A CDN for Steem.Ninja - [Development Update]

steem.ninja (66)in #steemninja • 5 years ago (edited)

A CDN for Steem.Ninja - [Development Update]

As many of you know Oracle-D recently released @steem.ninja. It offers a broad variety of services on the Steem blockchain. So far it allows easy on-boarding for every website, to buy a delegation with your credit/debit card and soon will allow you to quickly top up your Steem balance with your card. We received amazing feedback and responses from the community. Thus we will continuously improve the services provided.

Since we released the new website steem.ninja we got more and more messages on how to embed the Steem.Ninja logo and banners into posts, websites and blogs.

With the increasing demand and number of total requests made to our server we decided to setup a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to improve the performance of our site and guarantee high availability.

The result of these efforts is cdn.steem.ninja. Our CDN is based on AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS is a collection of cloud based tools for developer to easily deploy scalable solutions.

Specifically cdn.steem.ninja uses the following AWS services:

Route53 (DNS manager)
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
CloudFront (Content Delivery Network)
Certificate Manager (issues TLS certificate [HTTPS])

Route 53 - DNS manager

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
--- Source: What is Route53?

Below you see the DNS zone for cdn.steem.ninja hosted with Route53:

id 53459
opcode QUERY
rcode NOERROR
flags QR RD RA
;QUESTION
cdn.steem.ninja. IN ANY
;ANSWER
cdn.steem.ninja. 59 IN A 13.33.244.50
cdn.steem.ninja. 59 IN A 13.33.244.109
cdn.steem.ninja. 59 IN A 13.33.244.75
cdn.steem.ninja. 59 IN A 13.33.244.120
cdn.steem.ninja. 21599 IN NS ns-111.awsdns-13.com.
cdn.steem.ninja. 21599 IN NS ns-1458.awsdns-54.org.
cdn.steem.ninja. 21599 IN NS ns-1809.awsdns-34.co.uk.
cdn.steem.ninja. 21599 IN NS ns-793.awsdns-35.net.
cdn.steem.ninja. 899 IN SOA ns-1458.awsdns-54.org. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400
;AUTHORITY
;ADDITIONAL

Explanation of the response above:

We used Google's public DNS resolver 8.8.8.8 to get ANY DNS records for the domain cdn.steem.ninj (QUESTION)

The DNS resolver replied that there are four A, four NS and one SOA records.

The A records resolves to four IPv4 addresses and point to the server on which our files are stored.

The NS records are a list of DNS servers which are authoritative dns server

The SOA record (Start of Authority) includes administrative information about this DNS zone. It states that ns-1458.awsdns-54.org. is the primary DNS server and that awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. is the primary contact email.

If you want to learn more about DNS we suggest this article by CloudFlare: What is DNS?

S3 - Simple Storage Service

Let's start with a definition of what S3 is:

Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
--- Source: What Is Amazon S3?

That said it was a clear decision to use S3 as file storage for our CDN.
The S3 for cdn.steem.ninja is currently hosted in Ireland.

At the moment we only host a few images and javascript files on our CDN:

With more services being added to Steem.Ninja in the future the CDN will be used for more than our own assets. With the next release of our widget new users will be able to prefill their profile. Profile image and cover image will then also be hosted on our CDN.

CloudFront - The Content Delivery Network

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users.
--- Source: What is CloudFront?

With CloudFront we can be sure that our content is served always from nearby the users location. In the end this speeds up the loading of the webpage or individual asset.

So far we use the CDN for our media kit, which you can find here: steem.ninja/media

Integrate Steem.Ninja today: https://steem.ninja/widget

Steem.Ninja in a Nutshell

Steem.Ninja provides the following services as a complete turnkey package:

Easily purchase instant Steem accounts for $2.50 (minimum) with card payment.
Each account automatically gets a 15 Steem Power delegation for 90 days.
Easy purchase of 90 day Steem Power delegations in varying amounts with card payment.
Instant purchase of Steem using USD credit card payments (coming soon!)
Referral program (anyone can earn money for selling Steem accounts)
Account recovery in case your accounts get hacked.
Website Widget for easy implementation into any dapp / website front end
Easily sell Steem Power Delegations and earn percentage.

If you are interested in integrating Steem.Ninja into your website/app/dapp or project please go to the Ninja Widget Generator and feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.me/steemninja if you have any questions.

Please check out the
Introductory Steem.Ninja post for more information!

You can also implement the Steem.Ninja widget into your blogs, by simply posting your widget link into the body text of a blog

If you like what we do please vote for us as a witness: https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=oracle-d&approve=1

For any issues or queries please contact us on: [email protected]