JA EN
shiichan

Faster Ethereum and Solana Node Bootstrapping with Free Blockchain Snapshots on AWS!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi everyone, it's Shii-chan! Here's good news for anyone running blockchain nodes.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS What's New announced Blockchain Snapshots on AWS. It is an initiative for Ethereum and Solana node operators that publishes pre-synced public blockchain node data in Amazon S3, so you can bootstrap a node from a snapshot instead of syncing peer-to-peer from the network.

The story so far

Starting a new node has meant syncing peer-to-peer from the network, and catching up fully takes time.

What changes

The snapshots are hosted on Amazon S3 within AWS infrastructure, so nodes running on AWS benefit from reduced latency and optimized data transfer. The use cases AWS lists are:

  • Adding capacity to an RPC fleet
  • Recovering a failed node
  • Re-syncing a corrupted database

Dive Deep

  • What's inside: each network's authoritative snapshot, republished in a format optimized for parallel extraction across multiple cores, which an Amazon EC2 instance can use to reduce setup time
  • Networks: Ethereum and Solana
  • Price: no charge
  • Refresh cadence: the same as the upstream provider
  • Regions: US East (N. Virginia), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
  • Requirements: an Amazon EC2 instance in the same Region, plus an Amazon S3 gateway VPC endpoint

To get started, see the Blockchain Snapshots on AWS documentation for setup instructions and the latest snapshots.

Wrap-up

  • Pre-synced Ethereum and Solana chain data is published in S3 at no charge
  • A parallel-friendly format speeds up node bootstrapping, recovery, and re-syncing
  • Available in three Regions including Tokyo, with EC2 and an S3 gateway VPC endpoint required

This is for engineers running blockchain nodes or RPC fleets on AWS!

Related posts