Why not just run the server ourselves?
When we first started to consider the idea of running a stake pool, the first conversation we had was about how to make sure it was reliable, secure and easy to manage. Having a server on site would be the easiest to manage, but also had the highest chance of something happening to prevent the pool from being online. We live in an area with high electricity costs and about average internet reliability. We felt like the key metric to staying competitive is up-time.
This is where AWS comes into the picture.
The team already had experience working in the AWS universe, after building Lambda functions, utilizing multiple S3 buckets and various other projects. So AWS was a natural fit. Our first pool launched in the AWS US East Region!
After testing our early Shelley nodes, it became evident that we made the right decision. On the first testnet launch, we were able to get a pool up and running in a matter of a couple hours, backed by AWS reliability and performance. Our pool was producing blocks very quickly! Managing the pool was even quicker with the use of Grafana dashboards:
Expansion Into Europe, Asia and Africa!
As the testnets moved along we continued to monitor the pool, tweak the firewall settings, increase the hard drive space and rotate our keys without ever bringing the pool down. We continued producing blocks at a fast pace. This was a major factor in us feeling confident that a second pool would be beneficial to our customers. Enter Endeavor, Japan [ENDJA]! Because AWS has data centers all over the world, we are able to support our friends in Japan and the surrounding Asian nations, by creating a pool in an AWS data center located in Tokyo. The additional AWS node also acts as a redundant node for our US nodes!
All systems go for Shelley launch!
We are just days away from the Shelley mainnet launch and the whole team at Endeavor INTL cannot be more excited to see all of our hard work pay off for our delegators. If we keep producing blocks at the same rapid pace of our testnet pools, Endeavor Stake Pools will be awesome! It's going to be a fun ride and we hope you will join us!
Sincerely,
The Endeavor INTL Team!