“Simplifying Development with Blockfrost: Should You Use the Cloud or Self-Host?”

Ikigai Technologies
Ikigai Technologies

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Blockchain technology has emerged to revolutionize the digital landscape. Like all new technologies, it takes time to make it easy to use. This is where Blockfrost comes in; Blockfrost is a tool that makes it easier for applications to interact with the Cardano blockchain.

Blockfrost comes in one of two packages:

  1. A cloud offering that is ready to go in minutes and doesn’t require your team to maintain it. This simplicity comes with scaling costs that can become expensive as a product scales.
  2. Self-hosting Blockfrost on your own infrastructure. This provides enables colocating it with your other servers, and handling larger scale with less cost. The initial setup and minimum cost are much higher than the cloud solution this way.

We decided that self-hosting was the right approach for our needs. When we started getting it set up, we quickly found it was not as straightforward as we had hoped to get Blockfrost running on our infrastructure. What we wanted was to simply run docker-compose.

Unfortunately, that was not what happened. We thought it should be much easier, so we built what was needed to make it so. Now we’re excited to share it with the Cardano community! We believe our infrastructure code will make it easy for any Cardano project to self-host Blockfrost.

We developed two methods for deploying self-hosted Blockfrost infrastructure so that you can have the best of both worlds.

Our docker-compose solution has minimal requirements and is designed to get your local environment up and running in just a matter of minutes. With a single command, the Blockfrost API and supporting infrastructure are ready for development. The data is stored locally on persistent volumes, so you can stop and start work without worrying about losing test data.

In addition, we also built a helm chart for Kubernetes native deployments. The chart is configured for local deployments by default, but it allows you to customize each piece of the infrastructure. You can opt in or out of certain deployment pieces, control the service ingress, and easily provide custom configurations to the Blockfrost application. These features make the helm chart the ideal choice for repeatable, deterministic, and production-ready deployments that still work locally.

Whether you use the cloud or self-host Blockfrost, you can simplify your development process and bring your blockchain ideas to life. With the cloud solution and our infrastructure solutions, you can choose the approach that best fits the needs and budget of your project.

Click here to get our open source Blockfrost infrastructure repo on GitHub today. If you appreciate our contribution to the Cardano community, we’d appreciate it if you star the repo!

Check out our video on how we’ve integrated Blockfrost!

Disclaimer

The opinions shared within this article are those solely of Ikigai Technologies and contributors. Note that the content within should not be considered financial, legal, or tax advice. Neither the author nor Ikigai Technologies, et al. are financial, legal, or tax advisors. None of this content should be used to make any form of financial, tax, or legal decisions. Do your own research and consult professionals as needed for official policies, restrictions, and requirements in your jurisdiction.

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Ikigai Technologies
Ikigai Technologies

Passionate Technologists developing dApps and the future of Web3