case study
Blockchain specialist Chainstack reduces TCO by 30% using Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud
Eugene Aseev
Chainstack provides a managed blockchain platform for developers building decentralized applications, trading applications, or any application that depends on a secure, unalterable ledger of transactions.
Chainstack launched in 2018 to give developers easy access to cloud-agnostic, blockchain-agnostic infrastructure. Today the company hosts blockchain applications across multiple clouds using multiple protocols, including Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, Tezos, Fabric, Corda, Quorum and Bitcoin.
“Blockchain is about democratizing access to everything – finance, governance, rarity and collectibles – it’s a truly disruptive technology in so many ways. It is also extremely demanding in terms of compute, RAM and storage, especially when a particular blockchain protocol becomes mainstream,” says Eugene Aseev, CTO and Co-Founder of Chainstack.
Hosting demanding blockchain workloads
Since its launch, Chainstack has offered multiple hosting options for blockchain developers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The Chainstack customer base already consumes thousands of CPUs, thousands of Gigabytes of RAM and Petabytes of storage.
According to Eugene, using the large public cloud providers is becoming less viable for many customer use cases.
“Some customers insist on using one of the big public clouds, and that is fine, but for many others, they are looking for a better deal in terms of cost and performance,” he says.
“A blockchain node is quite demanding: it typically needs at least 4 to 8 CPUs and 32 to 64GB RAM on average – that’s the starting point – scaling up to tens of CPUs and hundreds of Gigabytes of RAM. Doing that in Microsoft Azure, for example, gets very expensive, very quickly.”
Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
Chainstack chose Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud (VHC) to provide a more cost-effective alternative to the large public clouds for hosting blockchain applications. VHC is a fully managed and hosted version of the Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure stack – a cloud platform designed for service providers who need high performance, cost-effective containerized or virtualized infrastructure to support their customers.
“We have experience with all of the major cloud vendors, and we are always looking for better options for our clients,” says Eugene. “When we consider a new hosting provider, we are looking at four things: reliability, performance and cost – these are the ‘hard’ features – and also, one ‘softer’ feature, which is support and the working relationship.”
“Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud gives us great reliability and excellent Kubernetes and storage performance, at a much lower cost than public clouds. With Virtuozzo we reduced Total Cost of Ownership by 30% compared to using public clouds,” says Eugene.
Streamlined support and UI
Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud also simplifies the cloud experience, according to Eugene. Chainstack was up and running quickly, and Virtuozzo support helps the company deliver an excellent service to its blockchain hosting customers.
“It’s very easy to get into the platform and start working with it. The interface is really nice and clean, simple and straightforward,” he says.
“The Virtuozzo tech team is very responsive, very professional and always really nice to interact with – we have a direct line to get one-to-one support when we need it. We’re passionate about our customers and providing awesome support. Virtuozzo is the same.
It has been a great experience so far!”
