-
@ cloud fodder
2024-10-12 15:54:42
# relay.tools quarterly report
October, 2024
# Project Updates
Milestone: Relay.tools is celebrating 1 year of OpenSats! Cheers to everyone that made this possible.
Relays were very popular this quarter. Scaling efforts were prioritized! This is a good indicator for relay.tools as it means that it's healthily growing. Development was executed well, completing one project at a time across the whole stack.
# Relay Discovery
I've been working with @sandwich from nostr.watch on NIP66.
NIP66 will be an ABSOLUTE GAMECHANGER for clients in finding of their relays. This was always a vision for relay.tools and I am honored to be working with @sandwich on what is a pretty amazing solution. We are now in a phase of client outreach, to gather client feedback and help them implement/understand the overall goal of the NIP.
TLDR: the goal is to create a distributed version of the nostr.watch data, using nostr events.
- [x] implemented NIP66 draft7 (the 'final' design) in monitorlizard
- [x] started shipping events to the monitor relay(s) in collab with nostr.watch backends and relay.tools backends.
- [x] fixed bugs and released new binaries for monitorlizard (a NIP66 data reporting tool)
# Auth Proxy Rollout
The NIP42 Auth Proxy project went really well this quarter. It's now serving tons of traffic and most bugs with clients have been squashed and the proxy hardened. This has become a very popular feature on the relays, as AUTH has many benefits beyond protecting of DMs.
- [x] testing vs. NIP17 and bugs fixed
- [x] cluster operations (multiple proxies)
# UI/UX
A huge milestone this quarter was the release of the settings wizard. This is a walkthrough for new (and current) users of all the available settings for different 'relay types'. A lot of work over the last year has gone into the culmination of these settings and the wizard was a major step forward to help users understand what their options are when running a relay.
Another major UI change was the introduction of a relay feed to the landing page for a relay. This is called the relay explorer. The idea was to move to a single page app, and re-do navigation for easy relay browsing and discovery.
- [x] settings wizard released
- [x] relay explorer v2
# Installer
The installer had lots of good effort put in by me and some nice contributors. We did a couple iterations on documentation and facilitated in the creation of 2-3 new relay hubs that are using this installer infrastructure.
Some additions to the installer were:
- [x] docs for building self-hosted machine images and installing on a VPS
- [x] FULLY AUTOMATIC SSL certificate handling for multiple domains with certbot
- [x] self-hosted influxDB (for relay metrics)
- [x] fix bugs with auto-deploy upgrade
# Billing/Invoicing/Support
The billing system had some improvements this quarter and many invoices were sent. :) It now has better super-admin tools to notify users of past-due balances via nostr (With NDK). This took a few iterations of deciding the best way to contact users of nostr and figuring out why they don't respond to messages. It's a learning experience all the way around and the billing system will evolve over time in ways that are conducive to remaining 100% nostr for user communication and support.
The support system also showed signs of life, and people were able to use it to contact me with their questions via the various help-desk methods that I've been rolling out. (A relay, a support npub, DMs, NIP17 DMs, simplex)
# Scaling!
Relay.tools successfully completed the first scale-out event. This is HUGE. Relays take more and more bandwidth and resources as they establish themselves, while at the same time needing a reasonable low-cost environment to grow in. To meet their demands the horizontal scaling is important. This will scale on commodity hardware or VPSs with ZERO vendor lock-in.
- [x] multi-server clustering with ZERO cloud vendor lock-in
- [x] deployment pipeline and capacity planning
- [x] HAproxy and additional AUTH proxies fronting all services
- [x] internal/external network support