Launchpad Office Hours Wraps Up 2023 with a Special Review

TL;DR: The biggest highlight of 2023 was Launchpad V2, with improved modularity and more features. Learn more about 2023 goal progress, community growth, challenges, and what’s in store for 2024.

The final Launchpad Office Hours of 2023 was a special edition that included an end-of-year review.

Read on to discover achievements and progress from 2023, including the transition to Launchpad V2.

 🗣 Launchpad Office Hours (LOH) is a biweekly meeting, hosted by the GraphOps team, where indexers learn and ask questions about the latest updates for running Launchpad.

What is Launchpad?

Launchpad is a toolkit for running a Graph Protocol Indexer on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestration platform that simplifies application management and scalability. It has load balancing and declarative configuration features that improve efficiency, making it easier to deploy and manage applications across diverse cloud environments.

Kubernetes is helpful for indexers—not only for indexing—but also because it adds core services like RPC endpoints and monitoring.

2023 Highlights: The Evolution of Launchpad

The biggest achievement of 2023 was the transition from Launchpad V1 to V2.

The first version was missing some features, wasn’t very customizable, and wasn’t usable for everyone. The second version is more modular and has more features, making it much more usable.

The image below helps to visualize the difference between the two versions. 🚀

V1 and V2 astronauts as shown in Launchpad Office Hours #9

What changed from Launchpad V1 to V2?

As seen in Launchpad Office Hours #9

Reflection on 2023 goals

GOAL: Reduce time from upstream releases to availability in Launchpad in a consistent manner.

• This has been smooth and sustainable recently.
• The GraphOps team would ideally like to push automation further by having comprehensive automated testing that is good enough to release without human intervention.

GOAL: Produce high-quality documentation and keep it up to date.

• Setting up generated documentation for namespaces was a lot of work, but it has been successful.
• The documentation needs to be updated in an automated way, which leads to a higher upfront development cost.
• The team produced some guides but hasn’t covered as much as they would like (i.e., CoreOS).

GOAL: Pursue a development model where we test Launchpad on our own infrastructure.

• The GraphOps team has been strict on this goal. Nethermind and Heimdall charts are not seeing stable releases, only canaries, as those chains are not yet running on the Launchpad V2 infrastructure.
• The team is happy that their use cases are helping drive Launchpad development, which enforces a minimum of testing and usage. They encourage the larger community to share use cases and challenges, or open bug reports.

GOAL: Achieve more modularity and flexibility.

• The GraphOps team has introduced scalingInterfaces to allow for control over workload management. The real power of scalingInterfaces lies in the capability to automatically scale workloads based on the specified replica count and update all the endpoints and values without manual intervention.
• The team has added the ability to override chartVersion and chartUrl, as the community requested. This is particularly beneficial for those scenarios where the default namespace setup doesn’t align with a user’s specific requirements. This provides the flexibility to specify versions and URLs that are best suited for individual needs, while still getting the benefit of namespaces.

Community growth and engagement stats for 2023

• The team hosted 9 LOH sessions
• LOH recordings on YouTube have 200+ views
• The Graph community has given 300+ likes to LOH-related tweets
• 40+ people joined us for live sessions on Discord

Challenges and learnings

• Rolling out new updates to chains must be done carefully to maintain network integrity and avoid data corruption.
• Implementing and managing various blockchain consensus mechanisms within a Kubernetes cluster requires a thorough understanding of both technologies, which can be a barrier to entry for using Launchpad.

The road ahead

• Adding Firehose and Substreams support
• Making schemas available (as previously previewed)
• Adding back Celo and Polygon, and bringing in Optimism support
• Improving documentation, FCOS guides
• Better secrets management
• Improving the observability layer (more dashboards, alert rules)
• Bringing in some data backup/moving capabilities (or at least document solutions here)

Join LOH to learn more

If you’re interested in the latest updates on running Launchpad, join us on Discord every other Wednesday at 5 PM UTC.