Leading Panama based cryptocurrency trading platform Deribit recently extended its services for customers with a private, direct access solution from Amazon Web Services. Until recently Deribit customers that are hosting their trading applications on AWS had to access the Deribit platform through the internet, with subtoptimal latencies. However now they are able to connect over a direct, private connection.
The Challenge
At the beginning of this year Deribit had received several questions of customers, asking for a private network connection from AWS. They were advised to talk with Dutch AWS Advanced Consulting partner CloudNation. A solution was discussed and agreed upon which existed of a combination of AWS native network services and the Aviatrix platform.
The Solution
The foundation of the solution is delivered by AWS Privatelink, a very robust and scalable service provider/consumer connectivity model. Through Privatelink, Deribit exposes its service to (potential) customers that access the service through a VPC Endpoint in their own AWS Virtual Private Cloud. Normally when interconnecting VPC’s the IP CIDR ranges within those VPC’s are not allowed to overlap, with PrivateLink this is not an issue. DirectConnect connections ensure the Deribit VPC in AWS is attached to the Deribit datacenter backend through redundant high bandwidth/low latency links.
In between these two components is where the magic happens, and this is done by deploying Aviatrix Gateways. Aviatrix is the leading (multi-) cloud networking platform of which CloudNation is a founding partner. By deploying Aviatrix Gateways that take over routing from, yet still fully integrate with the native networking services like the AWS Transit Gateway, advanced networking solutions become possible. The desired solution by Deribit could not be built with just the native AWS services, so the advanced capabilities of the Aviatrix platform needed to be leveraged.
Additional Benefits
Besides fulfilling the functional requirements, using the Aviatrix platform provides several additional advantages like intelligent failover, packet capture/troubleshooting options and more visibility in the network connections. CloudNation deployed the solution using cloud best practices like TerraForm infrastructure as code and deployment pipelines, and manages the entire AWS environment for Deribit, making it very flexible and removing the need for Deribit to train staff managing this solution. Using multiple AZ’s it is robust and self-healing, minimizing the management effort and making it cost effective.
The picture below describes the implemented architecture with the most important AWS and Aviatrix components. Pattern 1 describes how customers used to access the Deribit trading backend from their AWS environment. Pattern 2 is the new connectivity solution designed, built and managed by CloudNation. Deribit customers connect to the Deribit VPC’s through Privatelink in multiple regions. A Network Loadbalancer forwards the traffic to a HA set of Aviatrix Gateways, these are managed by an Aviatrix Controller in a CloudNation management VPC. After forwarding by the Aviatrix Gateways, connection requests are forwarded over DirectConnect to the Deribit datacenter and processed.
What started as a pilot now has become a great success, with Deribit customers being able to connect to the datacenter backend from the AWS London and Tokyo regions, and more regions on their way. They are seeing increased network performance and also have direct access to the Deribit High Frequency Trading Node, which also improves their trading experience. The graph below from one of the Deribit customers indicates a clear performance improvement once they started using the private connection:
CloudNation is very proud having contributed to this extension of Deribit’s customer services, doing exactly what we love: using cloud technology to build creative and pragmatic solutions, which help our customers accelerate their business.
If you would like more information on Deribit, its trading services and available AWS regions, please contact Luuk Strijers ([email protected]).
If you would like more information on CloudNation Managed Services/Aviatrix Solutions, please contact them via this page.
