How Stellar Reduced Cloud Costs by 77% and Cut Dashboard Development Time by 93%
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Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), the non-profit Foundation supporting the Layer 1 blockchain Stellar, partnered with Indicium to modernize its data architecture and unlock operational efficiency. SDF felt the need to reduce infrastructure costs, improve internal productivity, and enhance the experience for its developer community and partners. Indicium migrated its data warehouse, built a modern data platform, and optimized business intelligence workflows. The result is a faster, more scalable, and cost-effective architecture that drives measurable results across teams and partners.
Inconsistent Architecture, High Costs, and Development Bottlenecks
Stellar relied on a legacy data warehouse that lacked structure and observability. The infrastructure was built on ad-hoc scripts and non-reusable transformation logic. Development was time-consuming and difficult to maintain. Data was ingested in raw form into a lake, without a proper curation layer or warehouse to support business users.
The developer community relied on an API to access data, which in turn triggered Google Cloud Platform (GCP) queries – each call adding to cloud costs. There was no cost-effective method for retrieving historical data, creating unnecessary complexity and limiting visibility.
The broader data ecosystem faced scaling challenges due to the absence of governance, version control, and clear data lineage. As a result, development slowed, costs climbed, and onboarding new contributors became increasingly difficult.
A Modern Platform Built for Scale, Speed, and Cost Efficiency
Indicium began with a comprehensive audit of GCP architecture and swiftly implemented a cost-optimization strategy that led to significant reduction in cloud spend. As part of the modernization effort, the team designed and launched a state of the art data warehouse to replace the legacy system. This upgrade enhanced performance, governance, and observability. By shifting data processing and storage from the API to GCS/BigQuery, developers could now access data through their own GCP accounts, improving cost efficiency and access control.
To streamline data workflows, Indicium migrated complex analytics out of the custom Golang source system ingestion pipeline, and into a dbt-based framework. This transition standardized transformations and introduced embedded documentation, embedded documentation, testing, and lineage tracking within every model. The result: faster developer onboarding, increased development velocity, and greater confidence in data quality.
Indicium also developed scalable dashboards for key partners, which provided direct access to network data and key performance metrics. The dashboards supported net new partner onboarding in under 48 hours.
To strengthen platform security and observability, Indicium conducted a full IAM review. This audit enhanced compliance, simplified access management, and helped to reduce the risk of security breaches.
From Technical Debt to High-Performance, Scalable Data Infrastructure
Through this, SDF reduced infrastructure costs of the Stellar network by 77% through GCP optimization. Time to develop new dashboards was reduced by 93%, dramatically accelerating the delivery of insights.
By migrating 100% of analytics workflows to dbt, the team simplified development and improved accuracy. It increased platform adoption, streamlined maintenance, and accelerated iteration cycles.The implementation of the modern data stack significantly improved observability and governance. This led to stronger data governance, tighter platform security, and better access management, laying a more stable foundation for scalability.
Partner onboarding was reduced to just 48 hours, which enables faster collaboration and go-to-market for the organization’s ecosystem. Today, the modernized platform supports a wide range of internal and external analytics use cases. It handles everything from near-real-time reporting to long-term strategic analysis, and delivers consistent and reliable insights to all users.
Indicium’s Expertise and Collaborative Approach
SDF sought a strategic partner with the expertise to redesign the Stellar network’s data architecture for long-term growth and impact. Indicium delivered through IndiMesh, our proven framework built on collective intelligence, deep technical expertise, and rigorous quality control.
The organization prioritized real-time collaboration and a partner who could move quickly across both data engineering and analytics. Indicium stood out for its technical depth, agility and ability to identify quick wins that generated immediate cost savings, ultimately delivering greater value under budget.
We brought hands-on expertise in the modern data stack and our fast delivery model to modernize the platform without disruption or compromising quality. From re-architecting infrastructure to redefining development workflows, every layer of the solution was designed for speed, governance, and scale.
We replaced legacy pipelines with scalable dbt models. We built dashboards that reduced new partner onboarding time to 48 hours and overall development time by 93%. And we ensured every layer of the architecture met the highest standards of governance, performance, and security.
Indicium turned an expensive legacy setup into a powerful engine for growth, with the performance, reliability, and agility to support the organization’s mission, scale their network, and serve a growing ecosystem of developers and partners.
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