Maintenance

Maintaining Your Application on Solana

Any developer that has deployed their application to production knows that being able to maintain your application easily will relieve a lot of headache. How does the Solana protocol stack up when it comes to maintaining your application?

Understanding how easy it will be to maintain your application comes down to a few things:

Testing and Debugging: How easy is it to write tests to maintain functionality and debug potential issues?
Security: How do you keep your application secure?
Analytics: How do you properly monitor your application running in production?

Testing and Debugging

Testing and debugging is important in the development lifecycle. Tooling related to testing and debugging can pay back in hours of software development time, helping companies find issues faster and lessen their risk in production. Over 2023, the developer ecosystem has built out tooling to make testing and debugging an easier process.

Debugger: In the past year, two ways of using a step debugger were created, Bokken and ledger-tool’s debugger. With these tools you can step through breakpoints on your Solana-based smart contracts, understanding both the account state at each line of code.
Testing: Anchor framework’s mocha tests are the most commonly used testing framework for Solana smart contracts today. In the past six months, Solana Bankrun was created, enabling much faster testing and more capabilities around testing. Solana-program-test also exists, with similar capabilities and speed.
Code Coverage: Code coverage tools for smart contracts on Solana are lacking. Developers can use general Rust code coverage tools, but most of them will not accurately measure your coverage.
Logging: The base Solana logger is used within solana-program for most cases. This logger can be picked up via smart contract logs and piped via Geyser or sologger to help with analytics. SaaS tools such as Ironforge also exist to help watch application logs in production. In the past year, there have been improvements to the base logger via the Anchor framework to avoid many of the earlier limitations.
Events: The Anchor framework currently provides a very basic way of handling events in Solana on-chain applications. This framework, however, doesn’t give you an immediate event queue that you can use to catch up to the tip without some infrastructure involved. There are some proposals around improving events on Solana in the future.

Security

Having a secure application in production is paramount for any company wanting to operate safely. Security in decentralized applications is even more critical. Any bug within your smart contract can lead to large amounts of funds lost if you’re not careful. How do developers keep their smart contracts secure today?

CI Scanning: Developers can use basic scanning via Github Actions to scan for small vulnerabilities within their smart contracts. This kind of scanning can help them find vulnerabilities quickly before any deployment is made.
Audits: Any serious smart contract developer will get audits done by third-party companies within the ecosystem. Throughout the few years that Solana development has existed, multiple companies have popped up solely focused on audits.
Fuzz Testing: Properly fuzz testing against common known vulnerabilities is a good way to keep your smart contracts secure. There are fuzz testing frameworks like trdelnik that provide a quick way to understand if your smart contract is vulnerable to simple threats.
Live Scanning: While running in production it is best to be proactive against any potential threat by live scanning transactions for anomalies. Riverguard provides a high level of scanning on mainnet to understand if an on-chain application is vulnerable or susceptible to attacks given a pattern of transactions.

The Solana developer ecosystem has a decent amount of tooling around keeping your on-chain applications secure in production. But while the developer skill level grows, so do more sophisticated attacks – we continue to improve our applications, furthering education and tooling around security is critical for success.

Analytics

Developers seek analytics about the performance of their applications and those of their competitors. Today, analytics platforms support Solana with both raw and parsed transaction support. Due to the lack of availability and depth of data within IDLs, analytics platforms are slowed down and cannot provide rich accounts analysis. Once the IDL framework provided by Anchor is improved and more globally available, analysis will also improve on smart contracts.

The Solana developer ecosystem has only been around for four years. In that time, the availability of content and tooling to help developers build has cultivated today’s maturing ecosystem.

Conclusion

The Solana developer ecosystem has made significant progress in creating a robust tooling ecosystem, providing developers with the necessary tools to maintain their applications. While there is still room for improvement, the ecosystem has shown remarkable growth and maturity in a relatively short period. As the ecosystem continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative solutions emerge, further solidifying Solana as a premier platform for decentralized applications.

FAQs

Q: What are some of the major challenges in maintaining a Solana application?
A: Some of the major challenges in maintaining a Solana application include testing and debugging, security, and analytics. The Solana developer ecosystem has made significant progress in addressing these challenges, but there is still room for improvement.

Q: What are some of the key tools and frameworks available for testing and debugging Solana applications?
A: Some of the key tools and frameworks available for testing and debugging Solana applications include Bokken, ledger-tool’s debugger, Anchor framework’s mocha tests, Solana Bankrun, and Solana-program-test.

Q: How can developers keep their Solana smart contracts secure?
A: Developers can keep their Solana smart contracts secure by using CI scanning, getting regular audits, fuzz testing, and live scanning transactions for anomalies. The Solana developer ecosystem has a decent amount of tooling around keeping your on-chain applications secure in production.

Q: What are some of the key analytics platforms available for Solana applications?
A: Some of the key analytics platforms available for Solana applications include Ironforge, Geyser, and sologger. These platforms provide support for both raw and parsed transaction data, allowing developers to gain insights into the performance of their applications and those of their competitors.

Q: How does the Solana Foundation support the development of the Solana ecosystem?
A: The Solana Foundation continuously works to help the Solana developer ecosystem grow, encouraging new developers to contribute to the developer experience, and supporting the maturing of tools. The foundation also provides grants for projects that aim to improve the Solana developer ecosystem and welcomes feedback from developers on how to make the experience better.