Infrastructure Overview

NMT runs on Digital Ocean with Kubernetes orchestration for the backend and a separate deployment for the frontend. This section covers how the platform is built, deployed, and operated.

Infrastructure at a Glance

GitHub (Source Code)
    |
    | GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
    |
    v
+-------------------+     +-------------------+
| Container Build   |     | Frontend Deploy   |
| (Buildah)         |     | (separate infra)  |
+-------------------+     +-------------------+
    |
    | Push to GHCR
    v
+-------------------+
| GitHub Container  |
| Registry (ghcr.io)|
+-------------------+
    |
    | Helm deploy
    v
+-------------------------------------------+
|        Digital Ocean K8s Cluster           |
|                                            |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  |
|  | NMT Backend    |  | PostgreSQL 16   |  |
|  | (1 replica)    |  | (in-cluster)    |  |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  |
|                                            |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  |
|  | NGINX Ingress  |  | cert-manager    |  |
|  | Controller     |  | (Let's Encrypt) |  |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  |
+-------------------------------------------+

Key Components

Component	Technology	Purpose
Orchestrator	Digital Ocean Kubernetes (DOKS)	Managed Kubernetes
Package Manager	Helm 3	Templated K8s deployments
Container Builder	Buildah	Multi-stage Docker builds
Container Registry	GitHub (ghcr.io)	Image storage
Ingress	NGINX	HTTP routing and load balancing
TLS	cert-manager + Let's Encrypt	Automatic HTTPS certificates
CI/CD	GitHub Actions	Automated build, test, deploy
Security Scanning	Trivy	Container vulnerability detection

Environments

Environment	Domain	Purpose
Stage	`backend.stage.newmarkettrading.com`	Testing and staging
Production	`backend.newmarkettrading.com`	Live user-facing

Resource Allocation

Resource	Request	Limit
CPU	1 core	2 cores
Memory	2 Gi	4 Gi
Chrome data (RAM disk)	—	2 Gi
Temp storage (RAM disk)	—	1 Gi

The Chrome data volume is needed because the backend uses headless Chrome for Morpho data scraping.

Frontend Hosting

The frontend is deployed on Digital Ocean App Platform — a managed PaaS that handles builds, TLS, and scaling automatically. It is not containerized or deployed via Helm.

Property	Value
Platform	Digital Ocean App Platform
Build	Automatic on push (managed by DO)
Runtime	Node.js
Framework	Next.js

The frontend deployment pipeline is entirely separate from the backend's Kubernetes infrastructure. There is no Dockerfile or Helm chart for the frontend in the repository.

Known Infrastructure Limitations

Single Backend Replica

The backend currently runs as 1 replica in Kubernetes. There is no horizontal scaling or failover configured. During deployments, the pod is replaced (rolling update), which may cause brief interruptions to background worker processing.

Impact: If the backend pod crashes, indexing and valuation workers stop until Kubernetes restarts it. User-facing features (frontend + blockchain) remain unaffected since funds are on-chain and the frontend reads from the database directly.

Trivy Scan Non-Blocking

The CI/CD pipeline runs Trivy container vulnerability scans but they are configured with exit-code: 0 — vulnerabilities are reported but do not block deployment. This is a known TODO that should be addressed by switching to exit-code: 1 for CRITICAL vulnerabilities.

Overview