Absolutely, I think it can be easily done by just asking Steem to pay for their public APIs. A post about the APIs statistics now and then might bring in enough money to continue service. Time will tell.

In the realm of decentralized services, I think that consul is really, really overlooked, especially the potential of consul, coupled with ultra-low-cost servers. Once a machine is in a consul cluster, it is "bound" to the consul master and that master can execute commands on it as though it were root.  

Consul also manages services and service discovery.

It can be run alongside Nomad, which can schedule anything that can be run on linux in an extremely neat, tight fashion.

Yes, we need each one a node, unfortunately actually steem doesn't build on ubuntu 14 or debian jesse so it's really difficult to get one, the to be sure nobody will get one they take this wonderful instructions https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/BUILD_UBUNTU.md and no bin release https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases  actually I find this a shame... Fortunatly at least @xeroc works with us :)

I wanted to add the ability to change the API node. piston allows that already, but the gui has no feature for that yet. It will come for sure.

> I think it would be more impotent to have a way for independent community members to run API nodes them self, then having a nice geo redundant deployment managed by one party.

Agreed!!

> What dose the API Server consists of? Is this just the API of steemd or is there another service involved and if so would it be possible to have the code available to play around with and try to build a independent setup connecting to a local steem-node?

It's almost a standalone Steem node. This is the steemd config of `this.piston.rocks`:
				rpc-endpoint = 127.0.0.1:5090

				seed-node=52.38.66.234:2001
				seed-node=52.37.169.52:2001
				seed-node=52.26.78.244:2001
				seed-node=192.99.4.226:2001
				seed-node=46.252.27.1:1337
				seed-node=81.89.101.133:2001
				seed-node=52.4.250.181:39705
				seed-node=85.214.65.220:2001
				seed-node=104.199.157.70:2001
				seed-node=104.236.82.250:2001
				seed-node=104.168.154.160:40696
				seed-node=162.213.199.171:34191
				seed-node=seed.steemed.net:2001
				seed-node=steem.clawmap.com:2001
				seed-node=seed.steemwitness.com:2001
				seed-node=steem-seed1.abit-more.com:2001

				enable-plugin = account_history
				enable-plugin = follow
				enable-plugin = market_history
				enable-plugin = private_message
				enable-plugin = tags

				public-api = database_api login_api market_history_api

and this is an exert of what NGINX does to proxy the API via SSL:

				server {
												listen 443 ssl;
												server_name this.piston.rocks;
												root /var/www/html/;

												keepalive_timeout 65;
												keepalive_requests 100000;
												sendfile on;
												tcp_nopush on;
												tcp_nodelay on;

												ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/this.piston.rocks/fullchain.pem;
												ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/this.piston.rocks/privkey.pem;
												ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
												ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
												ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;
												ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';
												ssl_session_timeout 1d;
												ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:50m;
												ssl_stapling on;
												ssl_stapling_verify on;
												add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;

												location ~ ^(/|/ws) {
																				limit_req zone=ws burst=5;
																				access_log off;
																				proxy_pass http://websockets;
																				proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
																				proxy_set_header Host $host;
																				proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
																				proxy_next_upstream     error timeout invalid_header http_500;
																				proxy_connect_timeout   2;
																				proxy_http_version 1.1;
																				proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
																				proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
												}

												location ~ /.well-known {
																				allow all;
												}

				}


> Not to be ungrateful, my first reaction to this post was off course: awesome, finally a way to use steem independent of steemit.com like a real decentralized app. And it still locks to me a lot like that, only this small part seems missing, so thanks a lot for this awesome project!

The nicest thing to have would be a network of public API nodes that work like the P2P network. There are known SEED nodes and they just forward your requests to one of the publicly know APIs. Just like what electrum is doing ... or the NTP pool.

Yes it is hard if you are fluent with the required programming language.

I think someone has even created a docker image for steem .. search on steemit or github