Terraforming Ethereum Testnets

In order to test the bloXroute BDN in realistic circumstances, it wasn’t enough to pump artificial transactions through the network. Instead, we wanted to connect it to real functioning networks to see how it would do under everyday conditions, which may include misbehaving peers, corrupted or invalid blocks, and so on.

bloXroute’s mission is to serve any blockchain, so we set out to test a variety of existing clients in real world conditions. Each node contains a dockerized version of the client in question, alongside a bloXroute Gateway client. The bloXoute Gateway acts as a standard peer to that blockchain node (the node doesn’t know it’s talking to something special). The gateway relays transactions and blocks to and from each node, using the bloXroute BDN to transmit this information.

Today, we run real blockchain nodes of the following flavors: Bitcoin Core Testnet, Bitcoin Core Mainnet, Bitcoin Cash Testnet, Bitcoin Cash Mainnet, Ethereum Mainnet, Ethereum Ropsten, Ethereum Rinkeby, with plans to expand to lots more. This article will focus on how we automate the creation of Ethereum nodes, though the same idea applies to Bitcoin nodes, or any other nodes we create in the future.

The problems we needed to solve are:

We start with a terraform file for creating the ethereum node. For more details on how this works, we recommend reading the three-part series (https://medium.com/bloxroute/terraforming-bitcoin-testnets-part-1-3-40460946d4ef) on how we terraformed bitcoin testnets. Although the code has changed a bit since then, the basic idea remains the same.

The boot script takes care of figuring out which chain we want to launch, injecting those params from terraform tags, and launching the docker container in question. Because the container is injectable, it makes it easy for us to launch different versions of geth. The simplified instantiation of this module looks something like this:

That’s it! This is the general technique we use to spin up nodes from all flavors of ethereum and bitcoin clients, with minor modifications for the blockchain in question. In reality, since we want to test real world conditions, we actually have to run nodes in every geographical region of the world. Because of this, our terraform is actually significantly more complicated than the above, and involves the specification of per-region node deployments. Stay tuned for a future post discussing multi-region networking and deployments with terraform.

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