Gantree — A Node Infrastructure Toolkit for Substrate
Hello 👋
We're finally ready to loudly say that we've released Gantree, our full-service node infrastructure toolkit for Substrate-based blockchains. I know that's an eyeful of a tagline, but we think it's appropriate.
If you have your ear to the ground in the Polkadot/Substrate ecosystem, you may have come across a couple of mentions of Gantree already, but until now we haven't really published anything about it ourselves. This post both serves as an introduction and a tutorial about how you can get started using Gantree to manage your nodes.
But what exactly is Gantree? Let's break it down.
(If you would prefer the TL;DR in video form, click here)
What is Gantree?
We are describing Gantree as a full-service node infrastructure toolkit for Substrate-based blockchains. Let's examine each of those points in a bit more detail.
Full-service: Gantree doesn't require you to have any prerequisite knowledge of the infrastructure service providers that it deploys your nodes to (outside of having an account). Gantree doesn't host nodes for you, it provisions them on your own infrastructure. Currently we support Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS.
Infrastructure toolkit: Gantree is a tool to assist you in configuring your infrastructure to meet your needs, regardless of how specific they are. You can use it to deploy entirely new networks, or you can deploy nodes for existing blockchain networks. You can create as many nodes as you like at one time with Gantree, and they can all be configured individually without having to touch the machines themselves.
For Substrate-based blockchains: Currently Gantree supports the deployment and configuration of nodes which are built with the Substrate blockchain framework. This includes Polkadot, Kusama, Centrifuge, Edgeware, Laminar, Plasm and many more. If it's built with Substrate and there's a public Git repository (or binary) for it, Gantree can probably deploy it.
Who is Gantree For?
Gantree is a tool that we see being very useful for three main subsets of users.
Blockchain Developers: Building blockchains is a difficult, multidisciplinary task. Deploying and maintaining these blockchains (even if they're just testnets) is just as difficult, **and it requires a completely different set of skills. We firmly believe that you shouldn't need to be (or become) a DevOps wizard in order to build a blockchain, so we made Gantree to lighten the load on developers. Now you can focus on building while we do the heavy lifting of managing and monitoring your infrastructure, without giving up control.
Network Supporters: Is there a particular blockchain network that you like? Or even want to stake on? Gantree can provide you with the tools to set up multiple nodes for those networks on infrastructure which is owned by you. We also provide you with analytics and alerts to ensure that you don't miss anything which requires your attention.
Third Party Service Providers: Looking to build a block explorer? Or maybe a SaaS service which leverages blockchain data and requires highly-available nodes in order to provide real-time data to your users? Gantree ensures that you can spend more time building your service to bring value to users, instead of spending time deploying and managing nodes.
If you think you might fall into one of these categories, or you think that Gantree might be useful in other ways, I encourage you to get in touch.
Where to From Here?
The feature roadmap for Gantree currently prioritises monitoring and alerting for your nodes. Currently it's incredibly difficult to keep tabs on how your nodes are doing; whether they're syncing (and whether they're syncing fast enough!), if they're participating in the staking process like they should be, or if they're offline altogether. We believe that for the vision of Web3 to come together in the way that we want it to - the ability to host and maintain nodes should be accessible to as many people as possible. If you want to participate in the peer-to-peer future, we want to give you peace of mind.
How Can I Try Gantree Out?
Currently there are a couple of ways to leverage Gantree. The CLI will give you the most flexibility in terms of how you configure your infrastructure, and is usually the bleeding-edge. The Web Dashboard is a no-code solution where a wizard will help you to configure your deployment. In the very near future usage of the CLI will create nodes on the Web Dashboard for you to more easily monitor.
You can find rough guides for each of the above methods here:
We're a small team and trying to keep up with demand, so our documentation will be a little thin on the ground as we rapidly scaffold Gantree. The best way to learn if it's right for you is to get in touch and we'll spend some time learning a little bit about your use case. We're looking for feedback, so your thoughts are highly valuable to us.
Happy Building
We hope that this is a useful intro to Gantree and what we're building. If you have any more questions, please do join our Discord or Riot and ping one of the team.
