Greetings to all. Remember Bluzelle? Yeah. Guys who develop database solution for blockchain application. So, we are glad to talk about them again. To be honest, there is no so much news and updates. Anyway, we are likely to tell you a few exciting things.
As we know, development is one of the most critical parts of any crypto project. So, the tech team is ready to show us such significant updates features as new CreateDB size constraint functionality, a random eviction policy on a per-database (UUID) basis and other great things. In our point of view, all the innovations are useful and give a great ability to specify a database you want to create.
Furthermore, there is the one latest thing for community developers. You would wonder what we are talking about? We are talking about Developer Bounty Program launched by Bluzelle and GitCoin. Through this program, the Foundation will be putting out periodic bounties, payable in BLZ, those reward developers for building real-world use cases for the Bluzelle DB. They will put different bounty tasks out regularly, as a contest that encourages the community to actively use Bluzelle to build new software in a reliable and competitive basis. You know, we always uphold the community development. In our vision, it helps the main project to grow and become more popular, more developed. So, we are looking forward to the first use-cases.
To end with, we are proud of Bluzelle. We see the future of this one and are going to share updates with you some more.
Intro
Since we are looking at Bluzelle for the second time, we feel that we have to explain to you what Blezelle is.
Bluzelle is a decentralized service provider that aims to allow users to create on-demand, scalable databases for blockchain applications. Bluzelle — a highly distributed key-value store edge caching service that provides both high-performance and high availability. The Bluzelle server is written purely in C++ and runs natively on Linux, Mac-OS-X, and other platforms, but can also run in Docker containers. Bluzelle can provide localized edge-computing performance that is vastly faster than a typical cloud-based REDIS+DB deployment.
The network plans to provide scalable and reliable database services to distributed applications. Users can rent their excess storage and computing resources to application developers using the native BNT token as payment. Bluzelle hopes to connect consumers through a variety of distribution points such as AWS, Android Studio, Quorum, and Microsoft Azure. The project focuses on software developers and enterprise software architects in the Asia Pacific region.
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Sprint Recap
While the full version is still in private mode for selected partners and customers, the public can still access the test version with the latest features.
The latest added features are as follows:
- New CreateDB size constraint functionality. In the test version, anyone can create a database and it now supports an optional parameter to specify the maximum size (in bytes) of your database. If you leave this parameter out, there is no maximum enforced.
- A random eviction policy on a per database (UUID) basis. For databases that have specified a maximum size when created with CreateDB, when that database reaches its maximum and an attempt is made to exceed that maximum (ie: with a Create or Update), existing data already in the database will be evicted (deleted), on the basis of randomly choosing a minimum number of key-value pairs to remove until enough space is available.
- Create and Update now allow for a TTL value to determine expiry time, on a per key-value-pair basis. An important aspect of building an application that is intended to run on the Bluzelle DB is resource management. Specifically, ensuring your application does not exceed the maximum size of the database you are paying for. A key means to do this is to keep tight TTL (total time to live) settings on every key-value-pair you store. Now you are allowed to specify the optional TTL when you create a key-value-pair. If you do not specify it, the key-value-pair lives forever. If you specify it (in seconds), when that time elapses, the key-value-pair is automatically deleted. This is an important and fundamental part of managing your database resources on Bluzelle and avoid eviction, otherwise, it will happen on a random basis.
- Multi-swarm support to enable databases (UUID’s) to be distributed across numerous swarms. Bluzelle has added the CRITICAL horizontal scaling aspect to Bluzelle. For example, instead of 100 nodes on a single swarm that have a maximum capacity of 100 GB total, we can now have 5 swarms of 20 nodes each with 100 GB each in capacity, for a total of 500 GB total capacity for the Bluzelle network. 500 GB vs 100 GB. Multi-swarm support is 100% TRANSPARENT to the developer
- Active database resource governance to ensure stability, availability, and performance. The development team has now taken governance to a whole new level. Aspects relating to stability, availability, and performance are strictly enforced to ensure that these metrics are met. The key area this applies to is the management of resources. This means that if you intend to launch a production product on Bluzelle, you should observe all the TTL and eviction options available to you, even on the test version.
- Bug fixes and performance improvements.
Social encounters
Developer Bounty Program
Bluzelle has launched a new developer bounty program. In partnership with GitCoin, The Foundation will be putting out regular bounties, payable in BLZ, that reward developers for building real-world use cases for the Bluzelle DB. They will put different bounty tasks out on a regular basis, as a contest that encourages the community to actively use Bluzelle to build new software in a friendly and competitive basis.
- Task #1: Crypto-Market Application Using Bluzelle
The first bounty centers around building a web app, powered by Bluzelle, that provides a website that lists out the prices of cryptocurrencies, much like CoinMarketCap.com. First you would need to pull order book data from external free APIs (e.g. from CoinGecko.com) and store them into Bluzelle DB. After that, you need to read price data from the Bluzelle DB and display them in the web app.
Reward: 50,000 BLZ
Enter the bounty now: https://gitcoin.co/issue/bluzelle/CryptoMarketWebApp/1/3223
Notes:
- Multiple developers are allowed to compete in the same task.
- Once all developers submit their work, the Bluzelle’s tech team will review and decide the winner of the task. The winner will claim the reward of the bounty.
- For the rest of developers who also work hard on the same task, the team will still give out a certain amount of reward.
- The tech team will showcase all the submissions on its channels and community members can also vote for their favourite submissions.
- The license for each bounty submission will be MIT but the original developer can always claim ownership and credit for their creation.
Roadmap
MEIER release, late April/early May, 2019
- Smart caching. Data is stored using RAM and SSD. Cache features like eviction and expiry.
- Multi-tenancy governance. Enable multiple customers to use the swarm with proper controls to protect data and ensure high availability and performance.
- Multi-swarm. Data can be scaled using tiering across multiple geo-decentralized swarms worldwide.
- Ethereum Swarm Registry. Auto-bootstrapping allows nodes and clients to discover existing swarms using the Ethereum mainnet.
- StatsD. Aggregation and dissemination of swarm metrics, for monitoring and analytics.
- External monitoring. Third party monitoring of Bluzelle nodes to ensure uptime, performance, availability, and other metrics are maintained.
- JS and C++ clients. Full programming language support.
- C++ common runtime. Base library to quickly develop support in new languages.
- Bluzelle Studio. Updates to support multi-swarm and caching primitives.
- Chaos module. Intentional entropy to harden the network preemptively against attacks, faults, load testing, and edge cases.
CURIE release, late October/early November, 2019
- Pricing. BLZ tokens are required to pay for and use the services.
- Trustless decentralization. Nodes operated by members of the public can join swarms. These farmers earn BLZ tokens for services provided.
- Proof of Storage. Challenges to enforce governance of farming nodes and rewards.
- Swarm-level geo-fencing. New swarms can have geographic properties, such as EU-only swarms and China-only swarms.
- Native data types. Strings, sets, sorted sets, lists, hashes.
- In-place mutability. Functions on native data types, performed directly on Bluzelle.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
