Deriv tech blog - Tech news and ideas from our team

Operational excellence

operational excellence

Operational excellence

This tech blog discuss how our team achieved operational excellence by adopting a "deploy first, release later" philosophy, implementing feature flags, having observability and operation scripts ready before release, implementing parallel run when needed, and documenting requirements upfront.

Sponsoring MetaCPAN

Sponsoring MetaCPAN

We are delighted to announce that we are now a financial sponsor of MetaCPAN, the search engine for Perl modules. In addition to running our back-end code, Perl has always had a special place in our hearts: it is reliable, stable, powerful, and community-driven via CPAN. The CPAN comes with

How to connect AWS and GCP with an HA site-to-site VPN using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

How to connect AWS and GCP with an HA site-to-site VPN using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

As part of our effort to become cloud-agnostic, we are moving a section of our production services to GCP from AWS while most of our services and databases continue to run on the AWS infrastructure. Throughout this campaign, keeping our services away from the public network has been one of

How did we fix the NAT Gateway issue in site-to-site VPN between GCP and AWS?

How did we fix the NAT Gateway issue in site-to-site VPN between GCP and AWS?

At Deriv, we have decided to become cloud-agnostic by moving a few of our services from AWS to GCP. The majority of our services and databases still run on the AWS infrastructure. One of our main security concern was not to expose our services to the public network. Hence, we

WebAssembly: Beyond the Browser

WebAssembly in Deriv: Trading charts Charts are among the key components of trading applications and are used in multiple Deriv apps, namely DTrader and DBot. Our main objective going forward is to build a chart library with high performance and smooth rendering. We are currently considering using CanvasKit in our

Who said Windows cannot be automated? (part 2)

automated deployment Featured

Who said Windows cannot be automated? (part 2)

Windows automation using PowerShell and AutoIT Application installation In Windows automation part 1 we covered the automation for cloud environment and operating system. In this blog post, we are going to cover automation for the application installation. The application in question communicates with external third parties for analytics and monitoring

Who said Windows could not be automated? (part 1)

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Who said Windows could not be automated? (part 1)

Windows automation using Terraform and Octopus Deploy At Deriv, we have integrated the MetaTrader 5 platform (MT5), based on Windows, to provide our clients with advanced trading options. It was fine to handle the deployment manually when we had a limited number of servers required to manage the platform. With

Migrating To async/await (part 2)

Migrating To async/await (part 2)

Things to consider when rewriting code to use the new async/await syntax provided by Future::AsyncAwait. In part 1 we looked at how to rewrite code that previously used plain Future on its own for sequencing operations, into using the neater async/await syntax provided by Future::AsyncAwait. In

Migrating To async/await (part 1)

Migrating To async/await (part 1)

Things to consider when rewriting code to use the new async/await syntax provided by Future::AsyncAwait. The Future class provides basic asynchronous future functionality, and also a number of handy building-blocks for building larger code structures into meaningful programs. With the addition of the async/await syntax provided by

Awaiting The Future (part 2)

Awaiting The Future (part 2)

A further look at Future::AsyncAwait, where it will go next and how we should be using it. In the previous part, I introduced the Future::AsyncAwait module, which adds the async and await pair of keywords. These help us to write many forms of code that use futures for

Awaiting The Future (part 1)

Awaiting The Future (part 1)

Introduction At Binary, we have an increasing amount of code that uses Futures to represent asynchronous operations. The power of these objects comes with the increased complexity of writing readable code that makes use of them. Various articles I have previously written have described Futures and their use. In this

Unit Testing Asynchronous Code

Unit Testing Asynchronous Code

How writing asynchronous code using Futures can help simplify unit testing Well-tested code is always prefered over something that has no tests, as with more tests we can be more confident that the code actually does what we want it to. Within the realm of tests, there exists a spectrum

Future Caching Tricks

Future Caching Tricks

Caching the results of Future-returning functions Often when making read requests or queries to some external service, it is helpful to cache the results of these queries so that other requests for the same information can use that directly, rather than having to repeat the query to that same service.

Differential Memory Leak Analysis with Devel::MAT

Differential Memory Leak Analysis with Devel::MAT

A look at a slow memory growth case and how recently-added features in Devel::MAT version 0.38 can help get to the bottom of it. Slow Growth Over Time Given a process that grows a small amount of memory over time, it can sometimes be difficult to look for

One Thing At A Time

One Thing At A Time

Limiting Concurrency in Future-based Programming Sometimes a Future-based program needs to actively avoid concurrency in one specific way or area, and ensure that only one instance of a given operation is outstanding at any one time. While the program as a whole can make use of concurrency to do multiple

Tracing Perl memory leaks with Devel::MAT (part 2)

Tracing Perl memory leaks with Devel::MAT (part 2)

In the previous article, we took a first look at how to use Devel::MAT to help find the reason why a perl process kept using more and more memory. The cause last time was found to be a single string scalar that grew to a huge 1.6 GiB,

Tracing Perl memory leaks with Devel::MAT (part 1)

Tracing Perl memory leaks with Devel::MAT (part 1)

The Devel::MAT ecosystem allows developers of perl programs to inspect and analyse memory-related problems such as memory leaks, unexpected memory consumption, or odd state. So says the first paragraph of the user guide, on CPAN at Devel::MAT::UserGuide. The user guide then goes on a brief overview of

Parallel query without parallel query

Parallel query without parallel query

One of the key improvements since Postgres 9.6 has been the ability to distribute a query to multiple worker processes. Yet, with a few tricks this has been feasible almost forever, at least for the really heavy stuff. I prefer to keep the database specific stuff in the database

Lock contention in PostgreSQL

Lock contention in PostgreSQL

At deriv.com, our clients can trade in binary options. We keep all the related information in a PostgreSQL database. The life cycle of such an option begins when it is bought by a client. In our language, this is called an open position. Later the client sells the position

How to use EXPLAIN output in PostgreSQL?

How to use EXPLAIN output in PostgreSQL?

Sometimes you want to process the EXPLAIN output in SQL. Unfortunately, EXPLAIN itself does not offer that option. However, there are tricks... Wrapping EXPLAIN in a function This is probably the simpler version. It requires to create a function: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION explain( p_q TEXT, p_mod TEXT[

How and why we implemented our own crypto cashier?

How and why we implemented our own crypto cashier?

Architecture overview and reasoning behind implementation of deriv.com crypto cashier.