Pinknode 1.0 is now LIVE — a sleek UI for managing your infra
Pinknode 1.0 is our first official release of a fully functioning blockchain API & node service product that’s built for the innovators of the Polkadot ecosystem.
Decentralized application (dApp) creators across the Polkadot ecosystem can now alleviate the burden of maintaining resource-intense personal nodes by accessing our highly scalable and reliable infrastructure. Public signup is now available and you can register for an account 🚩here.
🚩For developers or power users, we’d like to get to know you better! Take a minute to fill out this short form — https://forms.gle/TWL6RvvBwU8Az9S49
Recap of Pinknode 👋
The growth of this ecosystem was made possible through the support and involvement displayed by the Pinknodian community, which has been evinced through instances such as the 33,000 subscriptions received during the initial DEX offering and the subsequent need to raise the quantity of winning slots from 500 to 600 in May last year. We are also grateful for the enthusiastic reception of the now-closed beta version of the minimum viable product — since its release in July last year, our endpoints have received over 400 million requests. We have also cemented sixteen mutually-beneficial partnerships with multiple parachains victors and candidates: with more to come in time.
Going forward into 2022, we will continue to prioritize accountability to everyone who has supported us. It is in this same spirit that the development team has worked tirelessly to fine-tune several new features which are going to facilitate smoother user experiences and more robust scalability.
The New and Improved Pinknode Portal 💻
So what is this all about?
TL;DR — With the feedback that we have curated and experience running dozen of networks over the past months, we’re introducing a complete user interface overhaul and infrastructural upgrades.
*NEW — Project & Team Management Functions
You can now create multiple Projects under the same Team, this function was introduced to better help users segregate their functions and workflow. Service plans will be parked under Team, and Projects will share the rate limit. Users can also create and belong to multiple Teams.
Next, we have a new team management feature integrated — this permits users to assign or adopt the roles of owner, administrator, or member within the scope of a project. By delineating responsibilities and allowing each member to adopt a role, their collaboration is expedited and workflow is clear to team members, this is especially crucial for engineers working on multiple projects that necessitate segregating their workload.
Outside of the technical development process, this feature could expedite the management of payment/invoices and permit managers to toggle between several assignments without compromising the outcomes of any of them.
NEW — Project Usage Analytics & Live Block Explorer
In today’s world of big data and analytics, the phrase, “you can only manage what you measure” is only going to become truer as more and more industries embrace digitalization and software continues to evolve rapidly. This is why we have introduced a usage tracker that will be an instrumental tool for improving the visibility of their products. Tracking all the requests made on an hourly or daily basis enables engineers to analyze their aggregated data from a span of weeks or months and draw upon them to lean into their most popular features.
Users can also track the Top 10 Requests made on their custom endpoints by Method or by Bandwidth. Examining the information from the top ten types of requests made to your endpoints could enable engineers to optimize your software, thereby preventing their codebases from bloating.
Instead of scrutinizing your logs to debug failed requests, users can now utilize Pinknode’s Live Request Viewer for a more detailed view of all your recent requests. Search through historical requests and responses sent through your endpoints up to 14 days ago! This is critical for error tracking and debugging purposes. Filters will be implemented shortly.
Infrastructural Upgrades
Our second milestone for Pinknode 1.0 is the infrastructural upgrades. We have duplicated our node network to AWS to leverage multiple of their system components like AWS S3, Application Load Balancers, and EKS. This ensures that we have the capabilities to maintain a secure and reliable infrastructure that is highly available across multiple regions.
Perhaps the most salient upgrade we did was the construction of our proprietary API Gateway to manage our RESTful API and WebSockets connections, which allows us to:
- maintain a separate caching layer that contains the customized logic for different parachain logs
- accurately log all API requests into a database
- handle numerous WSS connections
- perform latency routing
- limit the load on processing, computation, and storage leading to time and cost savings
- perform other custom configurations
This custom-built proxy service also powers real-time data feeds in form of Pinknode’s Live Explorer.
With these enhancements and a technology suite that consists of multiple independent software components that interface with each other, we employed a microservice architecture so future works and upgrades can run independently.
You can now enjoy the benefits of a highly available blockchain API service and gain access to the networks of Polkadot, Kusama, and Rococo with one click of a button by registering for an account here. We’ll be introducing and integrating new networks shortly.
Thanking Pinknodians for Their Support
With the last major lap of the projected timeline approaching, preparations are being made for the wide-scale onboarding of users and deployment of blockchain nodes. Eventually, dozens or even hundreds of projects will come onboard Pinknode 1.0 in order to tap into the full potential of this flourishing multi-chain system- bringing this platform closer to becoming the de facto infrastructure of Polkadot.
🚩For developers or power users, we’d like to get to know you better! Take a minute to fill out this short form — https://forms.gle/pankBeum8chZpp337
About Pinknode
Pinknode is a Polkadot-only Infrastructure-as-a-Service project with the goal of accelerating adoption and empowering innovators to build on the most promising Web 3.0 meta protocol, Polkadot. By providing API endpoints through a streamlined onboarding process and maintaining secure, reliable and scalable node infrastructure, Pinknode helps innovators jumpstart development quickly and accelerate product life cycles.
If you want to know more about Pinknode, check out our website, follow us on Twitter, and join our Telegram to get in on the conversation.
