Remote Work Isn’t Enough: Shifting Toward a Decentralized System Architecture
The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has upended businesses around the world, forcing companies to retool their organizations to weather one of the worst disruptions to the global economy in decades. In the face of unpredictability, both decentralization in the workplace and system architectures have taken center stage as methods to combat ever-changing circumstances. While each company faces its own set of challenges, decentralized organizations are inherently better equipped to take on today’s inclement business environment.
Binance’s system architecture is a good case study when it comes to decentralization. Over the past two years, our core development team has devised a decentralized solution to Binance’s software platform, shifting from a more monolithic sub-architecture to a microservices-based solution.
While a monolithic architecture has its benefits, different components of its software applications are tightly coupled and built within the same software framework, presenting a problem when any singular component needs to be altered or updated.
A microservices-based architecture, on the other hand, decouples these software components so that they can work independently with fewer opportunities for inadvertent cross-interference.
This approach has enabled Binance developers to work from anywhere in the world, as various teams can work on different parts of the software independently while communicating via an application program interface, or API. A geographically diverse development team also allows Binance team members to react quickly and autonomously to achieve the highest degree of system security, resilience and reliability. Solutions can be built and executed rapidly, and when urgent updates need to be applied, there is always someone awake who can respond quickly during local working hours.
Transitioning to a microservices-based solution allows teams to work remotely as well as work independently, which side-steps the frictional costs of collaborating over different time zones and working hours.
Binance has always been among the first to embrace innovative solutions that put security and users first. On the server side, Binance utilizes a cloud-based server solution that allows the team to deploy services closer to local users, thereby reducing latency and allowing users to enjoy a more responsive user experience.
While other organizations may rely on solutions based on traditional physical data centers or hybrid clouds, Binance is able to maintain an entirely cloud-based solution that allows for rapid server deployment to users around the world, meeting local users’ needs without having to establish a costly physical presence.
Built from the ground up on cloud-based infrastructure and with zero legacy infrastructure to contend with, the Binance DevOps team is able to manage thousands of servers around the world from consolidated interfaces. This means Binance is able to uphold the highest standards for security across all servers, with the same security standard applied to every operating server.
