The Lack of Tooling
It’s a thrilling time to be building blockchain protocols, apps and services. As of today, there are over 1900 projects tracked publicly and countless more being developed by internal teams at existing companies. The proliferation of blockchain APIs, industry specific blockchains and even blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) has lowered the hurdle for developers to jump right in. But what about the next step? How do you then take that proof-of-concept and get it ready for production?
When you start thinking through the steps to deploy and maintain a reasonably sized production network of blockchain nodes the gaps in tooling and infrastructure quickly become clear. How would you spin up hundreds of nodes all with the right configurations? How can you identify and troubleshoot issues that are unique to blockchain networks like unintended forks caused by two nodes getting out of sync? What would you use to scale up the number of nodes as needed? How do you know it’s even time to do that? Perhaps you could string together existing tools that are already in your workflow, but those are unlikely to be able to detect and resolve the nuances of blockchain networks. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Another approach could be to scale up the BaaS which your team used to develop the prototype. After all, that BaaS is managed by companies like Amazon and Microsoft who promise to do all the dirty work for you like assembling the required technologies, monitoring and troubleshooting infrastructure, etc. The reality, though, is that BaaS is also a fairly nascent industry. If you need to check the status of a blockchain node the knowledge base for one large BaaS provider recommends downloading a JSON file, extracting a URL, changing the header, running a curl command with the output and then checking the status response. That’s a far cry from the level of functionality we’ve grown accustomed to in other production environments.
It’s clear we need a better solution. To really deploy blockchain projects in production we need resilient systems with autonomous monitoring and recoverability. We need tools to ensure that consistent policies and access levels are deployed across the entire system. Basically, we need the type of tools that have existed for years in the traditional networking world — tools like cPanel and WHM for monitoring large networks of web hosts. In these tools, data is presented in simple dashboards and every function is just a click or an alert away. Without similar tools for blockchain, those innovative prototypes will remain right where they are.
Marconi is developing new networking technologies to help secure, operate and scale blockchain and information networks. The team is made up of industry experts with years of experience in both the networking and blockchain world and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on with our partners.
