Building the Public Infrastructure for Polkadot and Beyond
Our Mission: To make the lives of Polkadot developers easier by automating devops and managed infrastructure .
Blockchain development has huge potential to change the world. As a leading area of research and development around the world, it has limitless applications in finance, communications, distribution, and data governance.
But blockchain is hard, it’s so hard in fact that only the most dedicated development teams currently make any headway with it. Incentive structures are difficult to design, maintenance is costly, making a mistake at the start can haunt you for years. Development is slower and more restrained, invalidate a network or lose consensus and you corrupt your work — there’s no “move fast and break things” in blockchain development.
Why we’re here
One area of blockchain development that teams do not want to worry about is systems administration. Developers know that system operations and infrastructure setup consume an extraordinary amount of time, especially when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Secondly, developers now expect some form of CI/CD so that they can automatically test and deploy their codebase changes without any work. This has dramatically shortened the iteration time in traditional development. All of the OnFinality team have backgrounds in the blockchain industry and we recognised that these two devops issues were really holding back blockchain development.
So we went away, prototyped a few things, drank way too many energy drinks, and then came back with OnFinality. OnFinality aims to solve the above issues with blockchain development, give us a docker image, and we’ll create and deploy that change to a new distributed network running across multiple clouds in minutes. We’ll do it automatically for you, and then allow you to view system metrics across the entire network in one place. Take a look at how your change went, test it for the desired outcome, and if it didn’t quite work, you can roll it all back and try again — how easy!
The Polkadot Ecosystem
And that brings us to Polkadot, we saw the parachains potential early and right from the start, it felt natural to focus our efforts there. It solves ethereum’s governance, forking, interoperability problems, and more. The core premise of Polkadot is to create a thriving community of developers, users, and businesses that will tap into its multichain interoperability — that community is going to need a blockchain as a service (BaaS) platform there to help them get started.
Polkadot’s unique architecture means that we can focus on one network and then be able to support multiple current and future chains automatically. By putting in this effort now, even as Polkadot is still under development, we will be there ready to help the next generation of blockchain developers create the next big dApp.
Conclusion
We allow anyone with a Polkadot compatible network to use OnFinality to deploy to nodes on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. All you need to do is link a docker image of your node using the OnFinality portal, or use our APIs as part of your CI/CD pipelines to automatically create it during testing. Our customers, like Laminar (builders of Acala), already use OnFinality to create a fully bootstrapped test network in a matter of minutes which can be torn down afterwards without incurring unnecessary costs. Take a look at the power of OnFinality today or get in touch if you’re curious on how we can help you automate your testing and development.
