Using Reverse Proxy

To make it easier to connect to SKALE Chains, developers can use a reverse proxy to load balance transactions across a SKALE Chain’s 16 individual node endpoints. The core team provides a basic reverse proxy for convenience to each of the mainnet and staging SKALE Chains. Developers and ecosystem contributors are encouraged to deploy and customize reverse proxy settings and methods for application optimization.

SKALE Proxy

As mentioned earlier, dApps may use a reference implementation of SKALE Proxy hosted by SKALE, but it’s preferable to use your own setup. When it comes to setting up your own SKALE Proxy, it is recommended to use proxy-provision as described below.

Alternatively, to experiment or deploy your own reverse proxy in a manual way, go to SKALE Proxy repo.

SKALE Proxy Load Balancing

The current skale-proxy deployed by the core team uses an Nginx load balancing method where requests are distributed between the 16 nodes based on the client’s IP address. Should an individual endpoint be unavailable, the next available endpoint is used. Read more about this method here: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_upstream_module.html#ip_hash. You can find alternative methods here: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/load_balancing.html

Fallback

If a reverse proxy fails, developers should employ a fallback policy that fits their needs. These policies may include, for example, a fallback to another reverse proxy or a fallback to any of the 16 direct individual endpoints.

SKALE Network assumes a tolerance of the nodes becoming Byzantine. Therefore, a fallback policy to the direct endpoints should assume that of these endpoints may become unresponsive.

Proxy-provision

Proxy-provision is a convenient way to run skale-proxy in the cloud (AWS, DO, …).

Node requirements

Minimum requirements for machine in cloud:

4GB Ram
2 physical core CPU
50 GB storage

Recommended requirements:

8GB Ram
4 physical core CPU
50 GB storage

One of the main parameter for the reverse-proxy is a bandwidth, reverse-proxy is redirecting requests and not use as much computational power and storage. So it is necessary to have a good bandwitdth and create a machine at the close location to the area of usage(Europe, Asia, US, …)

Minimum requirements: bandwidth support for 300 req/s

Recommended requirements: bandwidth support for 1000 req/s

Setup

Register machine in the cloud
Do installation steps on you working machine(different than registered machine at the step 1)
Do configuration steps (Example below)
Copy .ssh/authorized_keys from registered machine on step 1 to files/authorized_keys
Run ansible-playbook -i inventory main.yaml

Example of inventory without block-explorer connecting to SKALE network on Ethereum:

[proxy]
proxy-0 ansible_host='1.2.3.4'(IP address of registered machine at step 1) ansible_ssh_user='root'

[all:vars]
ansible_ssh_user='root' # username on machine(s) - e.g. ubuntu
ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3

base_path='/root' # home path on the machine(s) - e.g. /home/ubuntu
proxy_domain='example.skalenodes.com' # proxy domain name
explorer_domain='' # explorer domain name (optional for proxy-only setup)
chain_id='0x1' # Chain ID of the network where SM contracts are deployed - e.g. 0x1
network_name='mainnet' # SKALE Network name - e.g. mainnet / staging / etc
eth_endpoint='https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/INFURA-API-TOKEN' # Ethereum Mainnet endpoint

main_website_url='https://skale.network/' # SKALE Website URL
docs_website_url='https://docs.skale.network/docs/' # SKALE Docs Website URL
networks='{}' # Legacy variable, keep as is
abis_url='https://github.com/skalenetwork/skale-network/tree/master/releases/mainnet' # URL of SM contracts ABI

cert_mode='certbot'  # 'certbot' - generate using certbot / custom - upload your own

do_token='YOUR-DO-TOKEN' # optional - DigitalOcean token (for 'certbot' cert_mode)
email='[email protected]' # optional - SSL cert email (for 'certbot' cert_mode)

And copy abi to files/abi.json

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