The Challenge

Since its founding in 2012, Coinbase has quickly become the leader in bitcoin transactions. As it prepared to respond to ever-increasing customer demand for bitcoin transactions, the company knew it needed to invest in the right underlying technology. “We’re now in the phase of legitimizing this currency and bringing it to the masses,” says Rob Witoff , director at Coinbase . “As part of that, our core tenets are security, scalability, and availability.”



Security is the most important of those tenets, according to Witoff . “We control hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin for our customers, placing us among the largest reserves in our industry,” says Witoff . “Just as a traditional bank would heavily guard its customers’ assets inside a physical bank vault, we take the same or greater precautions with our servers.”



Scalability is also critical because Coinbase needs to be able to elastically scale its services globally without consuming precious engineering resources. “As a startup, we’re meticulous about where we invest our time,” says Witoff . “We want to focus on how our customers interact with our product and the services we’re offering. We don’t want to reinvent solutions to already-solved foundational infrastructure.” Coinbase also strives to give its developers more time to focus on innovation. “We have creative, envelope-pushing engineers who are driving our startup with innovative new services that balance a delightful experience with uncompromising security,” says Witoff . “That’s why we need to have our exchange on something we know will work.”



Additionally, Coinbase sought a better data analytics solution. “We generate massive amounts of data from the top to the bottom of our infrastructure that would traditionally be stored in a remote and dated warehouse. But we’ve increasingly focused on adopting new technologies without losing a reliable, trusted core,” says Witoff . “At the same time, we wanted the best possible real-time insight into how our services are running.”



To support its goals, Coinbase decided to deploy its new bitcoin exchange in the cloud. “When I joined Coinbase in 2014, the company was bootstrapped by quite a few third-party hosting providers,” says Witoff . “But because we’re managing actual value and real assets on our machines, we needed to have complete control over our environment.”



Why Amazon Web Services

The Benefits

Coinbase is able to securely store its customers’ funds using AWS. “I consider Amazon’s cloud to be our own private cloud, and when we deploy something there, I trust that my staff and administrators are the only people who have access to those assets,” says Witoff . “Also, securely storing bitcoin remains a major focus area for us that has helped us gain the trust of consumers across the world. Rather than spending our resources replicating and securing a new data center with solved challenges, AWS has allowed us to hone in on one of our core competencies: securely storing private keys.”



Coinbase has also relied on AWS to quickly grow its customer base. “In three years, our bitcoin wallet base has grown from zero to more than 3 million. We’ve been able to drive that growth by providing a fast, global wallet service, which would not be possible without AWS,” says Witoff .



Additionally, the company has better visibility into its business with its insight pipeline. “Using Kinesis for our insight pipeline, we can provide analytical insights to our engineering team without forcing them to jump through complex hoops to traverse our information,” says Witoff . “They can use the pipeline to easily view all the metadata about how the Coinbase Exchange is performing.” And because Kinesis provides a one-to-many analytics delivery method, Coinbase can collect metrics in its primary database as well as through new, experimental data stores. “As a result, we can keep up to speed with the latest, greatest, most exciting tools in the data science and data analytics space without having to take undue risk on unproven technologies,” says Witoff .



As a startup company that built its bitcoin exchange in the cloud from day one, Coinbase has more agility than it would have had if it created the exchange internally. “By starting with the cloud at our core, we’ve been able to move fast where others dread,” says Witoff . “Evolving our network topology, scaling across the globe, and deploying new services are never more than a few actions away. This empowers us to spend more time thinking about what we want to do instead of what we’re able to do.” That agility is helping Coinbase meet the demands of fast business growth. “Our exchange is in hyper-growth mode, and we’re in the process of scaling it all across the world,” says Witoff . “For each new country we bring on board, we are able to scale geographically and at the touch of a button launch more machines to support more users.”



By using AWS, Coinbase can concentrate even more on innovation. “We trust AWS to manage the lowest layers of our stack, which helps me sleep at night,” says Witoff . “And as we go higher up into that stack—for example, with our insight pipeline—we are able to reach new heights as a business, so we can focus on innovating for the future of finance.”



About Coinbase Coinbase, a growing bitcoin wallet and exchange service headquartered in San Francisco, is the largest consumer bitcoin wallet in the world and the first regulated bitcoin exchange in the United States.

Benefits of AWS Easily process 1 TB of data daily

One-to-many analytics delivery to easily view performance metadata

Ability to scale across the globe with the touch of a button

AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Learn more » Amazon EMR Amazon EMR is the industry leading cloud-native big data platform, allowing teams to process vast amounts of data quickly, and cost-effectively at scale.



Learn more » Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.



Learn more » AWS Lambda AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running.



Learn more » Amazon RDS Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

Learn more » AWS Identity and Access Management AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely.



Learn more » Amazon Kinesis Amazon Kinesis makes it easy to collect, process, and analyze real-time, streaming data so you can get timely insights and react quickly to new information.



Learn more » AWS CloudTrail AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.



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