Tenderly: Developing the future of the Web3 with high performing infrastructure
About Tenderly
Tenderly provides a full-stack infrastructure for Web3 teams to build scalable decentralized applications with confidence and speed. A pioneer in the industry, Tenderly was the first company to launch blockchain transaction simulations, and recently raised $40M of series B funding following 500% YoY revenue growth.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usWith blockchain services faltering on a third-party provider, Tenderly migrated them to Google Cloud, reducing latency and building a high-performing full-stack infrastructure.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces disk latency from 800 microseconds to 300 microseconds
- Saves cost of increasing SRE headcount by 40%, with automated, fully managed services
- Delivers fast, reliable Web3 infrastructure across the US after expanding into two US data centers
Cuts disk latency by 500 microseconds, improving reliability
As Web3 edges closer towards its disruptive promise of a new, decentralized internet, smart contracts will play an increasingly important role in how businesses operate. Essentially blockchain computer code or programs that automatically execute an action when certain conditions are met, smart contracts are a key building block of Web3, and are held up as the future of everything from insurance contracts and property deals to supply chain management and energy distribution.
However, with Web3 still in its early days, the developer experience has typically lagged behind that of Web 2.0. It was this challenge that full-stack Web3 infrastructure provider Tenderly set out to address when it launched in 2018.
"We realized at the time that building in Web3 was extremely hard, because the tooling and components weren't mature enough," explains Nebojsa Urosevic, Co-Founder and SVP R&D, Tenderly. "We founded Tenderly to help Web3 industry leaders become more successful and more productive when they're building with Web3 technology. Our mission is to help Web3 go mainstream."
Built in Google Cloud, Tenderly offers Web3 developers custom environments to build and analyze their smart contracts, as well as testing and staging environments once they are built. When the smart contracts are ready to go into production, Tenderly provides developers with the infrastructure to enable their environment to scale as their user base grows.
The importance of building on firm foundations
When choosing the Tenderly infrastructure prior to launching the business, Urosevic and his co-founders understood the importance of getting it right first time.
"We all have engineering backgrounds, so we knew the burden of choosing the wrong provider—one that is not performant or reliable enough," explains Urosevic. "So from day one, Google Cloud was our choice. We spun up our cluster in Google Kubernetes Engine and are still relying on it to this day."
"We all have engineering backgrounds, so we knew the burden of choosing the wrong provider—one that is not performant or reliable enough. So from day one, Google Cloud was our choice. We spun up our cluster in Google Kubernetes Engine and are still relying on it to this day."
—Nebojsa Urosevic, Co-Founder and SVP R&D, TenderlyBlockchain networks and their need for speed
However, the nodes of a blockchain system typically use vast amounts of data and transactions, which initially led Tenderly to believe it would be more cost effective to host some of its systems on bare-metal services from a third-party provider. After six months, Tenderly began to notice a number of performance and reliability issues affecting its services, and its revenue in turn.
"The machines had a tendency to go off, which meant the majority of our platform was down, as we were relying on those nodes to keep up with the blockchain state at all times," Urosevic recalls. "Our monitoring stack would stop working, customer notifications weren't being delivered, and the whole platform looked like it was stuck at one point in time, as it couldn't receive new information from the blockchain. It was a big hit. That's when we began migrating those remaining components to Google Cloud."
Investigating the problem, the Tenderly site reliability engineering team realized that because some of the more complex blockchain networks were so fast moving—making around 1,000 calls to the disk every second—the nodes didn't have time to process everything and save it to the disk. That resulted in outages every month or so, where the nodes would simply freeze.
After migrating those networks from its third-party provider to Google Cloud, storing its blockchain data in Cloud Spanner, Tenderly reduced its latency from 800 microseconds to 300 microseconds, ensuring that its system is able to remain in sync with even the fastest-moving blockchain networks. As a result, Tenderly is able to provide a reliable, high-performance infrastructure to its customers, ensuring that its end users enjoy a fast and responsive Web3 experience.
