What is the key difference between Private Nodes, Public Nodes and Bakers in terms of Tezos Blockchain Network?
I thought that Public node = Baker, but it looks like not
According to tzkt.io we can see 4362 all Tezos Nodes (Private + Public ?), 359 public nodes and 113 bakers. The number of public nodes is not similar with the number of bakers
Private node doesn’t connect to any peer other than explicitly provided or specified in bootstrap nodes list (default). Also, peers that are connected to a private node don’t advertise its address to others.
Private nodes are typically used for sensitive operations. The entire setup includes one or many (failover) public (edge/frontend) nodes that are exposed to the p2p network, and single or multiple private (backend) nodes that are connected only to the edge nodes.
Baker is block producer in Tezos. Baker's software consists of several components including "baker" service, responsible for consensus operations and block producing. It uses Tezos node for reading blockchain data and injecting (broadcasting) operations and blocks via RPC interface.
Note, that while your node can be in public mode you can still disallow incoming p2p connection at the firewall level. TzKT treats nodes as public if they are accepting new connections thus can be used for bootstrap and improving connectivity.
Also note, that private/public is about p2p exposure, RPC endpoints (actually HTTP REST) availability is solely depends on your reverse proxy setup.
