KoinX, a crypto compliance company, encountered significant challenges in managing its DevOps processes due to the lack of a dedicated DevOps engineer. As a result, they relied on part-time contractors, which led to delays and inefficiencies, particularly during peak periods. KoinX evaluated a number of DevOps solutions to provide a comprehensive platform for automated deployments, monitoring, and infrastructure management. This case study explores how Kapstan helped KoinX streamline its DevOps operations, leading to significant improvements in deployment frequency, issue resolution, and developer efficiency.
Background
The Challenge: Before partnering with Kapstan, KoinX lacked a full-time DevOps engineer. The team relied heavily on contractors who managed the initial setup of their CI pipeline and AWS clusters. However, this ad-hoc approach led to several challenges:
- Reliance on a single person. The contractor’s availability was limited, leading to delays during critical moments, and a single point of failure.
- Hiring challenges KoinX struggled to find a suitable DevOps engineer, given the scarcity of good, reliable talent in this field.
- Downtime issues Without a dedicated DevOps team, KoinX faced downtime and other technical issues that the existing team could not resolve quickly.
Decision to partner with Kapstan: Initially skeptical about replacing a full-time engineer with a platform, Guna, the founding engineer at KoinX, changed his perspective after a demo call with Kapstan. He recognized that Kapstan could not only fulfill but also surpass their DevOps requirements. With Kapstan, every engineer on his team could handle upgrades, rollbacks, and real-time debugging without needing deep expertise in Kubernetes.
Implementation and results
KoinX was initially running their entire infrastructure on AWS. They had two main goals:
- They wanted to migrate their entire infrastructure to GCP in order to utilize free cloud credits they recently received.
- They wanted a simplified deployment process, giving every developer on the team self-sufficiency, without them having to learn new tools and a new DSL (Terraform).
With Kapstan KoinX achieved:
- AWS to GCP migration KoinX transitioned from AWS to GCP primarily for cost-cutting purposes, facilitated by Kapstan’s support. This move allowed KoinX to utilize GCP credits while maintaining seamless operations through Kapstan’s automation capabilities.
"At our stage, Kapstan is a replacement for a DevOps team. And equally importantly, we own our infra. It’s a solution where you can monitor, deploy, and manage your infrastructure on a single dashboard." - Guna, Founding Enginner at KoinX
- Improved efficiency The platform allowed all engineers to access the deployment process without compromising security, eliminating the need for complex credential sharing of the cloud account.
"My favorite part is deployments and how I can now give my entire team access to deploy their services, without being afraid of failures. Before Kapstan, deploying was a pain; now it's incredibly easy." - Guna, Founding Enginner at KoinX
- 7-8x Increase in deployment frequency The ease of deployment led to a drastic increase in how often updates and bug fixes were released.
"We went from deploying maybe 20 or 30 times a month to over 150 deployments in a single month — this would not have been possible without Kapstan." - Guna, Founding Enginner at KoinX
- Faster issue resolution Kapstan’s built-in observability tools helped KoinX quickly identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reducing downtime from hours to minutes.
"Thanks to Kapstan, identifying and resolving performance issues has gone from a multi-hour process to just under 15 minutes. Previously, a misconfigured Dragonfly caused a production outage that took nearly 8 hours to diagnose and fix. Now, thanks to Kapstan's observability, we quickly pinpointed the issue and rolled out the fix in minutes—without the need for an expensive third-party solution." - Guna, Founding Enginner at KoinX
Conclusion
KoinX's collaboration with Kapstan significantly transformed their DevOps operations. By automating and streamlining essential processes, Kapstan enabled KoinX to concentrate on its core business of crypto compliance, not infrastructure. This shift resulted in faster deployments, reduced downtime, and enhanced operational efficiency.
Their experience highlights the value of Kapstan as a comprehensive solution capable of replacing traditional DevOps functions at the early-stage, making it an ideal solution for startups aiming to scale efficiently and effectively.KoinX continues to leverage Kapstan’s platform for ongoing operations, with plans to expand its usage across the entire engineering team as they grow.
To discover how Kapstan can achieve similar results for your team, connect with one of our engineers today.
