IPFS Swarm and IPFS Cluster

Question

Consider 3 IPFS peers A, B and C When peer A establishes the connection with peer B and C (using ipfs swarm connect)

Will it form a cluster with A as leader? If yes, Do we need to manually create secret key? and Who and how the key is managed?

Answer 1

IPFS is a decentralized system, even you establish connection using peer A, at the end they all will end up sharing each other's DHT ( Distribute Hash Table) information and come at the same level. There will not be any leader in a cluster, and all peers will have the same privileges as any other peer in the network.

And right now there is no notion of a secret key in IPFS, all the data in IPFS network is publicly available if you want you have to implement a layer on the top of it and encrypt data before putting it into IPFS.

Answer 2

Private IPFS is designed for a particular IPFS node to connect to other peers who have a shared secret key. With IPFS private networks, each node specifies which other nodes it will connect to. Nodes in that network don’t respond to communications from nodes outside that network.

An IPFS-Cluster is a stand-alone application and a CLI client that allocates, replicates and tracks pins across a cluster of IPFS daemons. IPFS-Cluster uses the RAFT leader-based consensus algorithm to coordinate storage of a pinset, distributing the set of data across the participating nodes.

This difference between Private IPFS and IPFS cluster is remarkable. It is worth noting that a private network is a default feature implemented within the core IPFS functionality and IPFS-Cluster is its separate app. IPFS and IPFS-Cluster applications are installed as different packages, run as separate processes, and they have different peer IDs as well as API endpoints and ports. IPFS-Cluster daemon depends on IPFS daemon and should be started afterwards.

In a private IPFS network, you should have 'Go' and IPFS installed on all the nodes. Once it is done, run the following command to install the swarm key generation utility. Swarm key allows us to create a private network and tell network peers to communicate only with those peers who share this secret key.

This command should be run only on your Node0. We generate swarm.key on the bootstrap node and then just copy it to the rest of the nodes.

go get -u github.com/Kubuxu/go-ipfs-swarm-key-gen/ipfs-swarm-key-gen

Now run this utility on your first node to generate swarm.key under .ipfs folder:

ipfs-swarm-key-gen & > ~/.ipfs/swarm.key

Copy the file generated swarm.key to the IPFS directory of each node participating in the private network. Please let me know if you need further details on this.

Answer 3

No.It doesn't form a cluster because there is a separate implementation of IPFS for the above mentioned problem named as IPFS Cluster where a particular node pins the data across various other nodes through which other nodes in the network can access the data.The pinning of data by the node functions through a secret-key. For more information you can go through the documentation of IPFS Cluster. https://cluster.ipfs.io/documentation/