Setting Up an Avalanche Node with Microsoft Azure (Cheaper than AWS)
Running a validator and staking with Avalanche provides extremely competitive rewards of between 9.69% and 11.54% depending on the length you stake for. The maximum rate is earned by staking for a year, whilst the lowest rate for 14 days. There is also no slashing, so you don’t need to worry about a hardware failure or bug in the client which causes you to lose part or all of your stake. Instead with Avalanche you only need to currently maintain at least 60% up time to receive rewards. If you fail to meet this requirement you don’t get slashed, but you don’t receive the rewards. You also do not need to put your private keys onto a node to begin validating on that node. Even if someone breaks into your cloud environment and gains access to the node, the worst they can do is turn off the node.
Not only does running a validator node enable you to receive rewards in AVAX, but later you will also be able to validate other subnets in the ecosystem as well and receive rewards in the token native to their subnets.
You only need modest hardware requirements of 2 CPU cores, 4 GB Memory and 40 GB SSD to run a validator and it doesn’t use enormous amounts of energy. Avalanche’s revolutionary consensus mechanism is able to scale to millions of validators participating in consensus at once, offering unparalleled decentralisation.
Currently the minimum amount required to stake to become a validator is 2000 AVAX (which can be reduced over time as price increases). Alternatively, validators can also charge a small fee to enable users to delegate their stake with them to help towards running costs. You can use a calculator here to see how much rewards you would earn when running a node, compared to delegating.
I encourage everyone to run their own validators where possible, but for those that don’t meet the minimum staking requirements and want to delegate I am currently running a node which you can find below:
In this article we will step through the process of configuring a node on Microsoft Azure. This tutorial assumes no prior experience with Microsoft Azure and will go through each step with as few assumptions possible.
At the time of this article, spot pricing for a virtual machine with 2 Cores and 8 GB memory costs as little as $0.01060 per hour which works out at about $113.44 a year, a saving of 83.76%! compared to normal pay as you go prices. In comparison a virtual machine in AWS with 2 Cores and 4 GB Memory with spot pricing is around $462 a year.
The instructions on how to configure the node have been moved to the Official Docs where it will continuously updated. Please see instructions at the following link:
That’s All. Our Instance Is Prepared
Now that we have a node, it’s time to set up our node to be a validator on the network. There’s already a great tutorial on that written by Rado Minchev, so we’ll head over there next and declare our node to be a validator for Avalanche!
Monitoring — Configure Real-Time Alerts
Please see this excellent article / tool from community member Burcusan, on how to set up real-time alerts from your Avalanchego Validator Node. You can receive Telegram alerts if there is an issue with your node and further action is required.
Verify ownership of a Node and Associate identity
To make your node more recognisable for potential delegators to select to trust their stake with, consider verifying the identity of your node with the following providers Avascan, VScout, and Stakingrewards
To find out more about Avalanche see the following articles:
Avalanche, a Revolutionary Consensus Engine and Platform. A Game Changer for Blockchain
Avalanche Consensus, The Biggest Breakthrough since Nakamoto
Comparison between Avalanche, Cosmos and Polkadot
Why Avalanche (AVAX) has the potential to be an incredible store of value
