News96: Add Suredbits LN field report

Authored-by: Roman Taranchenko
Co-authored-by: David A. Harding <dave@dtrt.org>

Author: harding

_includes/articles/suredbits-enterprise-ln.md

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+{:.post-meta}
+*by [Roman Taranchenko][], Engineer at [Suredbits][]*
+
+After the first excitement of sending and, more importantly, receiving a
+payment over the Lightning Network has faded away, it’s always good to
+think about how to operate your node in a safe and reliable way.
+Failures almost always happen unexpectedly. How do you recover after a
+possible failure? How do you make backups reliable? How do you keep the
+seed in a secure location? Et cetera, et cetera…
+
+At [Suredbits][] we use Eclair for our nodes. Even though Eclair is
+pretty robust on its own, we took some steps to make it even more
+reliable---such as using PostgreSQL as a database backend [(using this PR
+)][db pr] and [AWS Secrets Manager][] to
+store private keys.
+
+Eclair has a built-in online backup feature, but it requires manual
+setup and script writing to automate, which is not really scalable and
+is error prone. Running PostgreSQL at AWS RDS allows us to automate
+backups and replication in a way that is familiar to many DevOps engineers
+and which makes restoring the database state easier.
+
+Using PostgreSQL as a remote database backend makes node failover
+simpler to implement because, if the node crashes for some reason,
+there’s no need to restore the database from a backup---all you need is
+to point a new Eclair instance to the correct database server. Here’s a
+[quick demo][failover demo] of an automated failover implemented with two Eclair
+instances plus AWS's RDS, ELB, and NAT Gateway.
+
+In the failover scenario depicted in the demo, we needed a secure way to
+allow the node’s seed for its private keys to be shared between the Eclair instances. Eclair
+stores the seed in a file on the local file system which should be
+backed up somewhere and restored when needed. The current Eclair implementation
+requires extra steps to do so in an automated fashion.  We instead use AWS Secrets
+Manager---an encrypted key/value store specifically designed to securely hold
+various kinds of secrets including database passwords and encryption
+keys. Now all you need to do to share the seed between the instances is to
+point them to the correct secrets location in the config file. Once
+configured, the instance can be stored as an AMI image which can re-imaged as
+many times as needed without manual configuration.
+
+The measures we took are just the first steps to building
+enterprise-grade Lightning nodes. There are still some more problems
+that need to be solved. For example, which Hardware Security Module
+(HSM) can be used for a Lightning node, or how to failover a Bitcoin
+Core node in a multi-instance setting. But we believe that our work is a
+solid base for scaling out Eclair and making it more fault-tolerant.
+
+For more information about this topic, see our [presentation][enterprise ln vid].
+
+*Disclaimer: Since private keys are involved, don't use third party cloud
+services without a thorough risk assessment.*
+
+[Roman Taranchenko]: https://github.com/rorp
+[suredbits]: https://suredbits.com
+[db pr]: https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair/pull/1249
+[aws secrets manager]: https://github.com/rorp/eclair/tree/aws_secretsmanager
+[failover demo]: https://youtu.be/L2DtolwS8ew
+[enterprise ln vid]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbwy9mJIrZE

_posts/en/2020-05-06-suredbits-enterprise-ln.md

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+---
+title: 'Field Report: Running a Lightning node in an enterprise environment'
+permalink: /en/suredbits-enterprise-ln/
+name: 2020-05-06-suredbits-enterprise-ln
+slug: 2020-05-06-suredbits-enterprise-ln
+type: posts
+layout: post
+lang: en
+version: 1
+
+excerpt: >
+  A field report about how Suredbits uses Eclair, AWS, and a remote
+  PostgreSQL database to operate an LN node with fast failover
+  capability.
+
+---
+{% include articles/suredbits-enterprise-ln.md %}