This November has been an ordeal for many of us, but thankfully, we have two good news for Solana.

The first one is that, quite expectedly, developers are not going anywhere. They know Solana’s overall value, advantages, and perspectives very well, so they keep working on the infrastructure and applications for end users.

The second one is that today we’re releasing an open-source load balancer. It enables devs to reroute requests from delinquent Solana public RPC nodes to active ones. We invite you to download and test it and to give feedback on our Discord. Developers can build a Docker image from source code or use a ready-made image from Docker Hub.

Why are RPCs so important?

A cryptocurrency wallet does not actually connect to the blockchain. It simply turns actions in the interface into code and then sends it to one of the nodes to be executed and included in the blockchain.

Wallets and other applications send code to pre-selected RPC nodes. If they stop responding and accepting requests, the applications won't work.

Hosting a Solana node is expensive, starting at $1,000 per month, so dApp developers often send requests to public RPC nodes. Those public RPCs, however, are usually hosted by centralized providers like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Hetzner.

A case in point: in early November, Hetzner discontinued all Solana nodes on its servers, which comprised a whopping 22% of the overall number of nodes. The network survived, but many apps crashed as their selected RPC nodes went offline.

This story shows that trusting only one RPC on a centrally hosted service is dangerous. A dApp developer can reduce the chances of failure with a script, module, or standalone app that automatically switches to a spare RPC endpoint in case of any problem with the primary node. But what if the alternate one fails too? This is the problem we are going to solve with our load balancer.

What is extrnode’s open-source load balancer?

We have created extrnode's open-source load balancer that distributes requests within a cluster of Solana’s public RPC nodes. Its main feature is that it automatically reroutes requests to another active RPC endpoint when the RPC node in use is down. As a result, dApps that use extrnode will only stop working if all available RPCs go offline.

The reliable operation of applications is the main advantage of extrnode. But there are others as well:

• extrnode’s open-source load balancer will be free to use. Just run it on Docker, connect to it, and all is set.

• In theory, the open-source load balancer can be configured to pick up the closest RPCs with the fastest response time.

• It’s community-driven: users can contribute ideas, modify their clients, and complement the project's source code.

Other existing solutions fall into three categories:

• Decentralized but paid balancers. Users often have to pay in volatile project tokens.

• Free but centralized balancers. Users can only access an RPC of a single provider, which reduces the solution’s reliability in case of attacks.

• DIY load balancer. Complex and expensive, as the development would require a team, money, and infrastructure to host the solution.

In the end, devs either have to pay or be afraid of an RPC shutdown due to incidents like Hetzner’s ban. extrnode’s load balancer will enable developers to work without such tradeoffs.

How can extrnode’s load balancer help dApp developers?

Developers can be confident that their applications will always have access to an RPC, and users can use those apps without errors or delays. To achieve this without extrnode, developers would have to ask users to manually switch to other RPCs. Building a custom load balancer can only be done by a large team: it takes money, expertise, and active assistance from validators and infrastructure providers.

In the current version, devs can use extrnode’s open-source load balancer to test applications on the mainnet. We can't guarantee its quality yet and don't recommend using the load balancer for production applications.

Soon we will release a free public load balancer and extrnode Premium for production use. extrnode’s public load balancer will be hosted on Everstake's infrastructure. Developers will need to send requests to extrnode's RPC endpoint for the load balancer to reroute them to other RPCs. The premium version will have only battle-tested validators, like 01node, Chainflow, Imperator, Chainode Tech, Stakin, Staking Facilities, Triton One, in the RPC cluster to provide clients with higher communication speeds and reliability.

After this, we plan to scale our products to other chains. We decided to begin with Solana since testing it on such a Web3 powerhouse is critical should we scale the solution to other prominent blockchains. Moreover, notwithstanding the troubles like the market downturn and Hetzner's ban, Solana’s community stays strong and unwavering in its belief in Web3.

Is using a load balancer safe?

extrnode's open-source load balancer will have a fail-safe request rerouting mechanism. Users can help us achieve this faster by testing it and sharing feedback with us.

We plan to create a separate premium solution for customers with higher security requirements. The enterprise-level version of extrnode will work only with the most reliable and fast validators. It will be distributed between them to provide complete decentralization and protection against any incidents.

An RPC Explorer and a public Solana RPC node map are to be released soon.

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