Mercado Bitcoin migrates over 100 services from its platform to Google Cloud
About Mercado Bitcoin
Mercado Bitcoin is an exchange with Latin America’s largest cryptocurrency and alternative asset investment platform, with over 2 million registered customers. The company has an office in São Paulo and a workforce of around 160 people.
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About Avenue Code
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With Google Cloud’s solutions, the company was able to improve service performance and monitoring, cut costs and achieve the scalability needed for expansion.
Results
- 15% to 30% in estimated cost savings.
- Setup was finished in around 40 days and migration was carried out in 8 hours.
- Scalability and support to keep up with the company’s growth forecasts.
Performance improved up to 50% in the main services.
Cryptocurrencies are receiving more and more investors around the world. According to research from consultancy firm Fortune Business Insights, this market will reach USD 1.7 trillion in 2027 at an 11.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In Brazil, Mercado Bitcoin, an exchange with the largest cryptocurrency and alternative asset investment platform in Latin America, also forecasts a strong business expansion.
Established in 2013, Mercado Bitcoin was a pioneer in Brazil’s cryptocurrency market. In 2018, it started offering alternative assets and making them more accessible to those who wanted to diversify their portfolio. With over 2 million registered customers and over 12 billion reais in deals until 2019, the company saw its platform’s usage volume grow 15-fold in the past 18 months. And expectations for the next 2 to 3 years are even greater, a 100-200x expansion.
Such growth requires a highly-scalable infrastructure, greater security and improved application management. The company was already using Google Cloud for a few data storage routines, but kept its platform’s servers in another cloud provider. After a deep dive into Google Cloud’s solutions, it realized that they were great for the needs of its IT staff, especially regarding performance, security, stability and support
“In order to accommodate our expected business expansion in the next few years, we need to scale our development strategy. To do so, we need a solid foundation and cloud resources with a partner strongly committed to supporting us. That is what we saw as one of Google Cloud’s main differentiators.”
—Ivan Perez, CTO, Mercado BitcoinPartnering to make migration feasible
Migrating more than 100 services from its platform to another provider seemed to be a complex task. However, when Google Cloud’s engineers laid out the solutions and steps of the process, Mercado Bitcoin’s IT team realized it was completely feasible. In order to help structure the migration, the company was supported by Google Cloud partner Avenue Code.
With the information provided by Mercado Bitcoin about the platform’s infrastructure, Avenue Code was able to set up the entire foundation for the migration project. That gave the team the peace of mind they needed to carry out the process on its own. “Avenue Code’s knowledge of Google’s infrastructure and how the migration from where we were to Google Cloud would work was essential for the project’s success,” says Perez.
Setup was finished in about 40 days. Migration was carried out in 8 hours. After the process, 15 Mercado Bitcoin IT professionals took courses offered by Google Cloud to learn more about the solutions. This accelerated adoption of the new procedures. The first results were seen shortly afterwards.
Ensuring performance, security and stability
In order to measure service performance in the new environment, the team performed load testing before migrating and established a few key metrics, especially for the most critical and in-demand applications. After migrating, they confirmed that the main services had improved their performance by up to 50% in the 95 and 99 percentiles, meaning shorter response times for customers. Some of them even sent feedback about improvements in the site and app usage.
Another essential point for Mercado Bitcoin was security across the company - customers, infrastructure, workers and office. “I can leverage Google Cloud’s solutions in several links of that chain, from customer security, since Google Cloud has specific solutions for mitigating phishing and bot attacks, among others; to the authentication of emails from our office,” says the CTO.
Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL were two tools that stood out for their flexibility of use, the ease to monitor applications and the detailed information they provide. “All those solutions provide excellent data and tracking levels,” Perez says. Now, developers have a lot more input to work with every day.
“In terms of application monitoring, Google Cloud’s stack is terrific. When I’m in Stackdriver and I need to monitor logs, metrics, production problems, what is working and what is not, it’s the best of worlds. It’s like a plane for the SRE team to pilot.”
—Ivan Perez, CTO, Mercado BitcoinThe CTO also mentioned benefits such as the network’s stability and a reduction in expenses and estimated that the company will save between 15% and 30% in costs. With improved performance and monitoring and a well-structured, scalable foundation, Perez thinks that impact will tend to spread across the business, delivering a more competitive time-to-market.
A solid foundation to grow
Building the infrastructure on Google Cloud was the first step to ensure a solid, scalable environment to keep up with Mercado Bitcoin’s growth forecasts.
Moreover, the centralization of data storage and the infrastructure in a single provider is helping the team review and hone internal processes, such as the data strategy. “We have a BI structure that keeps growing every month and provides increasingly sophisticated data for our in-house teams. Now we want to go ahead with other data-oriented solutions in the following months,” the CTO says. The testing and production process is also being honed with Google Cloud’s tools.
“We are transitioning from our old model to a more automated, consistent and robust one for deployment in production, testing environments and overall development. It’s a stunning optimization.”
—Ivan Perez, CTO, Mercado BitcoinTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mercado Bitcoin
Mercado Bitcoin is an exchange with Latin America’s largest cryptocurrency and alternative asset investment platform, with over 2 million registered customers. The company has an office in São Paulo and a workforce of around 160 people.
About Avenue Code
Is a software consulting firm focused on delivering end-to-end digital transformation solutions for all kinds of organizations.