Filecoin tools progress update: 26 March

Building on Filecoin is starting to get very exciting! We recently shared a demo of our the primary Powergate API called, the FFS.

What is the FFS? The FFS is one of the most important components of the Powergate. The FFS connectes a number of components in the Powergate to provide a tool for managing file storage and deal management in a straight-forward API. The FFS allows the Powergate to create API instances per-user. Each instance has a distinct wallet address, tokens, and configuration settings. The FFS can then create new deals, according to the API configuration, manage and repair those deals, and ensure that the data stored in those deals is available on IPFS. It's a lot! If you'd like to dig in more, a good place to start is the FFS design doc. Documentation coming soon.

Background Links 📘

• Overview, architecture, and key concepts.
• Previous progress summary.
• Project blog post.
• Project repo.

Next Steps 🍿

• Migrate to testnet/3
• Expose a number of new gRPC APIs for system management
• Extract devnet into new repo/project + dockerize
• Extract Lotus API from Powergate
• Complete and publish API Spec
• Update CLI to match latest enhancements

Sprint Debrief

Focus Areas 📐

• Embedded devnet for integration testing without network sync
• Support rich FFS configurations (deal config, miner selection configs)
• Finalize first release of all core-APIs

Discussion & Planning Changes 🤔

• No major planning changes!

Closed 💎

• Add replication factor to storage: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/177
• Add storage duration (cold layer config): https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/179
• Allow country filtering for deals: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/180
• Allow addition of stored data to the hot layer via config update (unfreeze): https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/189
• Default API config: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/176
• Enable a miner blacklist: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/181
• Hot/Cold storage config enabled flag: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/182
• Add storage renewal settings to config: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/184

New Tickets & Questions 👀

• Break repo apart to improve usability: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/186
• Use testnet/3: https://github.com/textileio/powergate/issues/211

Contact

• Feel free to join the Textile Slack or join our room on the Filecoin Slack.
• If you would like to discuss our work and how it may fit into your own projects, please reach out through email or setup a quick call here.