On Friday, we quietly launched Nautilus Cloud, a self-serve site for getting access to integrated development infrastructure of Tezos and Conseil nodes. The objective was to reduce friction in a quick and practical way for the many Tezos developers and clients who felt that running blockchain nodes and indexers can be full time jobs. Between our user-facing products like Galleon and Mininax, our analytics-oriented application, Arronax, and the numerous developer workshops we have been hosting over the recent months, service demand on our infrastructure has been steadily growing as the Tezos platform and our stack mature. We did not, however, mention our long-term plans for the service so we thought we would provide the community with more details.

Nautilus Cloud is ultimately meant to be a cloud service for blockchains which allows companies, individual developers and course providers to get up and running without having to learn esoteric technical details or hire an in-house blockchain DevOps team. While we only provide shared public nodes for free at the moment, soon we will have multiple plans- some of them paid- and the ability to spawn private nodes and indexers. In the long term, we also plan to work with the clients’ existing cloud providers through integration with AWS, Azure, etc, along with bespoke deployments on custom infrastructure.

The website will contain developers resources to get users started quickly with Tezos. The main dashboard will show multiple tabs, with each tab containing links and documentation for building with Tezos in a popular language like JavaScript, Java, Python, Scala, .NET etc. These tabs will mention several excellent community-made Tezos development tools. Along with our upcoming developer portal, we hope this will make the onboarding experience into Tezos smooth, pleasant and time effective.

And what of decentralization? We see the irony in announcing a centralized service as a decentralization company. Nautilus Cloud is meant primarily for reducing friction and promoting adoption. However, all back-end components for running the service will be open source and thoroughly documented. If you are a dApp developer, you can use Nautilus Cloud for education and easy prototyping. Then, once you are ready to launch, you can use Nautilus Core (still under early development) to deploy your own-infrastructure to get around censorship and enhance user security. Companies will have the option of launching nodes on their own cloud infrastructure while using our service as a wrapper. Nautilus Cloud will also be open source software so any other entity wishing to do so can launch their own instance so they do not have trust us or rely on us. We always aim for maximum practical decentralization.

We have now gone live with our seventh project centered around Tezos and we are excited to find out where this one will go. As usual, we rely on community comments, feedback and questions to do a better job with our products so we look forward to hearing from you all. As always, happy hacking!