Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are crucial in today's fast-paced software development world, particularly for extensive-scale applications in Web2 and decentralized apps. Nosana, as a decentralized CI/CD tools platform, offers complete automated DevOps pipelines, speeding the development process, minimizing software problems, and increasing user trust through transparency. This powerful solution streamlines the process and ensures a seamless transition for both users and developers.

In this article, we will look at Nosana's primary features and benefits and its impact on the development community, as well as some thoughts about it compared to conventional tools as a developer.

Project background

CI/CD process

CI/CD technologies automate different aspects of the software development lifecycle, such as code integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. While CI seeks to merge code changes into a shared repository, avoiding "integration hell" and time-consuming merging. CD complements CI by automating software updates across many environments [1], guaranteeing that code upgrades tests for bug-free and ready for deployment [2]. CD stresses regular, minimally invasive software modification delivery [3], allowing teams to deploy software numerous times daily, ensuring the program is always ready for release.

Traditional workflow

Traditional CI/CD pipelines frequently necessitate manual intervention and are prone to human errors, which can stymie development efficiency. Developers would conduct manual processes like merging code changes, performing tests, and deploying software. This manual intervention increases the likelihood of errors, delays, and inconsistencies, which reduces the overall efficiency of the development process [4].

Figure 1. A sequence diagram of manual implementation for CI/CD work (taken from coinbay.io)

Figure 1. A sequence diagram of manual implementation for CI/CD work (taken from coinbay.io)

Modern CI/CD processes and tools have arisen to address these difficulties, intending to automate and streamline the software development lifecycle. Developers can reduce manual intervention, minimize errors, and improve productivity by automating critical phases of the process. It is like a big revolution to this tedious process.

Decentralized automated pipeline

Decentralized automated pipeline, like Nosana's, provide automated DevOps pipelines to make development more accessible and efficient as below.

Figure 2. Benefits of using Nosana and others decentralized CI/CD services (taken from Nosana medium)

Figure 2. Benefits of using Nosana and others decentralized CI/CD services (taken from Nosana medium)

Before that, Tenderly, a Web3 development platform, offers tools and services for innovative contract development, testing, monitoring, and operation [5]. Their Web3 CI/CD system aimed to ease intelligent contract development and enhance the local development experience. It’s open-source CLI tool is essential for accelerating local development processes, analyzing stack traces, pinpointing code lines, and accelerating debugging [6]. Tenderly's all-in-one platform assists developers throughout the life cycle of smart contracts, from inception to widespread acceptance.

As this concept is relatively new, and with a few platforms support it, making it an ideal way to bridge the gap and contribute to Web3's growth and development for smaller team. Say goodbye to Web2 development tools and hello to Web3 development's future with Nosana now.

Exploring Nosana

About the project

Nosana is a blockchain-based platform that automates testing and creates a secure, transparent, and unchangeable distributed pipeline for developers. Its decentralized network of nodes enables test execution without third-party servers or services, allowing for tracking, auditing, sharing test results, and keeping them private. This CI/CD solution enables developers to conduct fully automated DevOps workflows, simplifying development, reducing software defects, and eliminating user errors. And because decentralized automation enhances communication and confidence processing power in traditional and Web3 metaverse communities grows, Nosana brings decentralized crowd computing to the metaverse, introducing blockchain technology's transformative power to app development for start-ups and small tech not to relying on bigger entities.

Service model

Nosana employs a community rating system based on First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) to ensure fairness and efficiency in job processing. Users can submit jobs and designate a charge to prioritize execution based on their financial ability with a small fee. The best part is that Nosana rewards $NOS tokens to community nodes, promoting active involvement and providing adequate computing power for job execution. All of this lives on the Solana blockchain to improve the overall efficiency of the Nosana Network by providing scalability, high throughput, and cheap transaction fees. This long-term ecosystem combines community rating, fee-based task prioritizing, and node execution rewards to provide dependable and timely job execution services while motivating community engagement and contribution from nodes worldwide.

Terminology