cloud failover system

As described above, we’re currently implementing a Kubernetes and Etcd-based system to provide cross-cloud block producer redundancy. Using this system, block producers can run in extremely reliable setups.

Sponsorships

We will sponsor developers to develop tools for EOS using the block reward revenue. These sponsorships will initially be towards developers working on open-source Active EOS projects. However, we will eventually extend this to developers working on the EOS ecosystem at-large. We plan on having an open application process for finding developers in need of sponsorship.

Meetups

We run the Meetup group LA Decentralized Web, which gathers developers to discuss technical aspects of decentralized technologies. We plan on sponsoring EOS and decentralized web-themed events through it.

Roadmap

June 2018

• Production multi-cloud, redundant block producer
• EOS-themed LA Decentralized Web Meetup
• Open-source EOS Helm charts
• Open-source EOS cross-cloud failover system

July 2018

• Financial transparency report for June 2018

August 2018

• Open-source sponsorships start
• Financial transparency report for July 2018

Position on dividends

We plan on operating as a self-funded company and will not provide unaffiliated voters with dividends. More information can be found at our website.