— By Darshit Suratwala, Blockchain Engineer, Scale3labs.com
Building with distributed systems, such as blockchain technology, is challenging. For example, deploying blockchain nodes and keeping up with frequent blockchain node software updates is complicated due to a lack of standardized tooling, creating a plethora of operational challenges. At Scale3, our mission is to equip web3 builders with best-in-class observability tooling to build with reliability and confidence. We’re here to handle the complexities, so you can focus on what truly matters: innovation.
Before diving into what we built, let’s better understand the problem that we were facing internally regarding deploying and maintaining blockchain nodes:
The Problems:
- Inconsistent provisioning: Manual provisioning of blockchain nodes on the cloud resulted in inefficiencies and inconsistencies. Different engineers followed their own methods, leading to a lack of standardization in server setup, resource configurations, firewall settings, naming conventions, and resource tagging. This manual approach also made it challenging to maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory of servers.
- Hidden costs: Identifying and deleting unused blockchain nodes, and the associated resources, proved challenging, leading to potential cloud cost leaks.
- Infra visibility: Maintaining an up-to-date list of all the servers that were set up became difficult and time-consuming, even though the list was documented internally.
- Maintenance and upgrades: The absence of a consistent convention for directory structure and server configuration led to variations in how blockchain nodes were set up. For instance, some servers had the Sui systemd service running as suid while others used sui-node creating friction during the node update process.
Introducing NodePilot
We started with comprehensive documentation but struggled to manage changes for blockchain nodes. So, we opted for a single source of truth — a streamlined formula for creating and managing blockchain servers.
To address this challenge, we developed a simple-to-use tool called NodePilot, which helps us run and maintain blockchain servers on GCP, AWS, Azure, and data centers with minimal operational demands. Using NodePilot, anyone can spin up or update a blockchain node within a matter of a few minutes and a few clicksNodePilot is more than just a utility; it’s a powerful workflow automation tool designed to simplify the setup and maintenance of standalone blockchain servers anywhere in the world.
Let’s walk through how we utilize our own platform to keep our self-hosted blockchain nodes up to date.
- A user provides a node using NodePilot and onboards their node to Autopilot for observability and alerting.
- A user can leverage Scale3’s Autopilot to receive alerts for new node releases for supported chains via Slack, PagerDuty, or e-mail.
- When alerted, the user will receive the message for a new node software upgrade.
- Scale3’s automatic binary builder builds the binaries and we leverage that to upgrade the node to the latest version.
The Benefits
Given that we manage our own nodes for development and production, we have experienced the following benefits of using NodePilot:
- The node setup has become consistent
It’s simple to set up a node, and cleaning up node resources is worry-free. Now setting up a new node from scratch takes 5 minutes or less!
A user simply needs to provide instructions and provisioning is handled by Nodepilot. - Node updates are easier than ever before
With the help of self-hosted binaries and Node release alerts integrated into our system, it’s easy to maintain updates with NodePilot.
Who can benefit from NodePilot?
NodePilot is tailored to meet the needs of a wide range of node operators, including large enterprises, startups, and individuals who are running blockchain nodes in their own networks. This is built for audiences who are running self-hosted RPC nodes. Some of their use cases may include building blockchain indexers, explorers, blockchain intelligence and analysis tools, and apps that directly interact with the blockchain.
How to get started?
Our goal with NodePilot is not to be a node provider but to be a node enabler. We believe in empowering our users with complete control over their blockchain servers. With Scale3’s observability tools as their trusted companion, users can confidently take charge of their nodes’ reliability with ease.
To get started with NodePilot,
- Visit our website to learn more,
- Submit this form to request access, and we will get back to you with the next steps.
We want to hear from you.
Everything we do at Scale3 is in service of making your experience as builders as easy as possible. If there’s something you want to see in terms of NodePilot moving forward or if you have feedback on the new experience, please reach out to us!
