This page documents a specific use case of Kurtosis: core protocol developers for a particular L1 or L2 can spin up multiple end-to-end testing environments with minimal DevOps effort, running realistic private testnets in CI and debugging failed tests using a Kurtosis package and the portability features of the Kurtosis runtime for local debugging.
| Use case/persona | Common pain points | How Kurtosis does things differently |
|---|---|---|
| Core Client Developers (building node software) | Core client developers don’t see cross-client or multi-node bugs until their code is shipped into a representative multi-node environment, and this typically requires a degree of DevOps expertise or long wait times (shipping into a shared environment) to validate. | Kurtosis enables core client developers to run local representative testnets and manipulate/introspect them rapidly, in order to prototype cross-client interactions before their code is shipped to remote CI pipelines. |
| L1 DevOps/Testing Engineers | There are no standard tools or best practices when it comes to modeling complex peer-to-peer systems like blockchains. Existing tools are ill-equipped to do this job well, especially when its not Ethereum. Builders spend more time on building and managing their custom testing infrastructure instead of on protocol-specific logic and innovations. | Kurtosis is used to define and run nodes in an isolated environment for end-to-end testing & validation of specific features, capabilities, or scales. The environment will run the same way, every time, on your local machine or in CI. Kurtosis also supports Kubernetes out-of-the-box and abstracts away complexities with deploying to Kubernetes. |
| Node managers/operators | Node managers need to test their own assumptions of node software before running upgrades, especially if they’re relying on their own middleware to maintain funds, uptime monitoring, and rollback logic. | Kurtosis allows engineers to validate the functionality of and safely maintain node infrastructure that spans multiple cloud regions, providers, and blockchains by providing realistic environments with which to test and canary certain operations and workflows on. |
subnet-evm for end-to-end testing in CI and for local subnet development and prototyping for builders.