IPFS IPFS Camp 2022 - Content Routing, 1 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Experience Content Routing from a Gateway Perspective - Thibault Meunier

Description

Discover the challenges that an IPFS Gateway faces to route content.

A

So today, um I want you all to experience what it is to be an ipfs Gateway and how content reading feels from the ipfs Gateway perspective. So it's gonna be going to be somehow an interactive talk. um The only thing you will have to do is just raise your hand when there's a question and like you have the answer so on that briefly, who I am I, think I have the same problem as previous speakers.

A

Emojis are not displaying, but that's another issue, so I'm a research engineer at cloudflare, I'm working on like ipfs ethereum and all the distributed systems and yeah I like croissant, not the brioche pressure in Portugal, even though they are good more like the French croissant, with like puffed past three.

A

So um today, uh I will talk about like first the content rooting live experience but, like you will feel content rooting.

A

um After all, the technical talks that like happened, then I will explain why gateways are special and I, don't want to say the snowflake, that's special um and then finally, the challenge that lies ahead in terms of gateways.

A

So this is a slide um there's a lot of things on it. um For those that are able to see the joke on, can you raise your hand?

A

So we have one people, two people, that's not much. So you see content reading is already difficult. Are you able to see uh the Indian flag who is able to see the Indian flag? One two, three, four: five: six? Okay, so we have some people so for those that have seen the Indian flag, could you please re-raise your hand?

A

Okay, um we'll take so Guillaume I. Think. Can you tell me where the Indian flag is and I will use? Okay, the pointer is useless, but can you tell me so top of the lower half? Okay, okay, I, think I see it um so yeah we've just performed content, routing, I didn't know we're seeing it. I just asked a lot of people. I received multiple answer after like querying a lot of people and yeah I got an answer for content.

A

If we want to put like ipfsc term on that um yeah I was a Gateway, so I like received some requests from the slides and I, was like just advertising to your, which content a new, uh my ipfs peers.

A

Finally, we had like the provider, which was the picture, um and it's like Reddit places from 2017, which is an online experience uh that happened so yeah question is gateways are special somehow so, as you've seen, I had like an arbitrary content request that wanted to explore the whole pictures which we could consider all data stored on ipfs and the question is from these arbitrary requests.

A

I wanted to like quickly be able to serve it and provide it to whoever um and that's kind of like make Gateway special compared to people that, like already know who they would contact and which peer in the DHT they will have- and there are some challenges for that so Gateway in a way and I will use like the kind of torrenting to our leacher nodes like really. They will query a lot of peers because, like they would have a lot of requests for rv3 content and arbitrary data.

A

These requests that will be cached, usually through HTTP or like through a custom cache to like, like kind of like the next time. The Gateway gets asked for the request they're able to serve it fast and by doing that, the removing load from the network, which is good. You have like less load on the network.

A

At the same time, that means you have less visibility, and sometimes that could be tricky to understand if your content should stay around because it's been used and served by a gateway gateways, don't provide any hosting, or at least the two most popular Gateway that we know of and so by, not providing hosting.

A

If we still doing the torrenting analogy, um they have a very bad ratio because they're just getting data and they're never providing it back and that kind of that makes them tricky, even though they have for most of the content, a very crucial role to make accessible content, accessible, ipfs content, accessible and, finally, there's little participation in content rooting. Even though it's not that true for, like ipf, like ipfs, IO or protocol lab or cloudflare, there's no easy link between like the content and the request being made by the Gateway and their participation in content.

A

Routing because like they would need an easy way to identify that, like requests come from a specific Gateway and actually the content like could be fetchback and answered back, and so once we have all these problems, the question is like: what's next like what Improvement could we do, and what should we like consider so that, like um there's like a better content routing from everyone from a Gateway perspective, so first of all, you've heard a lighting um in a lot of talk.

A

This mornings, um the setup of like gateways and indexes together, is definitely a good combination, because, like the Gateway will like query a lot of content from the DHT from like the peers that they have and they could just populate directly an indexer to make that content available back um then you could have like. The main issue is, as you've seen was like the Indian flag or like the Yukon.

A

Sometimes no one is advertising where content is, and so it can be very tricky to find who has it, and so the providers of the data should really advertise the content they have. She did be on the DHT. Should it be that, like Beat Swap or should it be via QR code, I, think there's a presentation about like having QR code, but like really, you should advertise the content.

A

Otherwise the public network is not able to access it and on a similar note, sometimes you don't want really to advertise content, because there's no good access control for ipfs. So maybe there's some data that you only want to provide to certain of your peers, and so that's something like you should be able to do. That's a policy you define to who accesses your content and so kind of thinking.

A

How which are the peer that like could access your content is something which is like very correlated with like how you could find the content and, finally, some kind of like peer reputation, maybe like an area to explore, even though what this would look like is tricky, as we mentioned like Gateway in the most common, like imagine, if your reputation system would likely have a very bad reputation and like preventing them from like accessing content, and that's it. Thank you.