Validator Operations Guide¶
Running a proof-of-stake validator puts a much greater emphasis on technical correctness, sound systems architecture, security, and overall operational excellence than most distributed systems. In a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency, operational skills take the place of raw computational power. This means that the design process, documentation and knowledge sharing are particularly important for validator operations.
This guide is a living document which details a set of best practices for running a validator service as implemented by Certus One, as well as technical background to help you design your own validator architecture.
The aim of this document is to provide a baseline for validator operations, both to make it easier for new validators to get started, and to provide input to other teams. We believe that collaboration and openness strongly benefits the overall ecosystem - the more well-run validators there are, the more resilient will the network be.
While this document’s focus is running blockchain validators, much of its content is applicable to operating any highly available, distributed service.
While it’s hard to provide an implementation that fits all use cases, we try to provide reference implementations which implement our guidelines.
This guide assumes practical Linux systems administration experience and at least basic knowledge of the blockchain you’re validating on (we recommend reading at least their whitepaper). For Cosmos, this includes both Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK.
Numerous books have been written about each of the topics in this knowledge base - keep in mind that a knowledge base like ours is only ever a starting point and a guide, not an exhaustive treatment of any of the topics we’re discussing. We took a look at our bookshelves (and e-readers, and browser bookmarks) and many articles have a literature list of books and articles which we can personally recommend.
The document’s source code is available on GitHub. Contributions and bug reports/feedback are greatly appreciated (feel free to use the GitHub issues for discussion as well as bug reports).
