Trading System @ Cloud : Hybrid Cloud
On my previous two stories I tried to highlight obstacles and possible approaches to migrate Trading / Financial applications to cloud. These problems / obstacles are not limited to Financial Applications, but across any platforms built over last couple of decades, but migrating Trading systems always faces bigger challenges because of various low latency requirements. If due to any change latency increases that put the whole platform on high risk, which can leads to multi million dollar fine as well. Due to this, Trading Application owners are always risk averse, even before changing hardware they want other application to go first and taste the water before them.
A leap towards cloud, definitely a big challenge for them. From my experience, only 50% of the effort is related to development or new technology adoption, other 50% all about surrounding systems and integration points.
Trading Platform @ Hybrid Cloud
On my previous story I have tried to describe a typical hybrid cloud adoption for Trading. I have used following diagram to use it.
Now for a low latency requirement, this cannot be a solution, time over the network will be significant here, hence you always want to compute near to your data a.k.a Edge. This is a old concept, in Trading old we used to call it Colocation or Colo. Placing Trading Servers near to Market Data provider’s hardware is actually a decade old practice.
To address this problem and to implement hybrid cloud more meaningfully for Financial platforms, all big boys (AWS, Azure & GCP) came with their managed on-prem solution.
Idea behind such offerings are many folds ..
- Taking advantage of state of the art cloud agility, but staying on-prem to meet low latency integrations.
- Any data related compliance issues are addressed, as you are not sending any data out of your premises.
- Making your application / platform cloud ready, with minimal disruption and switch to cloud when fully ready.
AWS Outpost
Fully managed hardware based solution, ready to be deployed at your data center / colo space. It provides a good range of AWS core services such as EC2, S3, RDS, Networking services, EMR, AWS tool sets (cloud formation, cloudwatch, cloudtrail etc…), and last but not the least AWS Security offerings. You can call it AWS in a box, running inside your data center. Currently it is hardware based, a VMware based solution will be available soon.
Azure Stack
Microsoft offering for Hybrid Cloud is much more robust, they are already providing multiple options to get things going.
Azure Stack Edge : This is AWS Outpost like offering or hardware-as-a-service. Azure based services will run on-prem on Microsoft provided hardware. AI / ML stack is also available on Edge.
Azure Stack Hub : This is an unique offering where Microsoft partnered with multiple hardware providers, and make Azure services available at on-prem. Unlike AWS Outpost, you don’t have to bring new hardware to your data center, existing hardware can be used to make Azure service running locally. If your applications are containerized, this should be considered as a planned move towards cloud. In my opinion, this is really suitable for Financial Applications.
Azure Stack HCI : This is more of an overhaul solution, where you are planning to use Azure to modernize your data center. This will lead to a permanent hybrid cloud. A complete hardware + software based solution.
Anthos
Google is considered as pioneer in this space, they introduce Anthos as App Modernization platform, using it enterprise can make their application cloud ready, while staying at on-prem, inside their network and hardware a.k.a comfort zone. Anthos is a platform to make your application ready for Hybrid / Multi Cloud architecture. If you compare Anthos with Azure Stack / AWS Outpost, it is not an apple to apple comparison. Anthos was never a hardware based managed solution, bringing cloud capabilities to on-prem like Azure Stack or AWS Outpost. It is a software platform, which can be deployed on VMWare with minimal hardware requirements. It mainly targets containerized applications, using Anthos control plane you can seamlessly manage them between multiple cloud and on-prem data center. It provides enterprise grade container Orchestration. Anthos should not be considered if you are looking for quick wins. For long term strategic wins, Anthos is a correct choice.
I tried to put a quick comparison of all the hybrid offerings. Overall, Anthos is a platform for a long term goal, but if you are already with Azure / AWS and stuck by low latency or data compliance issue, Stack / Outpost can definitely be a choice depending on how much deeper pocket you have.
