It’s been a month of morning meetings and frantic coding. As we work on rebuilding the Signals platform to run on some of the best hardware and software around, we can happily say we’ve been growing in every direction. In the sections below, we’ll go over some of the amazing progress we’ve been making, across recruitment, development, hardware and overall system stability. Everything’s coming together and we’re glad you’re here to witness it!

New developers on board

A strong team is the most crucial aspect of any successful project. Over the last month, we have focused on enlarging both frontend and backend development teams. We’ve been lucky so far, having found three bright developers who have now started working with us and seem to have settled in effortlessly. We’ll introduce you to them in the coming weeks so keep an eye on our social feeds.

We’re still recruiting, so spread the word: Signals are looking for more talented developers to further accelerate our move towards Beta. If you’re a blockchain buff interested in joining a close-knit, tech-obsessed team, fill out our application form here. We look forward to meeting you!

Signals Platform Architecture

It’s not easy building a platform capable of running thousands of real-time strategies. In the alpha, we attracted more than 20,000 users, who helped us collect extensive feedback and usage statistics. These have been invaluable in scoping out the speed, reliability and scalability requirements which our platform will need to handle. With this information, we can make sure our solution is capable of the kind of heavy lifting we envision, with thousands of users running strategies seamlessly in real-time.

Over recent months, we’ve held meetings with various industry experts, as we work to design our system in the most efficient way possible. This is so the Signals marketplace can grow fluidly without hitting any software or hardware limits. To be able to scale horizontally and handle the growing requirements for system resources, we are redesigning the Signals platform as a distributed, micro-services oriented system that makes full use of some of the most advanced hardware we’ve had the pleasure of working with.

While analyzing requirements, we dedicated extra focus to system security.

One of the most important capabilities of the Signals platform will be to run custom strategies and indicators in the cloud.

The implication of this is that we must be prepared to run untrusted code on our side, and that we need to be aware of the related threats. As there will also be user-specific information stored in the system, we are applying rigorous hardware, network and software security policies to our system design, so as to meet the highest level of security standards from the start.

Our software architects and developers are currently busy hacking away at some of the tools and frameworks that we think will best suit the platform. So far, we’ve decided on some cutting-edge technologies and frameworks like Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, Redis, .Net Core, React, GraphQL, Node.js etc. Benefiting from the help of some of the best tools in the business, we’re ready to push Signals above and beyond your expectations.

System Infrastructure

With our in-house team, we mainly want to focus on development and delivery of Signals platform functionality. However, a big part of the solution is the management of physical and logical infrastructure, which will serve the needs of our distributed system. This infrastructure needs to be analyzed, modeled and implemented in a reusable way, so that we avoid cloud lock-in and we will always be able to decide which parts of our system will be hosted privately, and which will be hosted using public cloud providers.

Because of the level of expertise required for such a job, we decided to outsource this to Quantasoft, who cooperate closely with SafeDX.

Quantasoft has years of experience as a hosting provider, with a team of skilled DevOps who are able to cope with Signals Platform’s security and scalability demands.

What we receive from Quantasoft is a Kubernetes/virtualization infrastructure model that should be easily deployable to any existing hardware or cloud configuration. Part of this model is an application platform, providing continuous delivery pipelines which should increase the frequency of production deployments, with zero downtime of the service. This way, we will be able to deliver new features on-the-fly, without interrupting strategy executions, which is critical both for our business and for customer satisfaction.

We also agreed with Quantasoft on a level of support for our infrastructure ecosystem. This involves maintenance of the cluster, as well as infrastructure monitoring, logging, security management, backups and other key elements required for the seamless operation of such a critical real-time system.

Testing Servers

Our strategic partner, SafeDX, has already provided us with some servers in its data center, meaning we are able to test our infrastructure model and verify our computing power requirements ahead of time.

We have no doubts that these servers, built using the newest generation of Intel® Xeon Scalable processors, Intel® Rack Scale Design (Intel® RSD) reference architecture, SSD drives and nearly 400GB of RAM, will have no problem handling any kind of load we throw at them.

Falling into the Tier 3 category for uptime, SafeDX data centers should provide the necessary highest levels of availability for our platform.

Having completed the most crucial stages of our redesign, bringing in a new infrastructure and architecture to Signals, we are now in the position to re-examine our roadmap and website. Our website will be undergoing a significant upheaval. This is to reflect our progress and change of focus, to introduce new users and promote our product more explicitly, now that the token sale is well behind us. Our roadmap also needs some tweaking, though changes will not be so drastic. The plan remains the same, but we expect you’ll be interested in seeing them fleshed out a bit more — keep an eye out for the next update with more details.

We hope you’ve found this behind-the-scenes update exciting, we’re thrilled to be on target to achieve everything we set out to do without having to make any significant compromises. It’s always good to hear from our users, so get in touch with us and let us know what you think!