Sprint 0

Summary

There must be always a start for everything, and this Sprint, has been the one for the new Alastria Core Team. Mainly this week we have been on boarding the new members, finding the way to organize ourselves, and have an overview about our goals, community needs, and overall alastria context. The team currently includes the following members:

• 3 Ftes of Iobuilders (this sprint @marcosserradilla @Ivan Saiz @Fernado Paris)
• 1 Fte of Alisys (this sprint æJoséIgnaciodelaVega @CiroLopez @Anderesalo)
• Jacinto Calvo (Sabadell)

We have started to work as a Team:

• Sharing all the information on daily basis, at 9:30 via videocall
• Create shared understanding with ADR (https://adr.github.io/), and define/work as group. Our aim is to use this format, to formerly built up, the Alastria Improvement Proposal standard, similar to Ethereum Improvement Proposal (https://eips.ethereum.org/)
• Start working on several issues, trying to find the right balance between priorities and easy task for the new members on boarding

Sprint Details:

User Story Title	Description
Documentation	Based on the community feedback, @jesusruiz and @carlosk inputs, and our own development experience, finding out that the alastria tech documentation, is outdated, difficult to follow, etc, we have focused the sprint on the total rebuild of the documentation. We have designed a new Wiki, including all kind of information, to help the tech community on the alastria on boarding. Our aim is to release the doc on the next days.
Netstats	The current netstats version deployed on the testnet, is a sofware build by the community, mainly oriented to the mainnet, and POW. We haven been reviewing the needs, defined the ADR, and wil will try to implement all the server, front and node changes for the next sprint
Alatria Access Point	The access to the nodes cannot be directly granted to all kinds of operations, due security reasons, possible DDOS atacks etc. Added to this we want to have TLS termination,security on the nocd. We are defining a reference implementation with nginx, that will allow any node, to proxy all his access via a a given proxy. Due that some of the members of the dev community, really have already done some imolementation, we will try yo involve them as much as possible.
Block Explorer	We want to release official alastria block explorers, to really support and visualize, all the network activity. We are defining how to deploy blk.io free explorer, with alastria styles. On the other hand we will evaluate the councilbox solution, to support and deploy it too.
Network naming	We have decided to start naming the new networks with contellation, stars related concepts. As example of this decision, the current network, has been named arrakis and the new testnet, telsius
New testnet - TELSIUS	Following the path of the strategical roadmap, we have start working on the new network. Our main focus is to tackle the identified contracts nested calls problem (https://www.bountysource.com/issues/59082411-not-able-to-call-function-in-another-contract), that can only be fixed with a new network due a genesis file needed change ( https://github.com/alastria/alastria-node/issues/278). This new testnet will hopefully released during Q42018
Node monitoring reference implementation	We want to offer a reference implementation to allow any partner of the alastria network, to be able to monitor its node. We have already defined a reference implementation in python, and we are developing the solution based on block syncing chekpoints. We hope a small reference implementation can be released on next sprint
Roadmap	We are working on draft definition of the strategical mainnet roadmap, building the vision and steps to reach the real public permissioned decentralized governance model. We will deliver a public a version on next sprint
Alastria Latam	We had sync meeting with the Latam team, trying to built a brotherhood mindset and work together as ONE TEAM
Alastria validator restart	We have changed the restart frequency from 48h to 72h. We are closely monitoring the platform to keep on improving performance. Validator are being restarted, due the memory leak identified on geth 1.7.
New quorum 2.1.1 release and path/ pull requests	We are actively reviewing new quorum updates to stay tuned to important fixes, We are following deeply the geth 1.8 pull request, that includes a huge memory perfomance improvement, than can seems to fix on our tests, the detected geth 1.7 memory leak
Gitlab repo	We have created a private gitlab repo, to upload all the current validator, infrastructure as code configuration ( security keys, aws, ..).. This need has appeared due the nowadays control of the validation algorithm by our team, based on ongoing definition of the OLA/SLA validator rules, governance and its implementation

Next Sprint (#1)

Added to the open user stories mentioned on Sprint 0, if possible ( On boarding takes time :)), we will start working on:

User Story Title	Description
Alastria official website: Developer section	We will create engineering.alastria.io and include totally de/tech oriented webpage, to really communicate, share and visualize all the available tools, on going work and benefits of alastria network.
Bank Of Gas	We will define the the tech specs and start discussions with Blockapps, to get theirs service && support for the implementation.
BootNodes	We will start defining the implementation of the bootnodes network topology, separating the structure, in bootnodes, regular nodes, and validator nodes.
Bender Bot	We have create an IFTT ( it this then that) based bot, called bender, to really automate network management. We will keep on improving the solution.