Neon Labs is a Web3 company focusing on interoperability between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, giving Ethereum Dapps an option for low transaction fees and greater processing capacity within the Solana ecosystem.

Neon EVM, an Ethereum Virtual Machine developed by the company, becomes a proxy between Ethereum and Solana, enabling a seamless experience for Ethereum users who want to leverage the faster speed and lower costs of the Solana blockchain. Ethereum developers don't have to rewrite their entire code for Solana as they can use the same smart contracts just by plugging into Neon Labs infrastructure.

Juliano Souza, Cloud and DevOps Manager for Neon Labs, had many challenges with data handling in the cloud and was constantly worrying about the costs and sub-optimal performance of running these high-throughput workloads on virtual machines on AWS and GCP, which made the operation complex, slow, and expensive.

"We were incurring high costs of egress traffic by transmitting large amounts of data to the blockchain, so decreasing lock-in within AWS and GCP became a priority as our operation was scaling up." 

Several companies within the Web3 space started to realize public clouds as a problem as the cost to operate within its infrastructure has skyrocketed over recent years. To mitigate that, some have already transitioned to alternative clouds while others are halfway between doing on-premise hosting and the cloud.

Still, these companies are dealing with an even bigger problem as plenty of cloud vendors have denied providing services to any activities related to blockchain, as seen in mid-2022, when a large German service provider banned all nodes running Solana blockchain, leaving 20% of the Solana stake offline.

I did some intensive research with several vendors, listing pros and cons, doing some proof of concepts, I went from 10 to 5, from 5 to 3, and from the final 3 we arrived at Latitude.sh, not only because of the functional benefits of the platform but also because Latitude.sh is a Web3 friendly company.

Juliano Souza, Cloud and DevOps Manager

To ensure a smooth transition, Juliano worked on an internal Proof of Concept to better understand Latitude.sh's platform and the best way to use it. Given that the platform promptly offers integrations with main DevOps market toolings, such as an easy-to-use API and a Terraform provider, the POC was quickly validated and he could start planning the actual migration from the public cloud.

His first challenge was internal, more specifically with the AWS environment and how his team would move the projects that were running over there without causing any downtime or issues to Neon Labs' operation, something that could only be accomplished with the combined effort of multiple teams from the organization.

The DevOps team worked alongside Product, Development, and Architecture for numerous weeks to ensure that all the applications would run properly within the new infrastructure and the service would not be disrupted during the transitional period.

From an incurred cost perspective, allocating such a big team to prepare, conduct, and perform the infrastructure migration may be hard to numerous organizations, but once you compare that to the overall cost savings alongside the performance boost of moving from AWS or GCP to a blockchain optimized Bare Metal, it makes the business decision a no-brainer: Latitude.sh's Bare Metal decreased Neon Labs' monthly cloud costs by 60% and increased the performance of their workloads by 3x!

Moreover, Latitude.sh's team quickly supported Neon with the transition, rapidly gaining traction on customer support requests to ease their ramp-up with the platform. With that, Neon Labs moved an entire business segment from AWS to Latitude.sh Metal, a project that was well received by all types of stakeholders interacting with the platform, not only for the inherent cost reduction but also for the significant improvement in workload performance.

Solana is computing and bandwidth resource hungry as it produces each block every 400ms, pushing large amounts of data to the blockchain at lightning speed. Neon Labs greatly benefits from the blockchain-optimized network and computing available on Latitude.sh's Metal platform.

On AWS, we had to wait for 10, 13, and sometimes 14 seconds between writing the block on the blockchain and having it displayed on our dashboard. Once the migration to Latitude.sh was completed, we increased operational efficiency so much that we lowered the average to just 3.4 seconds, and now we can say that Neon Labs is truly a real-time solution.

Juliano Souza, Cloud and DevOps Manager

This increase in performance was also noticed for setting up services when an instance had to be reinstalled or put under maintenance, as Latitude.sh's blockchain-optimized Metal computing can catch up with Solana blockchain three times faster than traditional servers running on public cloud infrastructure.

But still, what made Latitude.sh become Neon Labs' definitive choice? Blockchain-optimized infrastructure and end-to-end customer experience:

Having the best servers, components, network connectivity, and locations, all within Tier 3 data centers, are just the building blocks of Latitude.sh's value proposition. On top of that, there is a deep focus on enhancing the customer experience from the moment of consideration to the continuous use of all available solutions.

To achieve that, Latitude.sh offers a state-of-the-art self-service platform that makes the process of deploying servers smooth and easy. Additionally, the company provides 24x7 technical support and engineers who are experts in the blockchain space, ready to support and advise through the customer's journey. And with Neon Labs that's what became the ultimate decision-making factor:

"The benefits of Latitude.sh that I enjoyed the most were the openness and involvement from the team since the early conversations, they were eager to negotiate terms and conditions and provide flexibility to accommodate our specific needs. I didn't get that from any other Bare Metal providers and definitely did not get that from the Public Cloud." Are you ready to decrease costs and improve system performance just like Juliano? 

Get started with Latitude.sh today!  Or contact our sales team to discuss solutions customized to the specific needs of your infrastructure.