README
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Temporal ☄️
About Temporal · Web Interfaces · Usage and Features · Contributing · License · Thanks
About Temporal
Temporal is an enterprise-grade storage solution featuring an easy to consume API that can be easily integrated into your existing application stack, providing all the benefits of the distributed web, without any of the overhead that comes with running distributed storage nodes. Currently supporting public and private IPFS+IPNS usage, subsequent releases will bring about support for additional protocols like STORJ, and SWARM.
Temporal's API comes in two flavours, hosted or on-site. Should you not have the resources, or interest in maintaining your own infrastructure you can take advantage of our hosted API running in our very own datacenter. Those which have the interest, and/or resources may deploy Temporal within your own environments. For those that deploy Temporal themselves, we offer paid for support, installation, tutorials, and product usage information sessions allowing organizations to leverage all the capabilities that Temporal offers.
Temporal is modular such that the underlying protocols it connects to, can easily be upgraded, and replaced with without having to change the overall architecture. Simply write the interface for whatever protocol you're interested in, and a subsequent RabbitMQ consumer, and you're good to go. For a guideline on how this can be accomplished see protocol-expansion.md
We have a telegram chat, feel free to join and ask any questions you may have that could not be answered by reading the documentation here. We have an in-depth wiki which contains additional information such as architectural diagrams, design decisions, and more.
Goals
- Provide an easy to use interface into distributed and decentralized storage technologies.
- Target developers via the API, and non-developers via the web interface.
- Educate about decentralized and distributed storage technologies
- Introduce these new storage technologies to audiences who may have otherwise not heard of them
- Help organizations make informed decisions about whether or not integrating distributed and decentralized storage technologies is the right choice for your business needs.
Versioning Policy
Information about our versioning policies are available in VERSIONING.md
Web Interfaces
For those less interested in API usage, we have a web interface which can be used with two methods of access:
Please note that support for the I2P Interface is very experimental at the moment and does not offer HTTPS, as well as very infrequent updates.There are no stability, or even functionality guarantees for the I2P interface.
How We're Different
We aren't doing an ICO, and we're not wasting our development efforts on redesigning the wheel with some new fangled storage protocol, and blockchain solution. Although we're using bleeding edge technology, we're commited to using names, and open source software that is already tested, and that has a thriving development community behind them. And finally, results matter; It is far to common in this space for companies to ask you to hand over your hand earned cash on the fleeting promise that it will lead to something, but that something is either never delivered, or extremely lack in features, and is not the original idea which was sold.
We aren't running in a third-party cloud environment, as our hosted API runs in our very own datacenter. The only third-party cloud environments we utilize are for off-site backups, and service should any critical infrastructure failures occur in our datacenter. In the future as we expand and receive more funding, we will build-out another facility to provide our off-site backups and service endpoints. We are committed to bringing back control to users data, and we believe the only way to fully do this, is to build our own infrastructure, for which we maintain all control, and design decisions for. As a startup, we have to rely on third-party cloud providers for backups and off-site service points due to funding limitations, however we realize this is undesirable. This is one of our main concerns, and is something we are intent on resolving when our company grows, and we receive more funding.
Funding
Currently the project is paid for by RTrade Technologies Ltd, and we will not be doing an ICO. Funding is derived from private investment, mining farm profits, as well as purchasing of RTC.
Should you wish to consider donations, or private investment email admin@rtradetechnologies.com.
Should you wish to contribute not just to TEMPORAL, but to the overall success of RTrade and our platform, you may purchase RTC for ETH from our RTCETH Smart Contract
Media
Channels:
Selected Content:
Data Privacy
Our datacenter and cloud environments are all located within Canada, which has exceptional data-privacy laws. We comply with all laws and regulations surrounding data storage regulation within Canada. Should you feel like there is any discrepancy here, please contact us at admin@rtradetechnologies.com and we will be happy to resolve your concerns, and if there's anything we need to change, we will do so.
One of the big concerns with IPFS, and even cloud data storage in general is encryption. As IPFS doesn't yet support native data encryption, we allow users to encrypt their data using AES256-CFB. While this is better than storing data without encryption on IPFS, there are still some concerns with encrypted data storage on IPFS. Namely, if anyone is ever able to discover the content hash and pin the content, it will always be available to them. This is of big concern when using encryption algorithms as it is theoretically possible for someone to persist that data within their own storage system until the desired ciphers are broken, and they can crack the encryption algorithm. If this is something that is of concern to you, and even better solution is to encrypt your data, and store in on private networks. We have plans to eventually migrate to AES256-GCM which is more secure than AES256-CFB, and allow encryption of data with IPFS keys.
