Tezos suite v1.2 has been released - Delphi edition

We just released version v1.2 of the Tezos Suite.

Below we explain the most intersting changes. You can also read all release notes

Several people have provided early feedback for this release. Thank you!

Upcoming Delphi update

One key improvement of this release is support for unattended protocol upgrades. This may come very handy for the upcoming Delphi upgrade.

Here is how it works: when launching your cloud baker, you may pass a list of two protocols as terraform variable:

protocols =[ "006-PsCARTHA", "007-PsDELPH1" ]

Then the baking pod will come up with two baking daemons, and two endorsing daemons running side-by-side. You are not on the hook to upgrade your baker when the update does take place.

This is not introducing double-baking/double-endorsing risk because:

  • the daemons are built against a specific protocol version, so they are not active at the same time. The Delphi baker and endorser sit idle until Delphi activates,
  • even if they were both running for some reason, they are communicating with the same node, so their knowledge of the chain at any point in time is the same, meaning they would be producing the same blocks and endorsements,
  • we have added Terraform validation to ensure you do not pass the same protocol twice as parameter (incidentally this forces you to upgrade to Terraform 0.13),
  • if you follow our best practices, you are using a remote signer with Ledger, which will refuse to sign a block twice at equal height, providing last-resort safety.

Lower operating costs

The GKE best practices recommend any new cluster to be deployed as a VPC-native cluster. But the legacy option - routes-based cluster - is still available. In this release, we deploy a routes-based cluster by default.

With this setting, all Tezos node use the Kubernetes node IP address as source address when connecting to other peers, and do not go through a NAT gateway, thus reducing the NAT costs.

We are now using the “rolling” storage mode for the baking node. Previously, only the sentry nodes had this setting while the baker node was running in “full” mode, using more disk space.

These two changes result in significant cost savings when running a cloud baker.

What is the Tezos Suite?

MIDL.dev Tezos Suite is a complete solution for Tezos baking using industry best practices:

  • hardware security module
  • cloud-native operations

It is easy to deploy: the cloud setup will launch with only one command.

Who are we?

We are MIDL.dev, staking-as-a-service company. We offer development and support on the Tezos Suite. We also offer cloud baking as a service. Contact us for more information.