Block.one is an asset holding and investment company that creates, incubates, and invests in businesses that build trust in transactions, transparency in systems, and efficiency in how the world works. A pioneer in distributed ledger innovation, Block.one created the EOSIO blockchain, the leading open-source blockchain software that provides developers and businesses with the tools to build the infrastructure of tomorrow. 

EOSIO enables industry-leading transaction speeds and a sub-second block time latency rate, allowing developers to perform transactions at a lower cost through efficient resource management. Additionally, EOSIO is designed for a higher degree of configurability, which is particularly valuable for the creation and management of programmable infrastructures. This helps cloud architects deploy public or private blockchain networks and implement a suitable governance protocol through executable smart contracts. EOSIO blockchain smart contracts have use cases in the traceability of pharmaceuticals, agricultural commodities, and other products where it’s important to know the chain of custody for every transaction from producer to consumer. In addition, the blockchain solution has seen traction in gaming, supply chain, decentralized finance, and other industries undergoing digital transformation.

Business challenge

Block.one has been aggressively working on the performance and optimization of their EOSIO blockchain technology. They need to read and write blocks on the blockchain faster for it to be auditable and verifiable for different use cases, such as security. If a user logs into a service, EOSIO must be able to authenticate them securely. However, logging in each time to write a block would create too much of a burden on the infrastructure. Block.one wanted to split the blockchain writes and reads to make EOSIO more scalable and resilient across regions to relieve this burden.  

As Block.one began to scale their product offerings, the company looked to broaden the accessibility and reliability of their cloud platform solution. “We’ve been in this period of rapid innovation and we needed a partner committed to serving as a champion for this technology alongside us,” said Jason Lancaster, Manager of Exchange Infrastructure at Block.one. “Transitioning to Google Cloud has enabled our teams to adapt and resolve problems more quickly and efficiently.” 

Solution

To solve their challenges, Block.one switched to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By leveraging GCP’s highly provisioned, low-latency infrastructure, Block.one is able to drive the company’s vision forward. 

“We began engaging with Google Cloud in 2018,” said Lancaster. “It’s very motivating to work with Google Cloud because they invite the opportunity to innovate and solve problems together.”

To make the transition from AWS to Google Cloud, Block.one selected Google Cloud premier partner, SADA. Block.one sought SADA’s expertise to create the secure, transparent digital infrastructures that companies and their customers rely on for transactions. SADA worked with Block.one to design and deliver the necessary changes to refactor their Terraform code so they can deploy EOSIO in GCP. Refactoring eliminated technical debt, increased maintainability, enabled high availability of their systems, and simplified best practices for deployment. SADA also helped Block.one improve the way they implement Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.  

“As a growing company, our infrastructure needed to evolve in support of our vision, and that meant finding solutions that addressed the complexity and scale of our product’s codebase,” said Lancaster. “Working in parallel with your cloud provider immediately reduces the friction between developer, provider, and end users, and the responsiveness from Google Cloud and SADA has been unmatched by any other provider I’ve had the opportunity to work with.”

“SADA has made a huge impact on our ability to execute the EOSIO global infrastructure, and I’m excited to continue partnering with them on future initiatives.”   

Jason Lancaster | Manager of Exchange Infrastructure at Block.one

Results

As a result of working with SADA and Google Cloud, Block.one has been able to increase the performance of its EOSIO blockchain and complete their migration from AWS to GCP. The Terraform refactoring and GKE cluster optimization that SADA completed for Block.one enabled them to scale their technology while adopting new GCP solutions, plus it:

• Streamlined the use of variables in the codebase
• Reduced code duplication
• Helped modernize EOSIO for expanded functionality

After the move from AWS to GCP, Block.one has the ability to deliver differentiated blockchain read and write functionality and deploy horizontally across regions. Block.one users can now benefit from the faster performance and lower latency, enabling trust in transactions, transparency in systems, and higher efficiency. Additionally, EOSIO allows developers to more easily adopt blockchain technology, delivering improved speed and scalability for their applications. Overall, Block.one has gained a more resilient infrastructure since migrating to GCP.

“I’ve been in the business of hosting and supporting compute resources for 13 years. In that time, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve completed an engagement where I felt like going out of my way to work with a vendor. SADA has been added to my list of those vendors. The team–from sales to engineering, through advisory, and project management–were honest, managed my expectations very well, lived up to their commitments, and delivered a solution that represents the next generation of our platform.”

Jason Lancaster | Manager of Exchange Infrastructure at Block.one