Usage and Features
Spinning up a Node
Once you have a config.json set up (a template can be generated using temporal init), you can run the following commands to use docker-compose to spin up Temporal:
$> curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RTradeLtd/Temporal/V2/temporal.yml --output temporal.yml
$> docker-compose -f temporal.yml up
The standalone Temporal Docker image is available on Docker Hub.
Refer to the temporal.yml documentation for more details.
API Documentation
Our API documentation has been redesigned to use slate, hosted through IPFS. The main way to view it is through our gateway. However, in theory it is viewable across any gateway by navigating to /ipns/docs.api.temporal.cloud
Features
- API based
- Detailed logging
- Open source
- Public+Private IPFS usage
- Public+Private IPNS usage
- Private IPFS Network Management
- Modular design allowing for ease of integration with multiple storage protocols
- Optional data encryption before your content leaves server memory, and touches any distributed storage network.
- Redundant architecture designed for running two of every service, allowing for service availability despite catastrophic hardware failures.
Supported Technologies
Currently we fully support all non-experimental IPFS and IPNS feature-sets. Features like UnixFS, MFS are on-hold until their specs, and implementations become more stable and usable within production environments. Additional protocols like STORJ, and SWARM will be added, fully supporting public+private integrations. At the moment, the next planned protocol is STORJ, with alpha integration expected near the of January/February 2019.
System Monitoring
Temporal is designed to be monitored witha combination of Zabbix, and Grafana+Prometheus. Zabbix is used for operating system, and hardware level metric collection, while Grafana+Prometheus are used to scrape API metrics, along with IPFS and IPFS Cluster node metrics. We include Zabbix templates, and Grafana graphs within the setup/configs folder.
License
In order to better align with the same open-source values that originally inspired this project, Temporal has been changed to an MIT license for its production release. Originally I (postables) intended to release under Apache 2.0, however I think to truly help the open-source, and IPFS movement launching under the MIT license is needed.
Thanks
Without open source, Temporal wouldn't be possible, as such we would like to extend our thanks to all of the open source projects for which Temporal depends on. If you notice any are missing from the list below please open an issue and we will add it to the list:
Directories
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| Path | Synopsis |
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api
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middleware
Package middleware provides the middleware used by Temporal's APIs
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Package middleware provides the middleware used by Temporal's APIs |
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v2
Package v2 is the main package for Temporal's V2 http API.
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Package v2 is the main package for Temporal's V2 http API. |
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v3
Package v3 is the main package for Temporal's experimental V3 API.
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Package v3 is the main package for Temporal's experimental V3 API. |
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v3/proto
Package temporalv3 is a reverse proxy.
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Package temporalv3 is a reverse proxy. |
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cmd
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temporal
Temporal is the command-line interface for Temporal.
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Temporal is the command-line interface for Temporal. |
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Package customer is responsible for constructing customer upload objects to handle deduplicated storage billing
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Package customer is responsible for constructing customer upload objects to handle deduplicated storage billing |
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Package eh stands for "error handling", and provides error definitions
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Package eh stands for "error handling", and provides error definitions |
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Package clients provides GRPC client constructors for various RTrade services that Temporal relies on.
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Package clients provides GRPC client constructors for various RTrade services that Temporal relies on. |
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Package log provides utility functions that wrap Uber's Zap logging library
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Package log provides utility functions that wrap Uber's Zap logging library |
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Package mail provides Temporal's email utilities
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Package mail provides Temporal's email utilities |
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Package mocks provided generated mock implementations of various interfaces that Temporal depends on for testing purposes.
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Package mocks provided generated mock implementations of various interfaces that Temporal depends on for testing purposes. |
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Package queue implements Temporal's various queue consumers and publishers
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Package queue implements Temporal's various queue consumers and publishers |
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Package rtfscluster provides utility functions for interacting with IPFS cluster APIs
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Package rtfscluster provides utility functions for interacting with IPFS cluster APIs |
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Package rtns provides utilities for handling the publishing of IPNS records
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Package rtns provides utilities for handling the publishing of IPNS records |
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Package utils provides miscellanious helpers and utilities
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Package utils provides miscellanious helpers and utilities |