Sunsetting gosumdb
I will be shutting down the gosumdb witness by the end of September 2025.
This project serves as a witness for Go’s transparency log. This post won’t cover the technical details but will instead explain the reasons for this decision. For a deep dive into what the gosumdb witness does and how it works, you can read my three-part series:
Why the Shutdown?
The simple reason is high resource consumption, which translates to cost.
The project’s data tiles require 11 GB of disk space, and its periodic calculations consume up to 8 GB of RAM to check for duplicates. While disk space is inexpensive, RAM on hosted virtual machines is costly, especially for a personal project that isn’t mission-critical.
To save money, I am sunsetting the service. Although the performance could be improved (for example, by changing the duplicate check to be on-disk instead of in-memory), I don’t currently have the time to invest in re-engineering it.
I hope this project helped make the concepts of transparency logs and witnesses more accessible and perhaps sparked some interest in cryptography. When I launched gosumdb two years ago, someone reached out to learn more, which confirmed that the project served as a learning tool for at least one person.
If you want to explore this topic further:
- Filippo Valsorda explains how you can run your own certificate transparency log.
- WhatsApp has also deployed a transparency log, which, to my knowledge, does not yet have a public witness.