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Currently setting up a bakery and have the following architecture in mind.

  • Four public nodes running on four different datacenters on two different clouds
  • Two nodes running in private mode connected only to the four public nodes, also in the cloud
  • Baker, endorser and accuser running on 1 of the private nodes and the same stack on "hot standby" on the other
  • Both bakers using the same remote tezos-signer
  • A tezos-signer daemon running on a local laptop (because battery) with a ledger and two internet connections (fiber + 4G)
  • All nodes connected via a SDN/VPN

enter image description here

What does the community think about this setup? Sounds like a decent HA setup for a medium sized bakery? Any glitches? Overkill?

Feedback much appreciated 😬👍

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    Hi, asbjornenge! The folks here will be eager to help you with your issue, but an overly broad request for review raises more questions than answers. Folks can only offer various opinions which you may be able to pick through later, but Stack Exchange is designed to ask very specific, applied questions like the problem you encountered in this build. You might ask if a specific component meets some <specification> of Tezos (for example); but as this stands, this question is about to be closed as a poll of the community — not really a good fit for this type of Q&A site.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 22:28
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    @RobertCartaino Noted. I'll try to keep my questions more specific from now on 👍
    – asbjornenge
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 22:35
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    @asbjornenge What do you consider "medium sized" and why? What are you gaining by having such a complex topology if you have 1 roll or 500 rolls?
    – utdrmac
    Commented Feb 1, 2019 at 20:18
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    @utdrmac I consider a medium sized baker one that holds between 100k to 500k XTZ. If we held 1 million XTZ the setup would be more sophisticated. From this setup I gain high availability - ensuring that I won't miss a baking slot, and double bake protection - ensuring we don't get penalized. So I ensure good stats for our bakery in the years to come. Also peace of mind 😉 It probably does not help that I have a HA architect background 😝🙈
    – asbjornenge
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 10:26
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    Why does it matter if you held 1 million XTZ or 10k? You still only need 1 node to bake/endorse/accuse. This feels incredibly overcomplicated and "increases" the likelyhood of double baking since the baker could run on either VM. How do you prevent two bakers from running at the same time?
    – utdrmac
    Commented Feb 5, 2019 at 13:36

1 Answer 1

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Looks like a good start.

Unless your (4G)-router has a battery consider an uninterruptible power source (UPS).

A second laptop with signer and additional ledger on standby in a separate location close by will improve HA in case of hardware problems, fire/water damage or a prolonged power outage.

Probably more important is your software setup. Does the node/baker/signer software run as a service so it will start again in case of a restart? Here is a great guide to do this: https://github.com/etomknudsen/tezos-baking

Here is a general guide about baker security by Obsidian Systems: https://link.medium.com/ckapz7MOST

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    Thanks for excellent feedback! I'm going to use a laptop with 4G builtin so no battery issues there. Will it work with multiple signer / ledgers? Would I not need the same account / privkeys on both ledgers? Also multiple ledgers would probably not give me double bake protection? Software stack is all docker based running in a swarm and auto restarting, monitoring and alerts etc. 😉👍
    – asbjornenge
    Commented Jan 29, 2019 at 22:34
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    You can keep the second laptop with the signer and ledger offline. Just in case your first system breaks down you would manually activate the second. Hence it should be in a close by location. Yes, you'd need the same private key on both ledgers. You can clone your ledger.
    – Andreas Tissen
    Commented Jan 30, 2019 at 5:16

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