What are the pointers for moving Ethereum into production for a private blockchain?

Question

I am moving an Ethereum blockchain into production and I know many cloud services exist, including BaaS from Microsoft, AWS, Digital Ocean, and Google cloud services.

Is there any criteria from Ethereum to calculate the the space and memory requirement? Also is there a way to calculate how many nodes should be used in a production private system?

I did testing so far using localhost and geth and I found the PoW method used up my laptop battery in under and hour.

Hence I am thinking about using Proof of Stake or another method. Can I implement now using Ethereum or something like Proof of Authority?

Answer 1

About the changing to PoA this post could help. If you are using PoA the number of nodes is a bit irrelevant, since everything is mined by a single node.

Your genesis file should have something flagging the clique consensus (basically PoA).

{
    "config": {
        "chainId": 1515,
        "homesteadBlock": 1,
        "eip150Block": 2,
        "eip150Hash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
        "eip155Block": 3,
        "eip158Block": 3,
        "byzantiumBlock": 4,
        "clique": {
            "period": 1,
            "epoch": 30000
        }
    },
...
}

This will also make it lighter on your laptop battery ;) (setup your private network)