Save money and increase performance hosting Web3 and blockchain on OCI

The internet is rapidly evolving, and Web 3.0 (Web3), the possible future of the internet, is poised to transform the way the internet works and the demands for hosting it. Web2, the internet we know today, is controlled by large corporations who monopolize access to services in exchange for personal data. Web3, on the other hand, aims to decentralize value and data, allowing anyone on the network permission to use services, and no one can block or deny access. To achieve this goal, Web3 applications run on blockchains, a distributed ledger that generates trust without the need for a third party. When it comes to running Web3 workloads, there’s no better home than Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Many Web3 customers are having fantastic success hosting on OCI. Our industry-leading infrastructure and network performance, global availability, low data-transfer fees, scalability, and decentralization make it the ideal platform for businesses looking to harness the power of Web3 and blockchain technologies. Through their success, they have unlocked the incredible advantages that OCI has to offer.

“Cloud computing is enabling businesses to access a range of powerful tools and services that were previously only available to large corporations,” said the Harvard Business Review. “This is helping to level the playing field and create new opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses.”

What you need to host Web3 and blockchain nodes

• Computing and network power: To establish this decentralized, distributed blockchain network, numerous nodes must maintain a copy of the entire blockchain. When a new transaction occurs, it must be broadcast to all nodes and responses must be collated for majority-based consensus.

• Global availability: Users are accustomed to Web2’s global response times, so these nodes must be distributed throughout the world for performance purposes. For example, over 10,000 reachable full Ethereum nodes are distributed across 80 countries that all talk to each other.

• Fast storage: Each blockchain node must maintain the transaction state of the ledger, leading to a significant number of reads and writes. So, a high-performing database and storage are integral in influencing the performance of the chain.

• Scalability: An increase in platform development and transaction load leads to an increase in the number of nodes in the network, so nodes must be able to be deployed seamlessly and hastily.

• Decentralization: The core value of the blockchain’s decentralized philosophy is no control by a single source or service.

Why is OCI a good fit?

Industry-best infrastructure, network, and storage performance

We have partnered with AMD, Intel, and Ampere to offer customers the latest generations of compute capacity for a wide range of virtual machine (VM) and bare metal shapes. We also have a multiyear partnership with NVIDIA to bring the full NVIDIA accelerated computing stack, from GPUs to systems to software, to OCI.

Our networking is fundamentally different than other hyperscalers. Instead of running our control plane on the same servers as client tenancies, we created a control plane that increases performance and security, allowing us to offer complete bare-metal servers to customers. We also addressed network latency and collisions by creating a non-blocking Clos network as the standard networking model for our entire cloud, enabling us to be the first cloud provider to guarantee network performance with a financially backed service level agreement. We built remote direct memory access over converged ethernet (RoCE) backplanes allowing us to provide industry-best clustering for CPU and GPU workloads.

OCI has been at the forefront of storage performance since we launched in 2016. For workloads that require locally attached disks, we have DenseIO and high-performance computing (HPC) shapes with local NVMe storage benchmarking at 1.00MM+ IOPS. For workloads utilizing block storage, we can currently achieve block volumes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume.

Industry-best compute cost

OCI is optimized for performance and cost. We offer bare metal instances, VMs, and flexible instances, all at a fraction of the price of other hyperscalers. We offer three-times better price-performance for general-purpose AMD instances and more than twice better price-performance for compute-intensive and HPC Intel instances. We also offer flexible instances, which means you can right-size your workload and not waste money on fixed shapes.

Low data-transfer fees

For any cloud workload, but especially chatty Web3 and blockchain workloads, the large data transfer volume and charges can be detrimental. With OCI, we combat this problem in the following ways:

• Data ingress is free everywhere always.

• We offer a potential 30 TB of data egress free per month.

• We only meter egress traffic when it leaves a region through the public internet. All traffic contained within a region, such as between availability domains or zones, is entirely free. Any traffic exiting through a private line, referred to as FastConnect, is also free of charge.

• Even after eclipsing your monthly free quota, we’re typically 90% cheaper per GB than other providers.

Global data center presence with consistent pricing

Our executives saw early the importance of a globally expansive cloud that allows customers to deploy as close to their end users as possible and meet any compliance or regulatory demands there may be. For this reason, OCI has the most distinct cloud regions of any provider. Because of our efficient engineering approach to data center automation, pricing for our cloud services is globally consistent (apart from data egress charges). For example, a VM and block storage in Ashburn is the same as in Singapore, ensuring that blockchain nodes can be deployed anywhere around the globe, achieving the same infrastructure savings.

Scalability

A key benefit and attraction of cloud technologies is the ability to react to workload variabilities and only pay for what you need when you need it. For this reason, flexibility and scalability are both core tenants of OCI. We offer kits, tools, and plugins to facilitate the management of infrastructure, and all OCI services and regions are integrated with APIs, software developer kits (SDKs), and CLIs. This integration makes automating any architecture deployment possible and immediately reacting to customer demand straightforward.

Decentralization

Amazon Web Services (AWS) themselves claim their platform currently hosts 25% of all Ethereum nodes in the world. At Oracle, we focus on providing the cheapest and highest-performing infrastructure. We don’t want to make any aspect of this proprietary to Oracle or exclusive to a certain group. To us, it’s important that regular users can run a node and have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. It just so happens this goal is directly in line with Web3 and blockchain’s decentralization philosophy.

Hands-on support

Every OCI customer gets a consistent account team consisting of account executives and engineers that are present throughout the entire sales cycle. The sales team ensures that billing and cost management are monitored and continually reviewed, and the engineering team provides technical help. We’ve created weekly cadences, email chains, and even joint instant messaging channels for immediate responses, no matter what the question or issue may be. Oracle Support is included free with any OCI pricing you see, not a yearly cost or a percentage of your bill.

If you have any friends or colleagues that have worked with OCI, ask them about the support levels they received compared to other hyperscalers.

Summary

Widely considered to be the next iteration of the Internet, Web3 consists of open source, decentralized applications powered by blockchain technology. These applications require global infrastructure to host their large and communicative nodes, making OCI the ideal home for its high performance, low cost, globally consistent pricing, scalability, decentralization, and hands-on support. Numerous Web3 and blockchain companies are already reaping the benefits offered by OCI, and I hope this blog contributes to spreading this knowledge further.

If you want to try Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for yourself, check Oracle Cloud’s Free Tier with US$300 credits for a 30-day free trial. Free Tier also includes several “Always Free” services that are available for an unlimited time, even after your credits expire.

For more information, see the following resources:

• Oracle and NVIDIA partnership

• OCI Compute shapes

• Oracle’s public cloud regions

• OCI Cloud Economics