Skip to content

Provide more information on the requirements of your own pinning service #2245

@ross-spencer

Description

@ross-spencer

Pinning seems to be one of the most fundamental requirements of some form of data permanence.

If you are an organization looking at IPFS as providing some form of long-term knowledge base or information records management then there needs to be a way to ensure the longevity of documents, e.g. within disposal schedules or longer within archival contexts.

Beyond that, it is also likely if you are seeing to further the decentralization of the web, you will inevitably want to support community pinning in some way, thus increasing the number of peers offering this, and reducing centralized points of failure.

Given, can some consideration be given to the create your own pinning service section of the docs such that it can provide some basic technical requirements that individuals and organizations might want to consider as they determine if they can host a pinning service.

E.g.

  • server spec,
  • specifically, minimum and desired storage amounts,
  • requirements for memory versus compute, or both,
  • minimum bandwidth needs,
  • expected availability and uptime,

There seems to be related technology helping to determine if a service is compliant, e.g. https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/pinning-service-compliance but to get to that place there seems to be little information, i.e. i could create a host, make it publicly available, and support the pinning API, but if it has 4GB memory and 10GB storage, I have no idea if it approaches anything considered a community standard.

Some documentation on protections for pinning hosts/peers may also be beneficial, e.g. the type of data that might land on a pinning service and be made available by pinning hosts, should be considered, as well as how to ensure legal and data protection compliance if at all possible. Content encryption isn't used by default by IPFS so how is data maintained on a pinned service? Is it visible to the provider? Could data be viewed outside of IPFS on those servers, and so on? Specifically from the perspective of a pinning host protecting themselves versus those adding content to IPFS as the general guidance there of encrypting your own information if you need to do that is likely better understood.

Connected to #1798

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    kind/suggestionSomething that you'd like to see in the docs. This can be written content, web design, or imagery.need/triageNeeds initial labeling and prioritization

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions