Public Board to Announce 3node Maintenances and More

Public Board to Announce 3node Maintenances and More

Hi guys! I want to propose a new tool for farmers and users to communicate with each other in case of maintenance, network/deployment issues.

A Particular Incident

So little adventure on the Telegram channel where a user saw that their deployment wasn’t accessible.

We found out the 3node was down, and it could get back up when the farmer looked at the problem and did a reboot. All good, the user went on Telegram and the farmer was very responsive.

But how we do tackle this “problem” with many more farmers and users on the TF Grid?

The Public Board Proposition

We could have a public board where users AND farmers can announce news of maintenance or else.

  • Example 1: A user cannot access their 3node XYZ, they go on the board and make a statement:

  • My deployment on node XYZ is not reachable. Does the farmer know that is the issue?

  • Then the farmer, who is “subscribed” to the public board service, would receive an email or an alert: “A user cannot access your 3node. Check your farm”.

  • Example 2: A farmer knows they will be doing maintenance on node XYZ, they write on the public board: The node XYZ will be down for maintenance from moment_1 to moment_2.

  • The user gets an alert and can be prepared.

These are 2 simple examples, but I am sure you guys see how practical this could be.

In short, farmers and users can subscribe to the alert public board service, and create and receive alerts.

This might be accessible on the Threefold Dashboard. Propositions are welcomed!

A Way to Catalogue Bugs and Scan Potential Improvements

This would be a good way to catalogue the issues we get during farming and deployments.

It would amount to a kind of “Log issues” from the perspective of the whole TF Grid.

Questions and Feedback

What do you think, people of the New Internet?

Let us know and we can improve on this idea and see how to implement it.

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I think is a really important idea for the future of the grid. While the grid offers a decentralized cloud experience it functions more similarly to a co-location.

We definitely need to put deployers in contact with their farmers not only for issues but for the possibility of driving engagement. As a deployer there has been multiple times I have wanted to contact the host of a node to ask questions about its network.

As a farmer I would adore if a deployer reached out and asked for some changes,

A great example of this was when @simao reached out to me me because he was doing a lot of testing and wanted a dedicated node on testnet. Him being able to ask me if I’d be open to move it not only resulted in him renting more capacity, but also an increase in my rewards due to the dedicated node bonus. Beneficial to us both.

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Good points here Drew.

We need such inputs.

Tell us if you have ideas of how to present such board too!

Public Board for TF Grid 4.0

TF Grid 4.0 is coming! Should we get ready? Most surely.

So now that we want a public board, what form should it have?

Many possibilities.

We can do a simple ticket format as such:

Public board: Ticket Issue/Announcement

  • type of user
    • farmer
    • deployer
    • user
    • validator
  • network
    • main
    • test
    • dev
    • qa
  • internet region
    • state the regional internet region (TF Grid 4.0)
  • type of issue/announce
    • deployment
      • playground
      • terraform
      • zonaris
      • foldit
      • other solutions
    • farming
      • certified
      • diy
  • Issue/announcement
    • state the content in a few words

Public Board Visibility and Categorization

The content would be shown only to those interested.
Users/farmers/developers/validators can subscribe to the content they want news of.

By default, if your account deployed a workload on node XYZ, you get issue/announcement related to that node. So if a farmer sends a maintenance alert, or else, you would receive the information on your account’s TF Dashboard.

Same principle would apply for other categories, such as regional internets, e.g. if Zanzibar Regional internet has a news, you receive it in the public board.

Say the news is: the regional internet announces an opening for new validator slots, for an expansion phase. Then farmers of that regions, users, dev, validators, can decide if they want to be a part of the expansion.

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Furthering the disccusion on the Public Board, here what Flow Wolf shared on the Telegram chat:

"We need a way to speak to deployers or to farmers as deployer.

It needs some kind of contact exchange contract between deployer and farmer which comes into effect the moment the deployer deploys something, via email or better additional alert platform.

I have to contact all deployers with one click. Like “attention in x days we have a downtime of 1h, contact us to disagree.”

The better additional alert platform would be the public board.

There isn’t much activity on this post, but the overall demand of such public board is there.

I think we are close to be ready to share this as an issue/demand on the Github: https://github.com/threefoldtech/tfgrid_dashboard/issues

@scott @weynandkuijpers @gosam
I tag you here. I’d be curious to get your feedback before I write the issue to demand a public board on the TF Dashboard.

1 Like