Layer 1 Blockchain Platform
Migrated a Layer 1 blockchain's node infrastructure off Kubernetes onto bare metal, cutting costs 62% without sacrificing reliability.
- Ansible
- Bare metal
- Kubernetes
- Blockchain
A Layer 1 blockchain platform ran its validator and node infrastructure on managed Kubernetes across cloud providers. As the network grew, the cost and operational overhead of running stateful blockchain workloads on Kubernetes began to outweigh its benefits.
Node workloads are long-lived, stateful and I/O-heavy — a poor fit for the elastic, ephemeral model Kubernetes is built for. The platform needed lower cost and more predictable performance without giving up the automation and repeatability the team relied on.
Moved the blockchain infrastructure from Kubernetes to bare metal, rebuilding provisioning and lifecycle management as 30+ reusable Ansible roles covering node bootstrap, security hardening and upgrades.
Kept everything reproducible: the same roles provision a new validator, harden it and bring it into the network with no manual steps.
Infrastructure costs dropped 62%, deployment speed and reliability improved, and node operations became fully repeatable across ~10 validator nodes on multiple networks.