OnFinality Customer Case Study: Moonbeam
OnFinality provides the opportunity for the team to focus on developing the Moonbeam Network, improving the functionalities of cross-network compatibility with Ethereum.
OnFinality looks to provide infrastructure and developer tools that saves developers hours and allows teams to grow with confidence. Our mission is to save you time and help you provide better services for your users by providing core infrastructure. Let us focus on infrastructure so you can focus on building the future.
In this Customer Case Study series we hone in on how Moonbeam uses OnFinality to elevate and enhance their project via hosting and API services.
Summary
Moonbeam, one of the top Polkadot projects providing a layer-1 smart contract network to the ecosystem, features OnFinality as a scalable API service for the parachain on the Polkadot Network. Moonbeam saw significant growth in API requests as it launched, and continued to grow within the community. OnFinality provides a reliable API platform for Moonbeam so the DevOps teams can focus on developing their network infrastructure.
“OnFinality has provided vital and scalable API services for Moonbeam since the early days of the Moonbase Alpha TestNet through to production. We’ve worked closely with their team and have been able to rely on them for quality infrastructure and prompt response times”
— Tim Baldwin, VP of Engineering at PureStake, the company building Moonbeam
The Problem Facing Moonbeam
Moonbeam is a smart contract platform for building cross-chain connected applications that can access users, assets, and services on any chain. By uniting functionality from Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot and more into a single platform, Moonbeam solves today’s fragmented user experience — unlocking true interoperability and paving the way for the next generation of applications.
Moonbeam is designed for a multichain future, and with this in mind it focuses on the importance of allowing developers to take advantage of the connectivity between networks. Moonbeam supports this idea by providing Ethereum-based tools to the Polkadot network such as MetaMask, standardises on popular smart contract languages like Solidity and Vyper, and features top integrations like Chainlink, Gnosis Safe, and Etherscan. Moonbeam launched as the second-ever fully functioning parachain on Polkadot and is one of the top projects in the ecosystem.
The Moonbeam Foundation provided a grant, enabling OnFinality to support the network since the early days of Moonbeam’s Moonbase Alpha TestNet, continuing through to the launch of the MainNet on Polkadot. Various dApp development teams needed to connect to the networks (Moonbeam, Moonriver, Moonbeam Alpha). The PureStake team, which provides the technology and development for Moonbeam, would have had to commit significant time and resources in order to build their own API endpoints to support these deployments.
This expensive and time consuming process would have slowed development of the actual capabilities of Moonbeam’s various networks. In a fast paced environment like Polkadot, this would have significantly impeded the overall growth of Moonbeam by limiting early deployments on the newly-launched network. However, OnFinality prevented that by providing vital and scalable API endpoints enabling new users to join the network quickly and easily.
“On Finality’s node-as-a-service allowed the DevOps team to scale up the API infrastructure to meet the rapidly growing demand during the launch of all three of the Moonbeam networks, at a time when the previous solution was having difficulty scaling.”
— Art Kaseman, DevOps Manager at PureStake
How OnFinality Helped Moonbeam
OnFinality provides the opportunity for the team to focus on developing the Moonbeam Network, improving the functionalities of cross-network compatibility with Ethereum. We enable this by managing an API service for Moonbeam, freeing up developer time and reducing costs.
The Moonbeam Foundation grant has supported this service throughout the development of the various networks on top of Polkadot and Kusama. During this time, OnFinality has provided reliable services and fast response times, giving the network the ability to scale quickly and offer developers the best connection points possible.
Initially, the PureStake DevOps team used OnFinality to manually add Moonbeam nodes in multiple regions around the world to meet growing demand. Upgrades and configurations were updated through the web portal.
After identifying a particularly poorly performing RPC query, the team used OnFinality’s solution to create multiple configuration templates per network so that they could fine-tune the solution to better handle this edge case. The service split this query at the load balancer out to a dedicated set of specially configured nodes which brought the response time back into spec.
After continuing to scale up, the team leveraged the service’s API offering to automatically upgrade and adjust configurations across the entire fleet. This allowed them to ensure consistent configurations and reduced drift across all of the nodes.
“OnFinality has provided vital and scalable API services for Moonbeam since the early days of the Moonbase Alpha TestNet through to production. We’ve worked closely with their team and have been able to rely on them for quality infrastructure and prompt response times”
— Tim Baldwin, VP of Engineering at PureStake
“OnFinality allowed us to scale and diversify API services for all of the Moonbeam networks in multiple regions around the globe while ensuring consistent performance metrics.”
— Art Kaseman, DevOps Manager at PureStake
The Results
Ensuring that Moonbeam has fast, scalable and reliable API infrastructure is an important pillar to build upon. The comfort of taking care of this highly important infrastructure allows the PureStake development and DevOps teams to focus on more important strategic decisions, whilst OnFinality maintains the underlying infrastructure. Not only does this provide tangible value such as saved developer time and reduced network down time, but it also gives the Moonbeam team peace of mind, knowing they have a team they can trust supporting and maintaining their network.
“The broader Moonbeam team uses the OnFinality solution to quickly modify startup parameters to tune performance to keep in line with frequent software improvements. Their team is responsive to enhancing their software offering to support new features of the Moonbeam network.”
— Art Kaseman, DevOps Manager at PureStake
“The DevOps team uses OnFinality’s API to automate upgrades, and ensure there is no drift in the configuration of the product offering. We are able to keep a tight feedback loop on upgrades and performance enhancements while still ensuring the diversification and decentralization of the Moonbeam networks.”
— Art Kaseman, DevOps Manager at PureStake
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About OnFinality
OnFinality is a SaaS platform that provides infrastructure and developer tools that saves developers hours and allows teams to grow with confidence. Our mission is to help blockchain and dApp developers build the decentralised future faster.