Support Blockchain as A Service

Challenges

During its rapid growth, Hyperchain experienced significant challenges in establishing its blockchain platform. These included:

The absence of standardized traffic management, which posed the risk of system collapse
Incomplete security control and authentication management
Inconvenient permission control
High cost associated with public network IP addresses
Unstable blockchain nodes, with single nodes being vulnerable to attack
A lack of unified management for multiple protocols

Solution

Hyperchain has solved its challenges by registering service information with etcd and APISIX, which is the unified entry point for internal microservices.

This approach provided standardized traffic management, improved security and authentication management, convenient permission control, reduced costs, increased stability, and unified management of multiple protocols.

Competitive Edge of Our Solution

Route Forwarding

APISIX's proxy-rewrite plugin can conveniently handle cases where prefixes are added to the API path of the same service to expose APIs under the same domain name. The API gateway can strip these prefixes and forward the request to the backend service.

Traffic Limit Management

Another significant advantage for customers is APISIX's traffic limit management capabilities. The limit-req plugin can effectively restrict traffic input and output to ensure the platform's stability, which is especially important when dealing with large numbers of calls to driving components.

Security Control and Authority Management

Hyperchain has developed a plugin for private deployment scenarios to collaborate with APISIX. This plugin enables Party A to use its own authentication services or service account system. When front-end traffic visits the website, it must first pass through the Access-auth plugin to gain access to the backend BFF (Backend for Frontend) after authentication.

Hot Reloading

Another significant advantage for customers is APISIX's hot reloading feature, which saves development time and allows users to modify parts of their code without restarting the entire plugin runner.

Results

Convenient Permission Control

Hyperchain's blockchain platform involves multiple blockchains with complex RBAC permission controls and requires various certificates on the client side. APISIX's key-auth plugin simplifies the process by unifying the underlying chain, allowing authorized users to access the blockchain without worrying about permission configuration.

Clustering Improves Nodes Stability

The high concurrency of bank users visiting nodes on the Hyperchain blockchain platform can create a vulnerability for single nodes to be impacted by traffic. To address this issue, Hyperchain deployed Apache APISIX, which utilizes etcd for dynamic scalability, on K8s with the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. This approach ensures the stability of nodes by mitigating the problem of single-point traffic impact.

Support Multiple Protocols

APISIX's support for multiple protocols allows it to adapt flexibly to the underlying layers of different blockchains, reducing development costs associated with platform integration.