# Polkashots maintenance Q1-Q2 2022

This treasury proposal is Between the Kusama Council 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 Kusama network, to the benefit of node operators and validators,
* New snapshots at least once per day. Snapshots are filesystem dumps of the Kusama node storage backend files, of variety RocksDb, 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.

## Updates and commentary

Follow links for our [previous Kusama proposal](https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/124) and [previous Polkadot proposal](https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/80).

**Snapshot size**: Since last proposal, average snapshot size kept inching upwards as more and more parachains come online and store data on the relay chain. A Polkadot snapshot is now 77Gi while a Kusama snapshot is 122Gi.

It is in the interest of the community that we continue to deploy our service in the best-in-class infrastructure of Google Cloud Platform. With Google Cloud, we benefit from excellent uptime and reliability of the block-level snapshotting solution in their storage backend, as well as Premium network connectivity using Google's own pipes, bringing snapshots to you faster. We believe this increases the chain resiliency and is worth the premium.

More treasury-funded snapshot engines have come online since last proposal, specifically [Polkachu](https://polkachu.com/snapshots/kusama) and [RadiumBlock](https://www.radiumblock.com/snapshots.html#). We are excited that other ecosystem participants have stepped in, which makes our solution less of a central point of failure for the ecosystem.

**Usage**: **255.47 Tebibytes in Q1-Q2 2022** (see screenshot). Assuming a 90Gi average snapshot size over that period, this represents 2838 downloads, or **16 downloads per day**.

This is an increse of usage compared to Q3-Q4 2021 (10 downloads a day), in spite of the emergence of alternative services.

Other notable changes:

* we have switched from 7z to lz4 compression format, known for its speed and efficiency,
* per request of a Parity employee, we have restarted the ParityDB snapshot service for both Polkadot and Kusama. ParityDB is a custom built successor of RocksDB and will be the officially recommended backend soon.

As this service has been a recipient of multiple treasury proposals on Polkadot and Kusama since 2020, per the suggestion of the council whip Raul Romanutti, we are now for the first time making a single proposal on Kusama chain for all expenses including Polkadot and Kusama. We will follow up with a unique proposal on Polkadot treasury for Q3-Q4 expenses. This saves time for everyone involved.

## Operational expenses

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

For the previous period (Jul-Dec 2021), we charged the Polkadot and Kusama councils:

* a labor cost of 1,860 EUR/month including 2 engineers in 2 geographical locations (Western US and Western Europe),
* a markup based on a percentage of the cloud costs (KSM: 30%, DOT: 50%) for a total of 3,050.55 EUR.

If Polkashots was a paywalled service, an increase in usage would result in an increase in profit. The markup represents this unrealized profit for keeping this service open to all, as well as a financial buffer against future increases in usage. Per feedback from the curators, we are now locking this markup at the value paid during the previous period.

| Cost item | cost |
|------------------------------------------------|------------------|
| Labor, monthly | 1,860 EUR /mo |
| Labor, total for period | 11,160 EUR |
| Cloud costs, GCP "midlps" project | 26,620.01 EUR | |
| Markup (fixed amount based on past proposals) | 3,050.55 EUR
| Total for period | **40,830.56 EUR**|
| Exchange rate KSM/EUR (subscan EMA30 07/12) | 54.22 EUR (54.43 USD) |
| Total base price in KSM | 753.05 KSM |
| Slippage + conversion fee 5% | 37.65 KSM |
| Proposal (KSM) | **790.70 KSM** |
| Tip | 29.197 KSM |
| [Total paid at block 13630882](https://kusama.subscan.io/account/F3opxRbN5ZbjJNU513bmgwGM1wavp2xji1cn7pZD26udCje) | 819.797 KSM |