Hello ICON Blockchain! Insight Data Science here to invite everyone in the P-Rep community to a weekly infrastructure call. While we are barreling down on the end of the P-Rep election, a dynamic has inevitably formed where teams are trying to out promote each other based on what they bring to the table. This meeting is not for any of that as we need to start thinking ahead in how we all can come together to build a robust network. If the inherent competition that is the election divided us, let our common challenge over infrastructure bring us together.

Because we are a global community, we need to be inclusive of everyone. Thus we put up a poll in the Telegram P-Rep channel to get a sense of what times and days P-Rep teams would like to schedule the calls. The voters have spoken and the time for the first call will be 6AM UTC on Thursday the 19th of September. We also put up an agenda that we are inviting others in the community to suggest top topics of discussion. For the first meeting, we’ll be discussing topics mostly having to do with network infrastructure, security, and testing. Insight will also walk everyone through our one click deployment and demonstrate how easy it is to deploy our infrastructure with automation. The meeting will be recorded and posted on Insight’s youtube channel. Meeting invites will be posted on the P-Rep and TestNet telegram channels just prior to them starting.

We also collected some data on what kind of deployment environment each team is in. Currently it is a nice spread between all the different cloud platforms with AWS leading with 6 users, then GCP, Digital Ocean, and Bare Metal coming in second with two users each, and Aure and some other platform with one user each. This is a narrow sample of our P-Rep population though likely representative of the infrastructure that is in use. While a diverse set of deployment environments is encouraged, we are building out network topologies whereby node operators will be able to maintain a public component that is able to securely tunnel to any ultimate setting (ie bare metal or otherwise).

Really excited about engaging with the community and working together. The network is only as strong as the weakest links and thus we need to make sure all node operators are up to spec and don’t serve as a threat to the rest of the community. Infrastructure is our common challenge so lets work together to build a strong network.