Multi‑Region Stratum Gateways & DDoS‑Ready Mining Pool Architecture

A public mining pool is a real-time network service. Miners judge your pool by uptime, latency, and payout reliability. This guide explains how to design a multi‑region Stratum gateway setup and an architecture that stays stable under abnormal traffic — without turning your pool into an operations nightmare. If you’re deploying globally, we help engineers design the architecture, install gateways, and configure routing/DDoS controls so miners stay connected with low stale rates.

Signs you need multi-region gateways

You don’t need multi-region for every pool. But for public SHA256 pools, it often becomes necessary sooner than expected.

• High stale/reject rate: miners far from your region submit shares late.
• Global miner base: you market to miners across continents.
• Frequent “disconnect storms”: temporary network events cause mass reconnects.
• Marketplace hashpower: large short-term influxes stress your Stratum endpoints.
• Uptime is your brand: you want to compete on stability and trust.

Architecture patterns: MVP → production → scale

Core components (what must be separated)

Regardless of your stack (Yiimp, Miningcore, NOMP), production pools typically separate responsibilities so one failure does not take everything down:

• Edge Stratum gateways: handle miner connections and forward shares.
• Pool backend: share validation/processing, accounting, and reward attribution.
• Full nodes / daemons: stable RPC connectivity with resource isolation.
• Database + cache: tuned for write-heavy share traffic and safe retention.
• Payout services: controlled execution, batching, limits, and audit logs.
• Web UI + API: miner dashboards and status pages that remain usable during incidents.
• Observability: logs, metrics, alerting, and an incident timeline.

DDoS readiness (defensive checklist)

“DDoS-ready” does not mean “invincible.” It means you plan for abnormal traffic and can keep miners connected while your team responds. The exact controls depend on your provider and region strategy, but the principles stay consistent:

• Edge filtering: separate public-facing gateways from your sensitive backend services.
• Rate limits: protect login/API endpoints and reduce abusive connection churn.
• Failover capacity: assume one region can degrade and plan for rerouting.
• Blast-radius limits: keep wallets, payout keys, and admin panels off the public edge.
• Runbooks: define “what to do at 2am” for reconnection storms and degraded hashrate.

For wallet and key safety, see mining pool security hardening.

Failover strategy (what miners experience)

The goal is simple: miners should always have a working endpoint, even if a region is degraded. A practical design uses:

• Primary + secondary endpoints: documented in your pool’s “How to connect” page.
• Health checks: detect region failure quickly (Stratum, node RPC, DB, payout queue).
• Predictable behavior: when failover occurs, miners reconnect fast and do not lose shares.

Avoid designing failover that only engineers understand. Miners want clear endpoints and reliable stats.

Monitoring & SLOs for pool operators

Monitoring is your early warning system. A production pool typically alerts on:

• Stratum connection counts, reject/stale %, and share submission latency
• Node/daemon RPC health and sync status
• Database write pressure, disk, and queue lag
• Payout queue backlog and unusual withdrawal volume
• Website/API response times (miner dashboards must stay usable)

If you want a structured operations routine, see managed ops & monitoring.

Buying guide: what to ask a vendor

If you’re hiring someone to build a multi-region pool, you want more than “it runs.” Ask for concrete deliverables:

• Region plan: which regions, which endpoints, and why.
• Failover story: what happens when a region or node fails, and how miners recover.
• Security boundaries: where are wallets, admin panels, and secrets stored.
• Observability: dashboards + alerts you can actually operate.
• Runbooks: restart procedures, upgrade steps, and incident response steps.
• Payout safety: batching, thresholds, limits/approvals, and audit logs.

How we deliver multi-region pool deployments

1. Design: requirements, region targets, endpoint strategy, and abuse model.
2. Build: deploy gateways and backend services with safe separation and monitoring.
3. Verify: miner connectivity tests, failover drills, and baseline performance tuning.
4. Handover: documentation, runbooks, and optional ongoing ops support.

FAQ