Multiple Testnets and Prototype Wallet App

Hi.

I haven’t had an update in a while and have made a ton of progress, so here it goes.

1. Secured AWS credits to build out my development environment. So, I’m finally off my localhost.

2. Built CloudFormation scripts to build out the public/private/nat subnets in AWS as well as setup VPN entry points to secure the entire dev cluster. The default kubernetes openvpn helm chart was non-functional because it didn’t forward traffic so I forked it and built my own. Also, the version of OpenVPN was upgraded.
   https://hub.docker.com/r/mpestritto/openvpn-docker

3. Completed a setup of a docker register in the cluster so jobs can be kicked off to do DinD build and pushed to the internal registry. The docker-registry-frontend was also functional because it referenced an old google cdn library. This was stripped out and rebuilt.
   https://hub.docker.com/r/mpestritto/docker-registry-frontend

4. Auto build of bitcoind, geth and rippled containers that utilize in shared history.

5. Worked on the front-end and fully integrated it to launch nodes. I’d say it not too bad. See the screen shot below.

6. Started to work on a wallet app that consume BCN APIs. This is to visualize the wallets you have on all the nodes and gives a very clean way to interact with your launched nodes. Screen shot is pretty ugly - I’ll post it after it gets cleaned up.

What am I looking for next ?

• Alpha users - anyone running their own privates nodes ( on any chain ) and want to interact with them over API vs RPC? email me: matt at blockchainnode dot io

• Production cluster setup. Anyone willing to fund donations to this project to allow setup of production environment.

• I’ll post a video of me launching a few nodes in the next weeks as well.

Screen shot of the node launcher. Nodes launch and sync in 30-90 seconds.

Ruby gem alpha launch, test wallet app and and Ceph exploration

Hi.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made some progress.

Most progress was made on the first cut of the ruby gem. https://github.com/blockchain-node/ruby-client The basic functionality of being able to connect to a launched BCN node and make any RPC call over HTTPS fully working. I’ve been working on building some specific support for certain nodes - bitcoin and ethereum.

The skeleton to my first app being written on this platform is taking shape as well. I’ve decided to keep it simple and do a basic cross node wallet. Drop in your API keys, start the app and you have visibility into your hosted wallets, can create new wallets and/or accounts and view and send transactions. More to come here.

I’ve also spent some time exploring options for different distributed file systems. I ended up going pretty deep with ceph. Ceph provides distributed object and block device storages across a cluster of computers. I built a 4 node cluster using i3.large nodes that have NVMe backed SSD drives. At first, I was getting performance that was on slightly under a stock EBS gp2 volume at around 120 MB/s sequential read / write. When I reduced the replication to 2, from the default of 3 shards per object, it spiked up to about 140-150 MB/s. This was still not nearly as performant as a large 2TB+ EBS gp2 volume where you can get sustained speeds of around 250MB/s. The real hit was the random access performance tests. I cancelled the test suite after about 30 minutes when it still hadn’t finished.

Thanks for reading.
Matt

Public website launch and background info for project

Hi,

Welcome to the initial post of Blockchain Node.

Over the past few months, I have been working on the initial infrastructure to launch, manage and connect to blockchain nodes in a much easier way than you can now. I spent a good amount of time in 2018 working on various blockchain side projects, solidity programming, testing frameworks for solidity contracts and of course, launching and managing lots of processes, bitcoind, geth, rippled, monerod, etc.

I realized that it took way to long to setup and manage all of that infrastructure, so I started building this service in December of 2018.

I’m now at the point where I have a functional development/test environment with bitcoind (mainnet and testnet), able to launch a node in minutes. Testnet takes under a minute to sync off of the deployed snapshot and mainnet takes under 3 minutes.

I also have a working SDK in ruby where you can connect to the node in a few lines of code.

client = BlockchainNodeClient.new(id, secret, node_id) 
client.getwalletinfo
client.getbalance
client.walletpassphrase("MyPassword",60)
client.sendtoaddress("Address", 0.1)

More to come. Stay tuned.
Matt