High level overview​

This week, the Mithril team released the new distribution 2442.0. This release offers stable support for decentralized signature orchestration in both the signer and aggregator, the Cardano transaction client library, CLI and WASM, and the Pythagoras Mithril era. It also includes bug fixes and performance improvements.

The team also continued implementing usage metrics with a Prometheus endpoint and a Grafana dashboard for the aggregator. Additionally, they completed preparing the Pythagoras Mithril era and refactoring the node logs to improve their readability.

Finally, they kept implementing optimizations in the CI and updated the decentralized message queue CIP pull request, which has been granted the CIP number CIP-0137.

Low level overview​

• Released the new distribution 2442.0
• Published a dev blog post about the Certification of Cardano stake distribution
• Completed the issue Enhance readability of node logs #1981
• Completed the issue Prepare new Pythagoras Mithril era #1946
• Completed the issue Expose Prometheus metrics for aggregator #1980
• Completed the issue Deprecate macOS 12 builders in CI #2016
• Completed the issue Fix Cardano transaction chunk importer #2021
• Completed the issue Deprecate macOS 12 builders in CI #2016
• Completed the issue Fix warning log when building OpenAPI UI in CI #2017
• Completed the issue Update workflow github actions to node 20 #2018
• Completed the issue release-preprod aggregator is unavailable #2036
• Worked on the issue Release 2442 distribution #1943
• Worked on the issue Create Grafana dashboard for aggregator #2001
• Worked on the issue Record aggregator metrics in event store #2023
• Worked on the issue Refactor ChainPoint conversion from pallas Point #2037
• Worked on the issue CIP for Mithril signature diffusion through Cardano network #1775

High level summary​

• Benchmarking: Started release benchmarks for Node 10.0.
• Development: Governance action workload - alternative tx submission method built, passes tests.
• Tracing: Preparing the bump to typed-protocols-0.3.

Low level overview​

Benchmarking​

We've started the benchmarking process for the freshly tagged, fully Chang 2 capable Node version 10.0 pre-release.

Development​

Calibrating a governance action / voting workload within our submission service tx-generator is more involved than anticipated.

As measurements for performance impact of voting are required very shortly, we have - in parallel - created a nix / bash based solution. That one uses cardano-cli for creating and submitting proposals and voting transactions, while the generator can run any other known workload simultaneously. Thus, we expect to get a clear performance delta between voting vs. no voting going on. This setup has already been deployed, and is passing testing - soon to be used for the first real-world voting benchmarks.

The implementation however is less flexible, much less parametrizable, and in its design tied to the very specific, fixed topology of the Nomad cluster. The workload definition inside tx-generator will thus continue, and eventually be used as the standard for benchmarks targeting voting / governance.

Tracing​

The new tracing system, more specifically, the components that forward metrics and traces to cardano-tracer, contain well-defined peers in the sense of the typed-protocols package. The upcoming bump to recently released version 0.3 contains breaking changes in the package API. We've begun necessary downstream adjustments in our packages, re-defining aforementioned peers using the new API.

High level summary​

The SRE team continues work on Cardano environment improvements and general maintenance.

Some notable recent changes, updates or improvements include:

• Cardano-parts environments can now be migrated from Grafana Agent to Grafana Alloy.

• Most cardano-parts downstream clusters have now been migrated to grafana alloy use.

Repository Work​

Cardano-parts​

• Migrates to grafana alloy from grafana agent. Drops deprecated cardano-node service features and iohk-nix legacy mainnet relay filtering. Fixes cardano-parts jobs for cardano-cli breaking change compatibility. More detail is available in the release notes: cardano-parts-release-v2024-10-22

Cardano-playground​

• Migrates to grafana alloy for metrics collection, rotates sanchonet kes, fixes latest govtool develop nix packaging and nginx deployment and deploys to sanchonet. More detail is available in the PR description: cardano-playground-pull-34

Cardano-mainnet​

• Migrates to grafana alloy for metrics collection, fixes scheduled restart service status file. More detail is available in the PR description: cardano-mainnet-pull-24

Cardano-node​

• Removes legacy mainnet relay filter for bootstrap attr generation, bumps the iohkNix pin for similarly updated topology generation, updates mainnet topology config to match updated iohk-nix topology ordering. cardano-node-pull-6011

Govtool​

• Fixes nix builds for frontend and backend components, required node_nixpkgs pin update and regeneration of yarn.lock. Fixes impure nix builds required by some deployers by adding an optional returnShellEnv bool to the backend package. govtool-pull-2184

Iohk-nix​

• Removes deprecated legacy relays from mainnet env and corresponding filtering for bootstrap generation, simplifies bp config generation, arranges mainnet edgeNodes in alphabetical order. iohk-nix-pull-587

High-level summary​

The last few weeks have seen a solid amount of work and changes to the user-facing side of Hydra; namely great progress on incremental commits and using Aiken for our commit validator which has yielded size/cost savings. This has also allowed us to support PlutusV3 validators and keep up to date with the cardano-api. We also made a breaking change (improvement) to the server output SnapshotConfirmed to make it easier to work with signed snapshots. Finally, we made good progress on blockfrost support by adding an option to follow the chain via blockfrost, instead of through a cardano-node. Next up we continue our focus on incremental commits and general improvements, while planning the next release.

What did the team achieve?​

• Added the raw CBOR datum in transaction outputs #1543
• Used Aiken for commit validator #1680
• Updated to cardano-api 9.4 #1706
• Implemented the off-chain user journey for incremental commits #1522
• Documentation on the incremental commits feature #1704
• Some cleanup of unused modules and functions
• Full transaction information in SnapshotConfirmed event #1685
• Added blockfrost mode to hydra-chain-observer #1631

What's next?​

• Continued work on incremental commits #199
• Improvements to memory usage #1618
• DevEx improvements to split out components of the hydra monorepo
• Start to plan the 0.20.0 release

High level summary​

• Released diff-containers-1.3.0.0, fingertree-rm-1.0.0.3, cardano-lmdb-0.4.0.2, and cardano-lmdb-simple-0.7.0.1.
• Improved IOSim:
  • Added MonadLabelledMVar (176).
  • Improved the Show instance of ScheduleMod (175).
  • Ensure labels are printed where possible in IOSimPOR (174).
• Released Consensus packages for Node 10.0.
• Simplified Cardano hard fork triggers (1282.
• Decreased max permissible clock skew for headers from the future from 5s to 2s (1279).