Onionbalance Use Cases ========================== There a many ways to use Onionbalance to increase the scalability, reliability and security of your onion service. The following are some examples of what is possible. Current Deployments ------------------- **SKS Keyserver Pool** Kristian Fiskerstrand has set up a onion service `keyserver pool `_ which connects users to one of the available onion service key servers. Other Examples -------------- - A popular onion service with an overloaded web server or Tor process A service such as Facebook which gets a large number of users would like to distribute client requests across multiple servers as the load is too much for a single Tor instance to handle. They would also like to balance between instances when the 'encrypted services' proposal is implemented [2555]. - Redundancy and automatic failover A political activist would like to keep their web service accessible and secure in the event that the secret police seize some of their servers. Clients should ideally automatically fail-over to another online instances with minimal service disruption. - Secure Onion Service Key storage An onion service operator would like to compartmentalize their permanent onion key in a secure location separate to their Tor process and other services. With this proposal permanent keys could be stored on an independent, isolated system. Research -------- `Ceysun Sucu `_ has analysed Onionbalance and other approaches to onion service scaling in his masters thesis `Tor\: Onion Service Scaling `_. The thesis provides a good overview of current approaches. It is a recommended read for those interested in higher performance onion services.