Running a Full Bitcoin Node: AWS vs. GCP

Written By Erik

Welcome back Bitcoiner, to another short read for your enjoyment. Lets begin. We could start at a very high level and discuss the battle between these two goliaths of AWS and GCP, King Kong vs. Godzilla style (Ill let you decide which is which), But! Alas, we don’t have the space to fit it all in one article so we will skip that part.

  • Bitcoin Nodes: Wallet (Light Node), Full Node (or Pruned Node), Miner.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the partnership and integration of Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin Full node.

P.S. If you run a personal Bitcoin Wallet in a cloud provider, you might as well be using a custodial wallet that you do not have full control over. Also, while writing this blog piece I learned that Wallet nodes are more technically referred to as SPV nodes (Simplified Payment Verification), Light nodes, or Lightweight nodes. The more you know.

Miners can be ran on the cloud but AWS and GCP have ways of identifying which servers are being used for this very niche purpose as they sort of standout like sour thumbs. Additionally, they are not very profitable to run in the cloud at the moment and not recommended other than for educational purposes.

Anyways, I digress: What are the pros and cons of running a Full Node in the AWS and the GCP environments?

Bitcoin Full Node - A Full Node stores the entire history of the blockchain on its hard drive, validates new blocks added by you and others, as well as enforces the Bitcoin consensus rule set on its own software.

AWS

    • AWS Marketplace: Synced Nodes to recent date, Pruned nodes, Ordinal ready nodes, and much more.

    • Low startup costs: fast setup for educational purposes.

    • Unlimited storage*

    • Access globally*

      • If your node is back at home and you’re on vacation at Miami Beach you can just log in via the Internet. Hopefully your physical node doesn’t go down.

    • Ongoing payment for data storage.

    • Internet single point of failure with AWS Internet Gateway.

GCP

    • Low startup costs: fast setup for educational purposes.

    • Unlimited storage*

    • Ongoing payment for data storage.

    • Google Cloud Marketplace: Less support for Full Nodes, but better for Datasets and metadata.

    • Internet single point of failure with GCP Cloud NAT.

Based on this limited research, I would say both cloud providers are viable options to run a Bitcoin Node, but really we would be giving up the ethos of Bitcoin entirely. That Bitcoin ethos being: Sovereignty and with that sovereignty comes responsibility. The biggest advantage for both options is global access to the node via the Internet, but you are giving up all other real controls over the physical node.

Should you run your node on the cloud? For fast educational purposes, there aren’t many better options than a node in the cloud, but embrace a long time preference and build your own Bitcoin node at home.

Erik
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