Coinbase will split certain parts of its Coinbase.com and app infrastructure to prevent the cryptocurrency exchanges from going down during times of high volume.
During the recent Bitcoin bull run, Coinbase struggled to hold its own on high volume routes, leading to tricky comments on Twitter and Reddit that there is only news if exchanges don’t go down during peak times. With the stock exchange filing preliminary documents for a public listing of the company’s shares, infrastructure repair has undoubtedly become even more urgent.
According to an updated autopsy on Jan. 8 of the Jan. 6-7 outages, Coinbase will split its “monolithic” backend into “discrete” pieces to limit individual piece breaking and the entire system to shut down.
“We are further breaking down our monolithic application server into separate discrete services. In this way, we can create different scaling profiles for different sections of our API surface, which are loaded heterogeneously, ”says the exchange on the blog. “It also reduces the explosion radius when problems arise on a surface, as this only affects the APIs or functions for which it is responsible.”
On January 7th, Coinbase explicitly quoted record-breaking exchange volumes that were “slightly 6 times as high as the already increased request rate in steady state”.
The exchange said trading and buying were still available during this period, but other dependencies related to the feature limited the functionality of the apps.
On another blog, Coinbase Customer Service apologized for “response time delays,” another source of common complaints online. The aim of the exchange was to hire more team members, introduce a chat function with customer support and make the most important social media accounts clearer.
The two blogs follow a blog dated January 12th apologizing for UK and EU customers for system failures and trade restrictions.
