Behind The Blockchain: an interview with Alen Krmelj, Cloud Infrastructure Team Lead at Bitstamp.

During this interview, Alen gave us an insight into his career journey so far and into the cool stuff happening at Bitstamp right now. We spoke about Alen's thoughts on the future of DevOps and Blockchain as well as what life is like at Bitstamp, the problem the business solves and why they are the world's longest running crypto exchange who are continuing to grow.

We find ourselves in a particularly turbulent time in the crypto space, safety and security given from a trustworthy platform seems like something we all need.

So, let's get into it...

Jack "Hi Alen, for people who don’t know who you are, could you Introduce yourself?"

Alen "Hello everyone, my name is Alen Krmelj and I am a Cloud infrastructure Team Lead here at Bitstamp. I started my career path as a sysadmin 20 years ago and have been in the SysOps/DevOps/SRE space ever since".

Jack " Could you talk us through your career journey up to this point?"

Alen "At 14 years old I opened my first web hosting company. Because I was very eager to learn high-performance, highly available systems I thought joining an advertising space would be a great idea. And it was. I started off at Httpool and continued at Celtra. They were low latency, high throughput AD serving companies with lots of traffic. That got me hooked for years, tackling high-performance and scalability problems. After that, I decided I had enough of advertising and went into the crypto space. I joined Blocktrade with the intention of building the best crypto exchange. Unfortunately, the company went under with the bear market and I had to move on. The perfect choice afterwards was Bitstamp, where I started as a senior SysOps engineer".

Jack "Why did you initially take an interest in DevOps?"

Alen "I started working with cloud at Httpool, where we had a hybrid environment, but the real deal was at Celtra. When I joined they were cloud native and fully automated. I have loved learning and improving myself all my life, so taking up the DevOps approach was the way to go. Automation, infrastructure as code, helping devs make decisions, and empowering them is something that I love doing. When I joined Bitstamp we designed a framework that brings up the whole Bitstamp exchange with a single command and a bit of config editing".

Jack "Can you introduce us to Bitstamp?"

Alen "Bitstamp is the world's longest running crypto exchange. It's been here for a decade already and has seen through several crypto winters. It is a synonym for stability, safety and performance in the crypto space. Due to being a highly regulated exchange, Bitstamp took a bit more of a conservative approach to a lot of the features that crypto offers nowadays. This allowed the business to maintain high standards and maintain a high level of safety and security when customers use these features".

Jack "Why did you choose to work at Bitstamp?"

Alen "As the opportunity arose, it was a no-brainer for me. I wanted to stay in the crypto space and I think choosing Bitstamp as my next step was a great decision for my career path. At the time, Bitstamp didn’t have things automated the way it wanted, so it was a small sandbox for me to play in. The opportunity allowed me to design services and the infrastructure itself to be as good as it can be to deliver the high availability and performance needed to function".

Jack "What problem does Bitstamp solve?"

Alen "At its core, Bitstamp is a spot exchange. What it does, it does great. Security of assets, regulation and many other aspects make it a great choice for people and institutions that want to just invest in the crypto space, not necessarily day trade and use abnormal leverage to gamble their way."

Jack "Why do you care about solving that problem?"

Alen "The space is booming and moving at lightning speed. We need a tactical approach to that, so as not to make unnecessary mistakes for example like the FTX situation. When it comes down to it, gaining the trust of people and institutions is crucial. For that you need to slow down a little bit sometimes, verify things, see how they play out, and not make a mistake that could result in devastating consequences for the whole community".

Jack "Talk us through the technology stack you are using you make that happen?"

Alen "All of our infrastructure is in AWS and we use many AWS-managed services. To name just a few that you might be seeing in day-to-day work: Cloudformation, EC2, CloudMap, Organisations, RAM, ECR, ECS, Image Builder, Secrets Manager, Control Tower, etc. From other non AWS technologies we obviously use containers like Docker, Ansible and Terraform to automate most of our infrastructure. Our primary programming language is Python, but for hotpath and very performance sensitive apps we use Go. From databases, we use Aurora, DynamoDB, and several key-value in-memory databases like Redis and Memcache. Our preferred message bus is Kafka, logging with Vector and we have several proprietary products. The biggest of them would probably be NASDAQ matching engine. There are plenty of additional technologies that we use, but maybe these were enough to give you at least a glimpse of what we are dealing with".

