For Amsterdam-based exchange Bitvavo, the speed at which its customers can trade is everything.
"Every network latency that we cut, or every request that we serve faster, means a lot of revenue, a lot of opportunities, also for our users," Bitvavo engineering leader Ibrahim El Moufti told The Stack.
"We deal with a lot with high frequency trading and market makers and low latency systems, and our systems need to serve those requests as soon as possible," he said.
And while increasing speed by milliseconds, and sometimes nanoseconds, can make a difference for its customers, like many other companies, Bitvavo wants to focus on managing its core business rather than infrastructure. The company's. requirements are a system with zero downtime and the ability to accommodate bursty spikes in traffic.
"Imagine you have a busy day in crypto," Moufti said, perhaps due to a typical Elon Musk tweet. "Suddenly we have a high spike in traffic that was unprecedented. And we want to deal with those events really fast."
A private datacenter that requires a phone call to provision more capacity would simply not cut it. So, from its earliest days, Bitvavo has been cloud-native, and that decision has proven wise in a highly cyclical market for a company that wants to iterate fast.
When there is a surge in interest, Moufti said, its system centred on Kubernetes through Amazon EKS scales automatically, and cleanly, with low operational overhead.
Cloud-native for a smooth DORA process
Bitvavo particularly appreciates Aurora's separation of compute and storage, which AWS says improves availability, failover capabilities and operational efficiency compared with self-managed database deployments. For Bitvavo, those characteristics have become increasingly important as regulatory requirements have tightened.
The company recently completed work associated with Europe's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which requires financial institutions and critical service providers to demonstrate operational resilience and disaster recovery capabilities.
Moufti said Aurora's cross-region failover capabilities significantly reduced the engineering effort required to test and demonstrate resilience. Tasks that once demanded detailed playbooks, dedicated war rooms and extensive operational preparation are now more routine, allowing teams to focus on customer-facing development rather than infrastructure management.
According to the Bitvavo engineering leader, Aurora beat out other AWS services with its low operational overhead.
"We used RDS, for example. We tried managing our own databases on EC2s. I think the reason Aurora really sticks out for us is its low operational effort… We don't want to deal with the complexity of managing databases on the cloud."
Cloud AND AI-native
The cloud-first strategy also shapes Bitvavo's approach to artificial intelligence. Like many technology companies, the exchange is attempting to move beyond AI-assisted workflows towards what Moufti described as becoming "AI-native". The goal is to mature past giving employees access to generative AI tools, to integrating AI throughout engineering, product, legal and operational processes.
One example is incident management. Bitvavo is experimenting with AI agents that can analyse logs, metrics and alerts during production incidents, helping engineers identify likely causes more quickly. Rather than rearchitecting systems around AI, Moufti said the larger challenge has been improving documentation and knowledge management so that agents can understand internal systems and processes. In practice, that has meant changing how product specifications, architectural decisions and operational knowledge are recorded.
AWS is also becoming part of that AI strategy. Bitvavo recently began using Amazon Bedrock and AWS's emerging agent tooling, attracted in part by the ability to route tasks to different models while maintaining governance controls. For a regulated financial platform, Moufti said, identity management and access controls remain as important as model performance.
This interview was delivered in partnership with AWS.
