A crypto trading platform was paying ~$17,000/month to move blockchain data into the cloud. We moved the compute to the data instead — and eliminated the bill.
Then we secured it on hardware we didn't own, against both a stolen disk and a stolen machine, and built one Kubernetes stack that runs the same in the cloud or on bare metal — so there was only ever one platform to maintain.
See HowThe data was in one place. The compute that needed it was in another.
A cryptocurrency trading platform depended on blockchain nodes that ran on bare metal at a specialized provider — the kind of infrastructure that takes real skill to build and keep running. The platform's own workloads lived in the public cloud, and they had to talk to those nodes constantly to do their jobs. All that cross-network chatter carried a price: roughly $17,000 per month in data-egress charges, just to pull blockchain data into the cloud.
Instead of dragging the data to the compute, we brought the compute to the data. We stood up a Kubernetes cluster — Talos Linux — on bare metal in the same datacenter as the blockchain nodes. Now the constant back-and-forth between workloads and nodes happens on the local network, for free. Only the finished, curated data is written back to the cloud.
And here's the quiet detail that makes it pay off: data flowing into AWS and GCP is free — the cloud charges you to take data out, not to put it in. So the return trip costs nothing. The ~$17,000/month egress bill didn't shrink. It went to zero.
Moving to bare metal solved the cost, but it created a security problem. We didn't own or manage the physical machines — the provider did. Sensitive data now sat on disks we couldn't physically control, so we planned for two very different kinds of theft.
Full-disk encryption
Every disk is fully encrypted, and the key never lives on it. Pull a disk out of a host — or get handed one that was recycled — and it's just noise.
Operator-gated key release
Encryption alone can't stop a machine that boots and decrypts itself. So the keys live in a key-management service that only releases them under explicit operator authorization. A stolen host asks to unlock — and we simply say no. It never boots.
A disk is useless off its host; a host is useless off the network. Sensitive data stayed protected on infrastructure the company never physically controlled.
Running Kubernetes in two very different worlds — a public cloud and unmanaged bare metal — could easily have meant two platforms to build, secure, and operate. We refused to pay that tax. Instead we designed a single, cloud-agnostic Kubernetes stack that runs identically in either place: one design, one set of standards, one thing to maintain, whether it's on AWS or on metal in a rack.
The same portability that eliminated the egress bill keeps the operational overhead flat — and it's the same design that runs our self-hosted observability platform. Build it to run anywhere, and "anywhere" stops being expensive.
~$17K/month → $0
Co-locating compute with the blockchain nodes removed the data-egress bill entirely; only free, inbound writes reach the cloud.
Disk + host both covered
Full-disk encryption defeats a stolen disk; operator-gated key release defeats a stolen machine — on hardware the company didn't own.
Cloud + bare metal, one stack
A single cloud-agnostic Kubernetes design runs the same everywhere, so hybrid didn't double the operational load.
Hybrid cloud and bare metal, designed as one portable stack — secure, owned, and free of the egress tax.
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