# Polkashots maintenance January-April 2023

This treasury proposal is Between the Polkadot/Kusama Governance (Gov2) and MIDLDEV OÜ, a company registered in Estonia with registry number 14973249, commonly known as MIDL.dev.

## Service description

* A functioning infrastructure to provide usable blockchain database snapshots for the Polkadot and Kusama networks, to the benefit of node operators and validators,
* New snapshots at least once per day. Snapshots are filesystem dumps of the Polkadot and Kusama node storage backend files, of variety RocksDb and ParityDb, of type pruned, with a depth of 1000 blocks, compressed in lz4 format, that can be used by validators to quickly spin up or restore their infrastructure,
* A website frontend at polkashots.io with relevant metadata and download links, including a permanent link that always redirects to the most recent snapshot,
* Best effort incident and problem management,
* Redundant implementation setup which allows for continuity, seamless upgrades and basic disaster recovery & contingency management.

## Service Termination

[Warp Sync](https://substrate.stackexchange.com/a/5858/344) is now the recommended way to sync a Polkadot or Kusama node from scratch. After conducting a review, we have switched MIDL.dev operations to this method for all our validators.

Polkashots was primarily developed as an internal tool for our own usage. We made it available to all, becoming the first such service in existence, in early 2021. This was always meant as a [temporary solution](https://forum.polkadot.network/t/community-bootnodes-and-snapshot-providers/630), and we commend the team at Parity for implementing warp sync and thus providing a decentralized alternative to snapshot services.

Many validators were still relying on snapshot services such as polkashots.io as of the termination date. Now is a good time to terminate it and encourage everyone to make the switch. We have been providing this service on a pay-later basis and thus we are submitting our January-April 2023 for reimbursement one last time.

See previous submissions for reference:

* [proposal to the Kusama council for Q1/Q2 2021](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/124)
* [proposal to the Polkadot council for Q3/Q4 2021](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/80)
* [proposal to the Kusama Council for Q1/Q2 2022](https://hackmd.io/@nicolasochem/SkQv48pcc)
* [proposal to the Kusama Maintenance Council Q3/Q4 2022](https://hackmd.io/EietpRkQRDG3npwL07QKZw?view)

## Operational expenses

We are seeking cloud cost reimbursments for this last period of operations.

This is our fourth attempt:

* the [Polkadot Gov1 Proposal](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/274) was never acted on by the council,
* one [Polkadot Gov2 referendum](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/10) failed.
* then in july, we launched paired proposals on Polkadot and Kusama at the same time:
* the [Polkadot Gov2 proposal](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/10) for 999 DOT failed.
* the [Kusama Gov2 small spender proposal](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/referenda/238) for an amount of **332.5 KSM** passed on July 15th, 2023. This corresponds to 6,967.38 EUR.

This leaves us with 9,314.06 EUR (540.46 KSM at today EMA7 price) outstanding.

Therefore, we are seeking another Kusama Gov2 Small Spender proposal for 332.5 KSM. Shall this succeed, we will consider ourselves whole.

| Cost item | cost |
|------------------------------------------------|------------------|
| Cloud costs, GCP "midlps/626825809863" project | 16,148.97 EUR | |
| Cloud costs, Cloudflare R2 | 132.47 EUR (147.00 USD) | |
| Total for period | **16,281.44 EUR (18,294 USD)**|
| Paid Back by Kusama Gov2 on July 15th 2023 | 6.967.38 EUR |
| Outstanding | 9,314.06 EUR |

As the number of parachains is continually increasing, so was the cost of providing the service:

| | July 2022 | January 2023 | Apr 2023 |
| -------- | -------- | -------- | ---- |
| Kusama | 122Gi | 192Gi | 245Gi |
| Polkadot | 77Gi | 140Gi | 190Gi |

Google Cloud has the concept of "Projects" which allow for precise separation of infrastructure costs. All polkashots supporting infrastructure (Kubernetes cluster, virtual machines, block storage backend) reside on one single Google Cloud project "626825809863" for which we are attaching a screenshot:


Cloudflare commingles all expenses, but the relevant R2 costs (147.00 USD = 132.46 EUR) are shown in the 4 invoices (Jan-apr 2023):