Magma Devs unveils RPC Smart Router on Google Cloud Platform
In a paradigm-shifting announcement, Magma Devs, an engineering collective designed to enhance the decentralized Remote Procedure Call (RPC) routing protocol, introduced its ambitious initiative of an RPC Smart Router. This marquee release occurred on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, its unveiling date being Monday, December 22nd.
Strategic partnership with Google
The dynamic launch event, realized in synergy with the partnership of tech giant Google, holds great promise for large enterprises. The primary goal of this collaboration is to enable businesses a more steadfast and reliable connectivity method to public blockchains, counting Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon among others. The Smart Router is designed to be highly efficient, managing blockchain requests over several providers and autonomously selecting the fastest and most stable preference in real time.
Significance of avoiding reliance on a single access point
By taking the crucial step to not depend on a specific access point, the Smart Router is engineered to prevent outages while also reducing the incidence of delays and failed transactions on decentralized applications, as per a press release viewed by The Defiant. The efficiency and reliability of any blockchain system is intrinsically tied to the effectiveness of the pipes that connect these networks to the larger world, hence a break in these access layers could potentially result in the failure of all components above it, pointed out Yair Cleper, the Active Chairman of Magma Devs.
The Smart Router during testing phase
Magma Devs also offered insights into the performance of the Smart Router during the testing phase, stating that it had been efficiently employed during intervals of heavy traffic and potential provider outages. This while enhancing service availability. In an attempt to illustrate this point, one of the instances described was that of Fireblocks, a custody provider that utilized the Smart Router for maintaining service availability during high congestion periods.
The implications of RPC failures for enterprises
Cleper emphasized on the gravity of RPC failures, explaining that they cannot be dismissed piffle technical glitches. For businesses, such events may be extremely critical as they could potentially cause major disruptions. Through this innovation of bringing the Smart Router onto Google Cloud, enterprises gain a more transparent roadmap to access production-grade blockchain infrastructure capable of bolstering the efficiency of day-to-day operations.
The bigger picture: high-profile outages and what it means
This development comes on the heels of multiple high-profile outages observed across multiple cloud and blockchain service providers this year. Case in point, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage lasting several hours on October 20th caused significant disruptions to major websites and applications, including Robinhood and Coinbase.
A look at the vulnerabilities of modern internet infrastructure
The incident shed light on the vulnerabilities of the modern internet infrastructure. The digital realm is largely concentrated among just a few cloud providers. According to Statista, AWS alone controls 29 percent of the global cloud market, followed by Microsoft Azure with 20 percent, and Google Cloud with 13 percent. These statistics show that these three entities covering over 60 percent of the total cloud share.
Tackling centralized infrastructure is crucial
Such events reignited the ongoing debate on the centralization of crypto. While blockchains are primarily constructed to be decentralized, their current reliability on centralized infrastructure poses a significant hurdle and contradiction to their inherent design. In this regard, Cleper opines that Smart Router serves as a critical gateway for decentralized technology.
The Smart Router: A viable solution
Cleper went a step further to elaborate on how the software layer can function across diverse environments and deployment models, and by default connecting to Lava Network’s decentralized RPC infrastructure. It also allows clients to include other RPC providers they are currently using. It’s essential to note that the power over routing logic basically sits with the clients which makes the model more democratic and flexible.
Looking into the future
Cleper clarified that Magma Devs isn’t hosting the service in itself, but rather is deploying the software and offering service-level agreements. If a client makes use of the Google Cloud Marketplace deployment alone and it goes down, they would require a backup deployment. The Smart Router, in its hosted version, supports this, as it can be deployed across multiple environments or providers. However, the responsibility for redundancy in this setup ultimately lies with the customer.
