Please describe your proposed solution
With the advent of cloud computing, a new class of applications has emerged. These applications are optimized for the elastic nature of the cloud and utilize web standards to produce rich applications as cloud native technologies. Cloud native technologies continue to gain traction, with more than half of organizations running most of their workloads in the cloud. As the historical size of the Cardano blockchain grows, organizations will be seeking ways to integrate Cardano data into their existing infrastructure, data pipelines, and business intelligence workflows, by leveraging cloud native object storage, such as Amazon’s S3 or Google’s Cloud Storage. They will also be looking for ways to utilize this data source to support elastic infrastructure.
Archive nodes are common in other blockchains. An archive node provides a complete historical record of every block and transaction state change for a blockchain and is optimized for these types of requests. As the size of the Cardano blockchain grows, local storage of the entire chain will become a growing issue of cost and capacity. Creating an archive node allows creation of other nodes which can prune immutable block data from their own storage when paired with an archive node.
Blink Labs will build capabilities into its Go Cardano node to support an archive mode of operation which will allow it to both archive data and utilize archive data from a cloud native object store for servicing requests. Archive node usage will be built into the Go Cardano node as a supported out-of-box feature, allowing the Go Cardano node to be used in a mode which prunes the archive data when used in conjunction with an archive node.