I initially thought it was a game-changer decision to separate Indexer from Node as that would reduce the minimum computational requirement for running a node. But now I think this design decision has added a point of centralization in the ecosystem.
For running an Algorand node, we have alternatives like Pokt network and Blockdaemon but is there an alternative network for running Algorand Indexer? Please correct me if I’m wrong but at the moment, it looks like spinning up our own Indexer on Azure or relying on Purestake/Algoexplorer/Algonode are our only choices. Not that anything’s wrong with it, we’ve used Algoexplorer reliably for a while now and we are happy with the service but I’m just wondering if these service providers might end up becoming points of centralization (/failure) in the future.
I’m curious to hear the community’s thoughts on this. Do we need to build something like the Graph protocol on Algorand?
Thanks,
Sai
Actually i think it was good design decision because anyone can make better indexer than is the official algorand indexer… For many applications you do not even need to have indexer up and running and the node and information about the processed block might be enough.
Good think about the indexers are that you can query blockchain very efficiently… You cannot query the eth or solana for all transactions between some specific times with specific paid amount or note field prefix.
I wonder if someone will come with some service to provide graphql service on top of algo network, but having current indexer methods is quite enough for most use cases.
Actually i would love to see the archival node architecture to be split from the relay node architecture, but it is only my wishful thinking
Btw, i have few defi trading bots up and running, and came to the point where algoexplorer started to give me 403 errors… I am running my own indexer nodes and algod nodes, so i dont have this issue any more. I am running my architecture in HA, and its not that expensive btw. I try to keep my k8s and dockers public so that i keep the revision history. GitHub - scholtz/AlgorandNodes
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