Jack "What is the coolest thing you have worked on at Bitstamp and why?"

Alen "Every quarter we find new challenges. Probably one of the coolest things we did at Bitstamp was designing and creating our own deploy toolkit, that automates everything we currently have. There is also another tool that is lacking on AWS in general and that is, having secrets encrypted even on EC2 servers and only running applications can get access to them. We created a Secrets Caching Service which basically caches encrypted secrets pulled from AWS SCM and gets pinged via event bridge. Service runs on each server where the application uses a secure connection to it and authenticates via HMAC. This allows us immediate replacement of credentials while systems are running and enables constant rotation etc".

Jack "What makes Bitstamp stand out from the crowd?"

Alen "I do believe our cautious approach which may seem a bit conservative for some, distinguishes us from others. We like to see technology mature a bit before we can use it and that is definitely our edge".

Jack "What is life like for an employee of Bitstamp?"

Alen "I can say it was a bit more fun when the market was bullish, that’s for sure. In those times we could afford additional expenses and so on, but I would say that in the end Bitstamp is a great place to work. If not only for the technology, then for the people that are just amazing! We have so much fun working together and even hanging out after work. In the end, we are still getting a lot of goodies (even now in crypto winter), like home office equipment budget and so on".

Jack "Why would someone want to come and work with you?"

Alen "We actually have great onboarding. You can work on-site or remotely. We give you a bunch of benefits, like a budget for education, gym, conferences, home office equipment etc. We have several divisions that may be of interest for you to join, with the possibility to transfer to another. We host hackathons, AWS game day and a bunch of other events. There is more to it, but I would encourage anyone interested to just book an interview and find out the details".

Jack "What does the future hold for Bitstamp?"

Alen "There are multiple new features of the exchange coming out very soon, but unfortunately I cannot reveal them publicly yet. We are expanding our Earn program massively, so you will be able to stake all your assets with us. Next year we are also expanding our engineering and product teams, so if you are eager to help us grow, feel free to apply under the Careers link on our website".

Jack "What does the future hold for you personally?"

Alen "I am a pretty hands-on person, so I would love to stay in the tech lead role, more than go even more into team lead positions. I think Bitstamp is giving me an opportunity at this time, to create something really big and I am here to see it happen. Looking even further into the future, I do see potential in giving presentations at conferences, which I love to do. I like educating people on how to use technology efficiently, not just because something is “cool” or “in” at the moment".

Jack "Where do you see the world of DevOps heading?"

Alen "I think the future of DevOps will be oriented around CI/CD and easy integration to it. DevSecOps also is on the rise and it will empower developers to consistently track, monitor and remediate security defects during the various stages of development while improving the speed of delivery and quality. Kubernetes in general should see an even bigger rise in popularity and I think it will expand more and more into the development space. Serverless and no-code applications are on the rise. Those could be sufficient for many businesses that do not need full-blown infrastructure and Kubernetes".

Jack "How do you think blockchain technology, cloud and devops can work well together?"

Alen "I think the community around blockchain technology is great. There are plenty of new technologies to use, but on the other hand, sometimes you are forced to work with some really alpha bleeding edge software. That can be painful at times because getting things to work takes time, but on the other hand, the public wants it because it's cool etc. and you have to make it happen".

Jack "What is one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to make a devops career in Crypto?"

Alen "Most companies run their applications in a cloud environment. So knowing one of the cloud providers in depth would be a must. Knowing automation tooling and IaC is absolutely mandatory. Running your own node and mingling with that is also a bonus if you want to work more with blockchain technology itself. Check the lightning protocol and get familiar with it, how it works and what can be done there, because I do believe that this is the future for Bitcoin at least. There is a need for more DevSecOps people in crypto, so knowing security best practices and designing things with security in mind is important".

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We really enjoyed the insights from this conversation with Alen. The future of DevOps, Cloud and Blockchain sounds like an exciting one. Bitstamp have been around a long time (since 2011) so their approach to the safety and security of their customers assets seems like just the thing we need to keep growing trust in the space.

We'll be keeping a close eye on both Alen and Bitstamp over the next few years - exciting times ahead!

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To get involved with Behind The Blockchain or for recruitment related conversations reach out to Jack on Jack@unveilrecruitment.com