As the global leader in crypto accounting, Lukka provides proprietary, SaaS-based cryptocurrency settlement accounting products to institutions and individual investors. Lukka’s institutional-grade solutions provide their customers with clarity and insight into cryptocurrencies and the complex tax and regulatory rules governing crypto assets. Believing that the future of global commerce will be based in digital assets and blockchain, Lukka built the informational infrastructure needed to power digital asset exchange and valuation in a fast-moving marketplace. 

Lukka’s mission requires exceptional engineering talent, which Lukka has had ever since their company was founded. Andy Mei, Head of Engineering at Lukka, was confident in his team’s ability to build a greenfield application with a scalable microservices architecture. But, he also knew that managing a deployment to cloud-based infrastructure would slow his team down. 

“We needed a partner that understood how to efficiently deploy applications and manage complex microservices architectures day to day so that our team could focus on building value for our customers,” Mei noted.

For the engineering team at Lukka, high reliability and scalability were critical. Their customers require accurate valuations of the cryptocurrencies they trade, in order to establish accurate accounting values of their assets. These applications track pricing data for millions of daily trades across multiple exchanges for multiple cryptocurrencies, while validating trade and pricing data in the blockchains of the currencies themselves to ensure accuracy.

Mei also knew he wanted a streamlined automated code management, testing, and deployment process to maximize the time his team spent actually writing code. “We didn’t want to worry about the mechanics of manually testing and deploying our code. We wanted continuous integration capabilities and automated movement of artifacts through our various environments. We were very pleased to find both the skill sets we needed in a single partner — Blue Sentry Cloud.”

The Solution

Blue Sentry Cloud (BSC) worked with Lukka’s engineering team to define an immutable artifact and the appropriate quality gates for their continuous integration cycle. BSC’s Cloud Center of Excellence team worked side by side with Lukka’s internal team to ensure smooth deployments, site reliability, security, cost management, and other cloud best practices were properly in place as Lukka scaled. “We have been very pleased with Blue Sentry Cloud. They have allowed us to go much faster while also letting us focus on what we do best,” says Mei. “They have been an excellent partner.”

Specifically, Blue Sentry Cloud worked collaboratively with Lukka to: 

• Choose Docker containers running on an EC2-based Kubernetes cluster as the framework to deploy microservices. 
• Set up a PostgreSQL-compliant time-series database  on Amazon Aurora for the storage of currency value data with additional storage in S3. Aurora and S3 were chosen for their scalability, reliability and relatively low cost.
• Build four distinct Kubernetes clusters for Development, QA, UAT, and Production in discreet VPCs. VPC Transit Gateway was used for VPC peering. 
• Create an automated CI/CD capability using Jenkins to automate quality gates in the continuous integration cycle and to move successful artifacts from Development to the various testing environments.

The Benefit

Today, Lukka is growing rapidly and is no longer constrained by their infrastructure. With a robust cloud deployment, Lukka’s engineering team is able to focus on innovating for their customers. Application usage and data sets are growing by multiples and Lukka’s cloud deployment facilitates their growth and expansion. Thanks to the teamwork between their engineering team and Blue Sentry’s Cloud Center of Excellence integrated team, their application and DevOps processes are extremely scalable. There is now no technical limit to their  growth rate. 

“We are big believers in cloud-native architectures and automated deployment processes,”says Mei. “The combination of AWS and Blue Sentry has been a powerful accelerator for us.”