200 sats \ 2 replies \ @031ef7d322 20 May 2023 \ parent \ on: What's Under the Hood of the Big Lightning Nodes? bitcoin
An astute reader may recognize I left out a small bit critical piece: secrets management
There’s plenty of solutions there depending on your cloud provider. You definitely don’t need dedicated hardware, most of top nodes are in AWS.
For the LND lab I describe above, I would also add lndinit to initialize each node. You could set up Hashicorp Vault to use as a backend.
My advice is don’t spend any money on hardware until you have been running a virtual environment suitable for production use. Then evaluate your threat model and determine if it’s worth the upfront cost.
Great advice. I'll keep that in mind. I guess AWS is the way to go.
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From someone who has wasted thousands on unnecessary cloud bills, and has a mid-size homelab that’s 80% idle…
I would run everything locally (on a laptop/desktop) until that becomes a limitation, which is probably only the case when you’re ready to go live on mainnet.
Seriously, just use docker, or maybe a kubernetes dev cluster (kind or k3d) if you’re comfortable with it.
From someone who has accidentally lost too many testnet coins…
Use regtest as much as possible. When you’re ready to interface with the world, try one of the signets.
Seriously, be as stingy as possible with your sats. I used to think spending money on hardware and elaborate cloud infra would make me “invested” but the reality is all other resources required to learn this stuff are dwarfed by time, the scarcest resource of all.
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