I love the idea in this, basically setting up a fortress for your witness node to be more resilient.
One thing you're right about though is it would be a somewhat expensive venture. At the rate I'm witnessing blocks (maybe 3-4 a day?), it's not feasible to sustain itself financially, but I imagine the top 19 could easily go this route. Maybe even some of the people in the top 30?
I'd be more than willing to help prototype this type of infrastructure. I've been considering how difficult it would be to setup on AWS with a CloudFormation script that spins up seed nodes as ECS Containers, VPCs in every region that all interconnect via private networking, and an EC2 container for your witness node that's not accessible from the internet, but only the seed nodes.
It really shouldn't be all that hard, and even non-technical witnesses could copy/paste the cloudformation script to get started. Of course with this idea, if AWS is attacked, you're still the mercy of them being able to handle it.
It has already been tested in the wild on dedicated servers and VXLAN (however using only a minor block producer, not a full-time witness)
Big infrastructure providers such as AWS or OVH have plenty usable features that could help (like multi-datacenter private networking), so deploying this won't be hard, but you are not limited to a single infrastructure provider. In more affordable solutions, where you don't have multiple physical network interfaces or multiple outbound routes you can even use OpenVPN, which adds only negligible latency and does its job.
I'm just re-reading this post and comments and probably understanding them for the firs time. Steem would gain a lot from seeing those set up being made easy to set up for anyone. Hopefully this could be work out at some point.
That's awesome :)
I love seeing these kinds of advanced setups being theorized, tested and deployed!
@gtg I have this redundant setup in mind, the hold up is not economical for me to set up at my current witness rank.
Right now, I barely break even :) Maybe in the near future.
It's good for Top 20 to know this setup, maybe they will follow your lead.
Cheers,
@yehey
you are history as good