Zebitex — AWS infrastructure configuration and optimization for a cryptocurrency exchange

Zebitex is a cryptocurrency company from France developing and running a bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange platform in addition to providing a blockchain explorer service. They needed help with building a resource-segregated system to ensure the wallets cannot contact the blockchain ledger directly, which prevents wallet funds mismanagement.

Case info

Location: Toulouse, France

Industry: Bitcoin exchange and explorer services

Partnership period: March 2018 – ongoing

Team size: 1 DevOps Team Lead, 1 DevOps engineer

Team location: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Services: AWS infrastructure configuration and optimization

Expertise delivered: Blockchain development, cloud infrastructure management, CI/CD implementation, monitoring and alerting

Technology stack: AWS tools (Lambda, Cognito, RDS, API Gateway), DEX, GitHub, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, OAuth2, Docker, Helm, Vault, Sentry, Peatio, WebSockets.

Project requirements

The customer had the following project specifications:

1. Automate Kubernetes cluster deployment to bare metal servers
2. Automate Kubernetes cluster deployment to AWS
3. Build resource-segregated AWS stack
4. Implement and optimize CI/CD pipelines for product updates
5. Implement monitoring and alerting

Challenges and solutions

One critical feature of the app is its ability to monitor the system to prevent hacking. Zebitex uses a lot of technologies that conform to the system calls issued by the application. The platform also has a lot of network segregation between different parts of the app to ensure that wallets are not accessing it directly—they have to pass through a proxy before authentication.

Results

IT Svit has prepared Helm charts, Terraform and Kubernetes manifests and various other scripts to enable seamless and error-proof deployment of Kubernetes clusters to bare metal servers and AWS infrastructure. We optimized the system workflows and improved its performance while ensuring the security of operations. We implemented CI/CD pipelines to automate and streamline the delivery of new features and platform operations in production using AWS Lambda, Cognito, API Gateway, RDS, DEX and other tools. Finally, we implemented an in-depth monitoring and smart alerting system to help the customer keep an eye on the platform performance.

Conclusions

Working on Zebitex project enabled the IT Svit team to further improve our mastery with Helm and other tools. We were able to deliver all the required results on time, which helped the customer launch a profitable product and further update it. The main scope of work is done, but the partnership is ongoing and we help Zebitex grow and succeed!