Blockchain is changing the way the world stores and moves its information. To help Web3 developers build and deploy new products on blockchain-based platforms, Google thrilled to announce Google Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine.

Blockchain Node Engine, a fully managed node-hosting for Web3 development, will initially support Ethereum (ETH) as its first network. This will allow blockchain developers to offer fully managed Ethereum nodes that have safe access to the blockchain.

Blockchains consist of transaction data that is permanently stored and encrypted, acting as decentralized databases of sorts. Instead of relying on a central entity to validate and store data, the governing infrastructure of a blockchain is a node, a device, such as a computer, laptop, or server, that contains a full copy of the transaction history of the blockchain. Nodes on a blockchain form a peer-to-peer network, constantly exchanging the latest blockchain data so that all nodes stay in sync.

Google notes that manually deploying a node requires provisioning a compute instance, like installing an Ethereum client (such as geth), and waiting for the node to sync with the network. It may take many days to sync a full node from the first block (i.e., "genesis".

https://coins-gazette.com/post-detail/google-cloud-launches-its-own-node-hosting-service-heres-what-you-need-to-know