Highlights
In the last 4 months, we have announced 4 new partnerships with major blockchain-related infrastructure service providers, to help combat the healthy growth of Harmony’s on-chain utility via RPCs on other areas to help in the areas of infrastructure scaling*. These partnerships are major investments as a signal that Harmony’s prioritizing its ecosystem funds as a signal to the community that we are serious in growing Harmony. These partnerships will help provide alternative RPC service endpoints, websocket connections and indexed datasets, to the Harmony community. One of the four partnerships, Pocket Networks, have already rolled out in mid-October to help decentralize Harmony’s RPC services. The other 3 providers, Chainstack, Covalent and Quicknode, will launch in Q1 2022 and early parts of Q2 2022.
While the 3 additional service providers are preparing to integrate and publish their services to the Harmony community, the Harmony core engineering team had to work on scaling* up (expanding) the cloud infrastructure and blockchain sync improvements to help with the tremendous growth in demand for the Harmony blockchain dataset via RPCs. We are also getting the attention of unwelcomed spammers.
Harmony’s cloud infrastructure expansion is a continuously evolving engineering and process improvements. We have:
- built 4 different geographic presence around the world (from 1) to speed up connections to Harmony’s global audience
- added protections against spammy requests from individual users
- added node sync checks to divert traffic to healthier synchronized nodes across geographic regions
- upgraded our DNS beacon nodes to help validators synchronize more consistently
- expanded the number of metrics viewable at our monitoring dashboard metrics
- begun communicating pro-actively when there are issues via official post-mortem posts on Reddit
- increased the number of datapoints we have to alert our on-call personnel
What does this mean to you?
As a retail user, interacting with Harmony using wallets such as Metamask, or using a DeFi/GameFi app such as DeFiKingdoms, you may have seen your interactions with the dApps now more responsive than before. The experience you have via your browser or mobile device is now closer Harmony’s underlying 2-second on-chain finality.
As a developer, you could now see a more lower latency connection from anywhere around the world. If you are indexing the on-chain data, you’ll see a higher throughput in your requests. However, if you have a forwarding service from a backend server by real user requests, these could suffer from being blocked accidentally as it looks like a spammy request, hence you’ll need to dial it back a little, or perform a delayed retry.
What’s next?
There’s much left to do. We will be:
- working with our partners to make available the new and existing services come online to shift the RPC connection loads to them, directly referencing major dApp developers to work with them, or indirectly via traffic re-routing for existing RPC endpoints.
- focusing on further securing our cloud infrastructure to ensure web2 vulnerabilities are capped out over time, such as DNS security and firewall configuration improvements.
- optimizing the cost of our cloud infrastructure spends while growing our cloud data centers to multiple service providers, to help with resiliency from cloud provider outages such as the event on Dec 10th at AWS.
Partnership References
Pocket Networks
Chainstack
Covalent
QuickNode
(*) Key Definitions
- Cloud Scaling – In cloud computing, scaling is the process of adding or removing compute, storage, and network services to meet the demands a workload makes for resources in order to maintain availability and performance as utilization increases. See this article.
- RPC – In distributed computing, a Remote Procedure Call ( RPC ) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space. Read this article on Wikipedia.