The Powerhouse Behind DPP

What makes us tick?

Crypto traders have the chance to access a whole new world of financial opportunities — but only if they have the right tools and market data in their arsenal. At Digital Assets Power Play our main goal is to ensure traders have access to innovative and reliable tools, market data, and services for creating effective algo trading strategies. We want to make you as powerful as any trader or institution you’d find in traditional markets.

To create services that will allow you to take control of the crypto market, we needed to spend time designing backend systems that are flexible and scalable, ensuring long-term growth. Without a solid foundation it wouldn’t matter how innovative the tools we create are — they would be ineffective without the proper systems and hardware.

Since our ICO last September, we have gone through rigorous analysis and thorough testing in order to develop a robust system to power the DPP ecosystem. DPP’s private cloud, enterprise-grade and microservice based backend system is well suited to address our client’s needs.

Creating a solid backend

Based on the requirements of our ecosystem of services, we had to optimise the design of our system architecture — the most critical component. It was vital to ensure it could accomodate for the future growth of the DPP platform.

While a public cloud based system seemed like an attractive option due to its simplicity, low initial costs, and the ability to scale, we were concerned about the increase in monthly costs. This will only be further emphasized as we continue to grow and require big data storage with high network throughput running into tens of Gbps. We also didn’t want to be locked into a proprietary software or any specific public cloud vendor.

Soon we discovered that the processing limits (volume size, network throughput, and IOPS) of public clouds were reached when testing high-speed data streaming and processing of market data, resulting in high-load read/write data. With crypto markets continuing to grow and encountering these limits with dozens of connected exchanges, moving to a proprietary private cloud system architecture was the clear choice. Currently, our private cloud network architecture is scalable up to 40 Gbps and can provide up to 300K IOPS, with storage being expandable on-demand in TBs.

Deploying a private cloud system architecture, which addresses public cloud processing capacity and security issues, ensures that each of our 5 DPP services operates smoothly. While it’s more expensive at the start (time and upfront investment) and more challenging to maintain, a private cloud solution still provides better ROI in the long-run and ensures long-term scalability and growth for our platform.

In addition to a private cloud, our solution was to develop, deploy, and maintain an open source microservice-based software architecture. DPP services are made up of dozens of independently deployable microservices which together create an agile modular system that is efficient and scalable. As the number of microservices has grown, we implemented the best techniques available from DevOps in order to manage the development and deployment process.

Using Red Hat OpenShift

To address system architecture requirements, Red Hat OpenShift has been deployed on our servers. As an open source solution based on Docker and Kubernetes, it’s commonly used by large enterprises such as banks and government IT solutions. OpenShift allows us to orchestrate dozens of Docker microservices ensuring zero-downtime of our system. Should a hardware server fail, the microservices will automatically be moved to a working server. This working platform has built-in CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, EFK and others, which is crucial for providing rapid development with real time monitoring and alerting. With security in mind, all of our Docker images are certified by Red Hat and patched daily. This approach allows us to follow DevOps processes of adding increased value and responsiveness through rapid service delivery, and ensuring high availability and scalability of our system architecture.

OpenShift also allows us to utilise and manage available resources more effectively. If a microservice needs 50GB of ram and 0.1 CPU, we can give it just what it needs. It also optimizes processes by moving the microservice to a better suited server by having horizontal autoscaling of pods/containers depending on the load.

Customer satisfaction is important to us

But at the end of the day, no matter how amazing our solution is, DPP is nothing without you — Our supporters and future customers. Unlike some of our competitors who don’t prioritize speed when it comes to customer queries, great customer service is a top priority for us. From day one, a fully integrated CRM was embedded into our system. This will allow for customer support and ticketing solutions as well as feedback collection.

And last, but certainly not least, we have implemented 24/7 monitoring and alerting for all aspects of our system. This will guarantee that you have a solid set of reliable crypto trading tools across all of our services and whenever you need them.