Interview with Andrej Migin, CTO
In the following interview Andrey Migin, Head of Software Development, told us about his experiences with Microsoft Azure.
What were the biggest challenges in building the platform?
Blockchain is still a new technology. It's quite difficult to find experts and developers combined into one in the open source community and also to fit them into our internal development culture. We thus have to train and develop these experts ourselves.
Regarding Azure: The crypto market is developing rapidly. The time to build new resources like CPUs, storage accounts, load balancer roles, public APIs etc. should definitely be shortened and the essential steps simplified. I know that we place enormously high demands here, but it is a real challenge. New developers often know AWS, but if you ask them why, then nobody has a straight answer. When they take their first steps with Azure, they quickly notice that the user interface is more comfortable and their initial resistance quickly dissolves.
How does the platform scale during peak trading loads and strong customer growth?
First of all, the CPU and memory performance will certainly increase. We develop with a micro-service architecture where all important services scale automatically. And then, of course, we can always optimize the code for better CPU and memory utilization.
How satisfied are you with the support from Baggenstos?
We are very satisfied. Baggenstos has supported us swiftly and competently in all instances.
What are your experiences with the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model?
Here our expectations have been completely fulfilled. What we appreciate very much, of course, is the monthly billing and the flexibility.
What are the next steps in the development of the Lykke platform?
The scaling of all services is certainly our biggest priority. Then we want to integrate as many blockchains as possible. And finally, we want to optimize our Kubernetes Federation so that there is no more downtime.
What do you think of the Azure pricing model?
The Azure prices are absolutely competitive. In terms of storage, Azure has the best price/performance ratio at about $7 for 100GB and also two indices covering about 90% of applications. Most valuable is the fact that practically unlimited storage resources are available.
What are your wishes and expectations for Azure in the future?
Generally speaking, we are very satisfied with the Azure services.
For me, Azure should be such that we can outsource system administration to Microsoft and concentrate fully on software development. I think there is still some potential there. We no longer need system administrators today, but we do need dev-ops.
My wishes for additional or extended services would be:
- Unlimited storage capacity of any kind and for all use cases
- Kubernetes as services
- Better user interface and more evaluation options for the load balancer
- Improved and easier handling of availability sets
- Real time display of costs
- Simplified scaling of resources such as CPU, disk, IP addresses
Which crypto currencies do you personally own and how do you see the future?
First of all, a small definition. There are crypto currencies (Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin etc.) and tokens, which offer additional functionality from the respective issuers.
Personally, I will buy any crypto currency traded on the Lykke exchange. No one can say which one will rise and develop in the long run.
Many thanks to Andrey, for the open and interesting conversation. We wish you and the entire Lykke team continued success and are happy to contribute to further growth through our services and Azure.
