Scaling to new heights: Coinbase migrates to Amazon EKS and scales 10x (PRO303)

Here is a detailed summary of the key takeaways from the video transcription, broken down into sections:

Introduction

  • The presentation is about a 10x scale program that Coinbase and AWS Professional Services worked on over the last 18 months.
  • The key business objectives were:
    1. Reducing cost
    2. Scaling the architecture to support 10x the current traffic
    3. Modernizing the compute infrastructure from EC2 to a Kubernetes-based architecture

Coinbase Overview

  • Coinbase is the first and only publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange.
  • They face challenges with sudden volatility in the crypto market, which causes traffic influxes in their systems.
  • They need to be able to scale up and down their infrastructure quickly to handle these fluctuations.

Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) at Coinbase

  • The CCOE's role is to ensure Coinbase is using the cloud effectively and efficiently.
  • The three pillars are:
    1. Cloud architecture excellence
    2. Cloud usage excellence
    3. Cloud lifecycle management
  • Cloud optimization is a function of the expense of cloud workloads divided by the rates paid for the architecture.

The 10x Program Phases

  • The program was broken into 3 distinct phases, each with its own statement of work and learnings.

Phase 1: EC2 X86 to EC2 Graviton

  • Coinbase first worked on improving their autoscaling capabilities before bringing in AWS Professional Services.
  • They implemented warm pools, step scaling policies, and more granular metrics to improve scalability and responsiveness.
  • The migration to Graviton instances resulted in a 20% cost savings, better performance, and reduced carbon footprint.
  • Challenges included build pipeline issues, instance availability, and limitations with autoscaling groups.

Phase 2: EC2 to EKS

  • The goal was to shrink compute costs by 50% or more by moving to a Kubernetes-based architecture.
  • Coinbase used a larger project team approach, with weekly program check-ins, management check-ins, and assigned teams.
  • They focused on delivering ROI by identifying high-ROI services to migrate first, bin packing services, and leveraging the managed aspects of EKS.
  • Key learnings included the importance of prerequisites, using migrations as teaching moments, and considering IP space needs.
  • Results included a 68% reduction in resources for migrated services and a 50% increase in scaling speeds.

Phase 3: Graviton on EKS

  • Coinbase realized they had lost some Graviton adoption when moving to EKS, so they created a new statement of work to combine the two efforts.
  • They updated their Graviton migration guides for EKS, focused on Go-based services, and organized the work by clusters rather than individual services.
  • Challenges included the cluster autoscaler preventing full Graviton utilization, which they solved by increasing Graviton node pools.
  • The final results included 10% savings on compute due to Graviton's 20% cheaper instances, better scalability, and improved resiliency.

Overall Learnings

  • ROI and financial measurement mattered, so they focused on high-ROI, low-effort, low-impact services first.
  • Breaking the journey into phases allowed them to learn and carry forward improvements.
  • Defining a single-threaded leader and pairing AWS Professional Services with internal teams helped bridge cultural and trust gaps.
  • The overall 10x program resulted in a massive EKS migration in 12 months, proved the ROI-based funding model, achieved aggressive cost savings, and made the CCOE team experts in flexible workforce management.

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