How Ona became the fastest way for GSR traders to securely run code

For cryptocurrency investment firm GSR, rolling out Ona wasn’t just about modernizing developer workflows. It was about unblocking high-impact teams across the business and reclaiming significant time previously lost to dev environment maintenance.

After rolling out Ona, employees at GSR were unblocked across all disciplines:

• Quants ran compute-heavy C++ models, Jupyter Notebooks, and ML workflows on Ona instead of brittle, maintenance-heavy VDI. Infra ticket volume dropped, and work got done faster.
• Traders explored sensitive market data without downloading a single line of code, API key, or access-controlled CSV file.
• Analysts shared reproducible, version-aligned workspaces that eliminated drift and “works on my machine” issues.

With Ona, GSR’s development experience became faster and fully self-serve. Every technical contributor—whether a quant, trader, or analyst—now spins up a consistent, production-like environment in seconds. Infrastructure teams gained back time and focus, no longer tied up handling one-off support requests or environment drift.

Handmade dev environments were a bottleneck for Dev & SRE

Christopher Norman, Head of Engineering at GSR explained its development environment had become difficult. Due to regulations and security needs, GSR had built a ‘dev box’ infrastructure in their VPC, and while their system addressed many common frustrations, it was challenging and costly to manage:

• Customized EC2 instances built with manual image management and maintenance
• Complex containerized setups documented in internal wikis, requiring ongoing patches
• Architecture migration challenges that created environment compatibility issues

To ensure security and control, GSR initially centralized development inside VDIs. But over time, the team needed more flexibility and speed. Developers moved fast, traders needed instant access, and SREs were juggling too many configuration edge cases.

“Our goal was to have the SRE team focused on revenue-generating tasks,” added Norman. “Managing developer environments shouldn’t be their priority.”

Ona gave both engineers and non engineers a frictionless compliant workspace

GSR didn’t just simplify engineering workflows. They unlocked a faster, safer path for a broader group of contributors. Traders and quants, long reliant on fragile local setups and high-friction VDI workarounds, quickly became Ona's biggest advocates.

These weren’t full-time developers with expertise in local configuration or package management. For them, Ona delivered something previously unavailable: a truly secure, reproducible environment with zero setup friction. No installation, no IT tickets—just instant access to everything they needed.

Once the switch happened, adoption was smooth. Now, Ona is treated like any other dependable tool: nobody thinks about it.

Ona gave both engineers non engineers a frictionless compliant workspace

GSR implemented Ona to deliver ready-to-use environments across roles, with immediate results:

• Easy Jupyter Notebooks: Quants stopped losing hours setting up dependencies.
• Enhanced Data Security: Traders gained secure access to sensitive market data through controlled cloud environments designed for financial compliance.
• Scalable Configuration: Reusable workspace templates replaced flaky wiki pages and manual setup.
• Strategic Time Reclaimed: Platform engineering effort that previously went to environment management – roughly 20% of full-time capacity – is now redirected to higher-value infrastructure work.

Cloud-based dev environments raise the security baseline

GSR sought a development platform that could deliver speed, flexibility, and compliance simultaneously, which is particularly important when working with sensitive financial data.

Ona delivered exactly that. Cloud-based workspaces provide teams with the performance they need while maintaining complete data security. Traders and analysts work within purpose-built environments that come with compliance guardrails built in from day one.

Security became a competitive advantage. Complete audit trails, minimal exposure surfaces, and full infrastructure visibility happen automatically, freeing the team to focus on strategic priorities rather than oversight tasks.

Takeaways for financial firms

GSR’s story offers a blueprint for firms struggling with dev environment sprawl:

• Self serve tools scale better than tickets: The support team now spends close to zero time on environment issues.
• Traders and quants don’t want to think about tools: Ona lets them focus on the work, not the setup.
• Yes security can be easy: Ona's cloud-based, policy-compliant workspaces improved compliance without slowing users down.
• The cost justifies itself: Although the per-user cost is higher than open-source or VDI tools, Ona eliminated significant overhead—freeing ~20% of platform engineering capacity for higher-value work.

Platform consistency is a strategic advantage

GSR’s adoption of Ona isn’t just a dev tooling upgrade. It’s a shift in how technical work gets done in a high-stakes environment. By making secure environments instant and invisible, Ona frees up traders and quants to focus on insights – not infrastructure.

In an industry where milliseconds matter, simplifying the stack is a strategic advantage.

Ona is trusted by over 1.7M developers, including teams at GSR.