Hacken

FinOps & Cost Optimization · Blockchain Security & Compliance

Hacken is a Web3 cybersecurity and compliance company: smart-contract audits, pentests, Proof of Reserves, and real-time threat monitoring. Its Hacken Extractor platform collects and analyzes data from 25+ blockchain networks (Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Bitcoin, Tron, VeChain, and others), so the infrastructure has to run continuously and under load. We took ownership of the platform's production infrastructure on AWS: Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD, observability, and security. The primary focus was production stability and getting cloud costs — which were growing alongside scale — under control.

~30%

Lower monthly cloud cost

25+

Blockchain networks processed

24/7

Production uptime through the optimization

Challenge

The cloud bill was growing faster than the actual workload required. Dozens of Kubernetes nodes were running "just in case" on full On-Demand instances, and the dev environment was running on managed services spread across multiple availability zones — even though dev doesn't need high availability. Given the large volume of traffic, this generated significant cross-AZ data transfer costs that were essentially wasted. There was no single view of where the money was actually going — the bill just arrived at the end of the month.

Objective

This is production handling blockchain data 24/7 — you can't simply switch off the excess. Any change to a node pool or instance size risked taking down data collection, so what was needed wasn't a one-off cleanup but a managed, phased optimization with a zero-downtime guarantee. The goal: substantially cut the monthly cloud bill without touching the platform's reliability.

What we delivered

Ran an end-to-end cost audit across AWS
Moved stateless workloads to spot node pools with cluster autoscaling
Right-sized over-provisioned EC2 resources
Migrated dev Kafka to self-hosted within a single availability zone, eliminating unnecessary cross-AZ traffic
Standardized delivery through a GitOps workflow on ArgoCD, with all infrastructure defined as code in Terraform

Key advantage

Instead of firefighting the bill by hand, the infrastructure now scales itself to demand, and every change is reproducible and peer-reviewed in Git — so the team ships to dev and prod predictably and without manual intervention.

Outcome

Reduced monthly cloud costs by ~30%, while production maintained continuous operation and zero-downtime deployments. Engineers moved from reactively dissecting bills to predictable, automated delivery.

Technologies