CI/CD with GitLab + Kubernetes: deploy in 10 minutes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

CI/CD automation: from 2 hours to 10 minutes per deploy

Client

E-commerce startup, 5-person engineering team

Challenge

Manual deployment took 2 hours
Frequent release errors
No fast rollback path
Required: CI/CD automation, GitOps, fast rollback

Solution

Self-hosted GitLab
GitLab CI pipeline (Build → Test → Deploy)
Managed Kubernetes in Yandex Cloud
Flux CD for GitOps

Technologies

GitLab

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

Flux CD

Results

✅ Deploy time: from 2 hours to 10 minutes (12x)
✅ Errors: −90%
✅ Deploy frequency: from 1/week to 10+/day
✅ Rollback time: from 1 hour to 2 minutes

Geo-Distributed Blockchain Node Cluster in Kubernetes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Geo-Distributed Blockchain Node Cluster in Kubernetes

Client

Cryptocurrency platform (Web3 / DeFi)

Challenge

The client needed fault-tolerant infrastructure to run ETH and BSC full nodes across four regions (EU, US, AP, LatAm) with minimal latency for end users, DDoS and RPC spam protection, secure HSM-based transaction signing, and centralized observability. Cold node sync takes 2–3 weeks — a fast-bootstrap solution was required.

Solution

1. Infrastructure & IaC (Terraform + EKS)

Terraform modules: VPC, subnets, security groups for 4 regions (Frankfurt, Virginia, Singapore, São Paulo)
Managed Kubernetes (EKS 1.29+) per region with dedicated node pools: full nodes, archive nodes, signing service
NVMe StorageClass (gp3) via CSI driver for high-performance chaindata storage
Helm charts for geth / bsc-node with per-region custom values

2. GitOps: Flux CD Multi-Cluster

Flux CD v2 with Kustomization per region — single source of truth for all clusters
Secrets management: HashiCorp Vault + External Secrets Operator (ESO)
All infrastructure changes applied via git push — no direct cluster access required

3. Load Balancing & Anti-Spam

HAProxy 2.8: sticky sessions, health checks via eth_syncing — traffic routed only to fully synced nodes
Nginx Ingress: rate limiting, IP reputation filtering (Lua-based, fail2ban-style)
Cloudflare Workers: geo-routing + L7 DDoS protection
Custom Go sidecar: health endpoint returns ready only when node is fully synced

4. HSM Integration for Transaction Signing

AWS CloudHSM (prod) / YubiHSM2 (staging) for private key storage
Go microservice with PKCS#11 abstraction — swap HSM vendor without rewriting code
Isolated K8s namespace + NetworkPolicy: no egress except to HSM endpoint
gRPC API for backend: sign tx, get pubkey
Full audit log of all signing operations → Loki

5. Monitoring & Alerting

Custom Prometheus exporter (Go): eth_blockNumber, eth_syncing, peer count per node
Grafana dashboards: sync lag, block height per region, RPC latency, SLO 99.9%
Alertmanager → PagerDuty: alerts on block lag > N blocks, node down, peer count below threshold
Loki + Promtail: structured logs from all nodes with region/pod correlation

6. Operations & Disaster Recovery

Snapshot bootstrap: chaindata from S3 via rclone — node ready in hours instead of weeks
DR playbook: step-by-step runbooks for regional recovery
Chaos Engineering (Chaos Mesh): node kill, network partition, pod failure tests
Architecture Decision Records (ADR) for all key design choices

Technologies

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Flux CD

Prometheus

Grafana

Results

✅ Geo-routing: latency reduced by routing users to the nearest region
✅ Fast bootstrap: node ready in hours via S3 snapshot instead of 2–3 weeks of sync
✅ Anti-spam: rate limiting + IP reputation — public RPC handles bot load without degradation
✅ HSM: private keys never leave the hardware module
✅ GitOps: every infrastructure change goes through git with a full audit trail
✅ SLO 99.9%: tracked in Grafana, PagerDuty alerts on any degradation

Helm on DevOps Engineer & CloudAdmin

CI/CD with GitLab + Kubernetes: deploy in 10 minutes

CI/CD automation: from 2 hours to 10 minutes per deploy

Client

Challenge

Solution

Technologies

Results

Geo-Distributed Blockchain Node Cluster in Kubernetes

Geo-Distributed Blockchain Node Cluster in Kubernetes

Client

Challenge

Solution

1. Infrastructure & IaC (Terraform + EKS)

2. GitOps: Flux CD Multi-Cluster

3. Load Balancing & Anti-Spam

4. HSM Integration for Transaction Signing

5. Monitoring & Alerting

6. Operations & Disaster Recovery

Technologies

Results