Expanding into new regions for faster networks globally
Tenderly has also been able to grow its user base by expanding into new regions, offering low latency networks wherever Google Cloud has a data center. Tenderly recently expanded its services into the U.S., spinning up two new clusters on either side of the country.
"In our competitive workspace, latency is really important—50 milliseconds is somebody's decision to go with Tenderly or somebody else," explains Ilija Petrović, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Tenderly. "So being able to expand to two US regions in just a few weeks, as US demand increased, helped us to reduce latency, making our applications much, much faster."
In the event of any performance issues in a particular region, Tenderly can easily re-route part or all of the traffic to a different region, ensuring its availability remains high, thanks to the low backbone latency of Google Cloud.
"In our competitive workspace, latency is really important—50 milliseconds is somebody's decision to go with Tenderly or somebody else. So being able to expand to two US regions in just a few weeks, as US demand increased, helped us to reduce latency, making our applications much, much faster."
—Ilija Petrović, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, TenderlyHorizontal scaling to handle large spikes in traffic
Traffic through Tenderly's networks doesn't remain consistent at all times. Instead, there are peaks and troughs of traffic, depending on how its services are being used. A sharp rise in the price of a cryptocurrency, for example, might see a large spike in traffic using certain smart contracts on the blockchain, resulting in far higher CPU and memory usage. With Google Cloud, Tenderly has the flexibility to handle these sudden increases in demand without any loss in performance.
"Google Cloud provides horizontal scalability, so we don't have to worry what might happen if one of our components starts seeing a spike in traffic," Urosevic explains. "GKE will automatically scale up the number of microservices, so that the load can be handled without any performance degradation. That means we don't have to worry about that segment at all, where previously we used to worry constantly."
Saving time and money with automated, fully managed services
Tenderly benefits from other aspects of automation in Google Cloud, too. With the fully managed services of GKE and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, including automated maintenance and built-in software optimizations for Cloud SQL, and automated cluster lifecycle management in GKE, Tenderly is able to save significant time and resources.
"We recently calculated that we would need to increase the headcount of our SRE team by 40% if we wanted to manage Kubernetes and Postgres ourselves," says Petrović. "Not having to worry about upgrades and maintenance really helps us. Everything just happens naturally, without any downtime."
Monitoring and reporting tools built in to Google Cloud also help the SRE team to spot errors easily and fix them quickly, before they become an issue. All of these time savings free up the SRE team to focus on more business-oriented operations, such as spinning up and integrating new networks into Tenderly, to offer its customers the most reliable service.
The right infrastructure for the future of Web3
As Web3 developers work on bringing blockchain technology to mainstream adoption, they will need scalable and permanent solutions to support them, meaning the demand for Tenderly's advanced tooling and infrastructure will continue to grow. Maintaining a reliable service will therefore remain central to Tenderly's offering, as it strives to bring all infrastructural components together, standardize practices to facilitate blockchain development, and remove friction for Web3 innovators.
Urosevic anticipates that the throughput of the world blockchain network will increase 100 times over the coming years, so the Tenderly team is firmly focused on using Google Cloud to ensure its full-stack infrastructure is as stable and reliable as it can be for its customers during this predicted period of rapid growth.
"Developing with Google Cloud is more efficient, secure, and scalable," says Urosevic. "It provides a great user experience for our developers, helping our customers be more productive and efficient. As they start seeing huge rises in traffic, our customers will be able to depend on us, as we depend on Google Cloud."
"Developing with Google Cloud is more efficient, secure, and scalable. It provides a great user experience for our developers, helping our customers be more productive and efficient. As they start seeing huge rises in traffic, our customers will be able to depend on us, as we depend on Google Cloud."
—Nebojsa Urosevic, Co-Founder and SVP R&D, TenderlyTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Tenderly
Tenderly provides a full-stack infrastructure for Web3 teams to build scalable decentralized applications with confidence and speed. A pioneer in the industry, Tenderly was the first company to launch blockchain transaction simulations, and recently raised $40M of series B funding following 500% YoY revenue growth.