Blockchain DevOps Services and Management

If you need to implement Blockchain in DevOps, Aelius Venture is the IT outsourcing partner you need! Our dedicated teams can design and build cloud infrastructures and apps for companies in the UK and across the globe. Let’s build the DevOps blockchain together for Blockchain DevOps Services!

Aelius Venture Helps the Business Combine Blockchain & Devops

Blockchain technology underpins numerous projects in various industries, from finances and retail to real estate, the energy market, environmental control, and social services. However, these products must be developed and delivered to end-users cost-effectively and provide an uninterrupted user experience. This is where DevOps comes into play, helping blockchain startups gain a competitive edge in the market.

Blockchain DevOps Services — Containerization of Decentralized Apps

Aelius Venture has ample experience with developing blockchain applications and containerizing them. This allows blockchain startups to release their products fast and add new features to them on schedule while providing an uninterrupted user experience to their customers.

DevOps & Blockchain Combined to Help Your Product Succeed!

DevOps principles ensure timely development and stable performance in production. This is essential for any product and is essential in eCommerce and retail, where an hour of app or website downtime results in huge lost revenues. This is why running blockchain-based products for Shopify eCommerce shops is done with DevOps workflows. Aelius Venture can ensure the same reliability and performance of your product or service!

Applying DevOps in Blockchain Development!

Aelius Venture has ample experience with both sides of the blockchain software delivery process. We have developed various blockchain products for customers from finances, eCommerce, mining, shipping, transportation, real estate and energy market, social services, and environmental control.

We helped the startups fully leverage all the benefits of blockchain architecture:

– decentralization of operations for interactions between numerous peers
– immutability of records to provide an undisputable ledger of data
– speed of processing to enable instant operations
– security to ensure the anonymity of transactions

Our in-depth expertise with software development and operations applied to the development and production of blockchain-based applications helped us deliver numerous useful products like:

– a system of coupons for enabling cross-sales in a huge network of eCommerce shops
– a system of QR-codes to replace the excise stamps in retail
– a transparent energy market using smart contracts
– a registry of land trading and real estate ownership records
– a productivity audit app for a mining corporation
– a cargo manifest checker for the seaports association
– lots of cryptocurrency exchange apps for various customers and many more blockchain-based solutions

All of these products had to be developed and many of them had to be integrated into a complex existing infrastructure on time and without disrupting the operations. This means that every code commit has had to be tested extensively at test environments and staging servers before being pushed to production. To ensure sufficient scalability and cost-efficiency, these apps were deployed to AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, each of which has specific services and features useful for blockchain development.

However, most importantly, these apps required decent DevOps expertise to ensure the resources were always correctly allocated and available. Aelius Venture has provided the required DevOps engineers and best practices to enable managing the underlying cloud Infrastructure as Code, automation of testing new code batches through Continuous Integration, and seamless pushing of new app features to production through the Continuous Delivery pipelines Blockchain DevOps Services .

DevOps for Blockchain Apps — Aelius Venture Style

One of Aelius Venture’s customers wanted to containerize a blockchain app. The Docker image is readily available, so the customers wanted us to configure the deployment using Kubernetes manifests. However, using Kubernetes for infrastructure configuration allowed us to enable multiple useful operations like backups and restoration, logging, monitoring, and smart alerting, utilizing dashboards from our internal monitoring system with Prometheus + Grafana and many other functions (measuring the blockchain length, syncing the data real-time, etc.) That is how we did it going out of the way just for the sake of customer satisfaction and requirements.

We had to solve the following challenges:

– Ensure problem-free app deployment to AWS infrastructure using Kubernetes manifests

– Provide convenient and informative system monitoring based on ChatOps best practices

– Enable automated system backups and restoration

The solution we came up with includes the Sumologic platform with smart alerts sent to Slack, thus implementing the ChatOps principles. For example, if the blockchain API stopped accepting new blocks — we receive an alert immediately and begin fixing the issue at once. The workflow we have implemented involved auto-restoration from the last backup, auto-update of image registry after a new blockchain version is released, hourly backups of all blockchain data, etc.

This system works using the following approach: once an hour the cluster checks the blockchain app health within the container. If the app runs normally, a snapshot is saved to S3 storage. If the app is down, the container is rebooted and its persistent volume is deleted. As a part of the launch routine, the Kubernetes pode checks the empty persistent volume and the latest snapshot of data is uploaded from the AWS S3 bucket. This takes from 2 to 20 minutes based on the blockchain app complexity and the volume of data stored.

Leveraging our solution enables the customer to run multiple blockchain apps within a single Kubernetes cluster securely, with in-depth monitoring through a convenient dashboard, smart alerting to Slack, detailed logging with Sumologic, and much, much more Blockchain DevOps Services .

Results of Applying DevOps Approach to Blockchain App Development

DevOps approach to infrastructure management ensures the system runs efficiently at all times. To meet the security requirements, the Kubernetes cluster runs in the internal network, which can be accessed through a VPN only. Public access is available to the load balancers only. There is a separate bastion host with SSH-auth for managing the VPN server, so the system is protected from external access. We have implemented the following features:

– Logs rotation, so once the log file reaches the maximum size, it is gzipped and stored in the Kubernetes pode. The content of each log is read by the SuboLogic collector and sent to the central SumoLogic instance for processing.
– Backups rotation so every backup made is pushed to an S3 bucket, where the limited number of backups is stored. The latest backup replaces the oldest, so the system is kept up-to-date and does not grow in size exponentially.
– Free pode space evaluation helps us monitor the degree of pode volume filling, due to the unrestricted growth of the blockchain blocks. Thus said, we are alerted when the adjustments to the pode volume have to be done.