Nasdaq has reached a brand new milestone in its cloud journey because the MRX choices market has totally migrated to the Amazon Net Companies (AWS) cloud, leveraging co-engineered AWS Outposts. With this transfer, we’re paving the best way for the following technology of capital markets to allow higher scalability when managing unpredictable occasions whereas offering higher flexibility and resiliency.
The completion of the migration comes one yr after we announced our plans to reimagine the way forward for the capital markets by shifting our North American markets to the cloud. It builds upon Nasdaq’s decade of labor step by step and systematically shifting our foundational methods to the cloud, together with knowledge distribution, income administration, regulatory reporting and market operations methods.
Committing to the Cloud
Whereas our cloud journey started in 2008, the worldwide coronavirus pandemic solidified our conviction that we would have liked to speed up the conclusion of our cloud ambitions and start migrating core markets to the cloud. In 2020, our knowledge volumes reached new data, with 60 billion messages shifting by way of our market methods and over 200 billion data into our Nasdaq Knowledge Warehouse, up from a mean of 70 billion per day. Lots of our trade know-how clients additionally skilled a major surge in buying and selling volumes, with some rising by over 100%.
Amid this market setting with heightened, sustained volatility, we acknowledged the necessity for dynamic capability and order circulation, in addition to the necessity to have a extra geographically moveable enterprise and the flexibility to work together with clients in new, digitalized methods. With the cloud, we are able to add capability every time wanted with out impacting different workloads crucial to our day-to-day operations. We are able to additionally assist our clients get higher management over their service consumption with fast scale whereas offering them higher flexibility and selection in how they work together with us and the companies they need to eat.
Classes Realized
The North Star in our technique has been to carry the cloud to our shoppers and the broader monetary ecosystem whereas preserving or bettering the efficiency profiles that we provide at the moment on our markets and for our know-how shoppers. As a part of this cloud journey, we’re additionally targeted on bringing our shoppers and companions with us in order that they will totally leverage the ability of the cloud to achieve efficiencies and enterprise agility. To do that efficiently, we’re adapting our tooling for deployment, orchestration and instrumentation.
Transferring markets to the cloud required the migration of an intricate net of processes, methods and native protocols which can be utilized by a number of layers of the general capital markets ecosystem. To efficiently execute on the efficiency stage we do at the moment and handle a wide selection of real-time market circumstances, our underlying market infrastructure for the matching engine should be resilient and extremely performant. All of the whereas, we should keep ultra-low latency transactions and deal with huge volumes of message visitors. This was an bold, transformational undertaking for the capital markets, and we’re grateful to have AWS as our most popular cloud supplier and accomplice as we forge this new path.
Interoperability between our buying and selling platform and the brand new cloud infrastructure was mission-critical as we approached our program, and we recognized some key architectural and operational modifications that might allow the interoperability required whereas capturing the advantages of the cloud. With the brand new infrastructure-as-a-service mannequin, we would have liked to make sure that market methods might proceed to function throughout AWS service occasions in addition to when disconnected from the general public cloud. Our infrastructure design relies on static stability, which serves as a tenet to ship resiliency. Moreover, we all know bodily servers and different parts can expertise different points that impression availability, so we needed to contemplate fault domains as a part of our deployment.
One of many key benefits of the cloud is the flexibility to capitalize on fashionable and environment friendly instruments and API-driven workflows for orchestration and instrumentation that allow us to automate each how infrastructure and functions are deployed and managed. Critically, previous to launching MRX within the cloud, we repeatedly examined our operational assist procedures and held drills with AWS for “game-day” eventualities to assist guarantee the whole lot labored as supposed.
Shifting the structure and deployment of our mission-critical know-how and operational fashions couldn’t have been possible with out cultural alignment, a robust collaboration with AWS and the assist of our clients and broader ecosystem stakeholders.
During the last 5 years, and particularly the final two, our group has undertaken plenty of initiatives, together with the creation of a Cloud Middle of Excellence (CCOE) and several other coaching initiatives to broaden the capabilities of our workforce and upskill the place required. Nonetheless, we’ve additionally needed to assume in another way, and whereas doing so, align our companies, know-how groups and the broader group.
However our imaginative and prescient to maneuver markets to the cloud wouldn’t have been doable with out the deep collaboration and engagement at a number of ranges with AWS. From the beginning, AWS helped us tackle and mitigate dangers as we labored collectively to pave the best way for a way markets will function sooner or later. Collectively, we now have enhanced product growth for AWS and Nasdaq, constructing the Outpost design and resiliency fashions, each new to AWS. All through this course of, the tight suggestions loop between our engineering groups has helped us keep on the right track and even outperform our expectations.
Persevering with the Journey
This newest milestone has been greater than a decade within the making, however we’re solely simply getting began. From a know-how perspective, we’re introducing Kubernetes, which can assist allow us to repeatedly enhance the dynamism of the buying and selling system deployment.
We plan to maneuver extra markets to the cloud subsequent yr and can additional optimize our deployments as we study extra. As we advance, we intend to supply cloud-based Colocation with applicable regulatory approval, and different complementary companies for our consumer group within the coming years. Moreover, we’re packaging our experiences with MRX to create a market migration blueprint designed to assist our Market Expertise group. Made up of over 130 monetary market infrastructure suppliers – exchanges, clearinghouses and central securities depositories — in 50 nations, we hope to assist them drive and speed up transformation of their market ecosystems everywhere in the world based mostly on our mixed know-how capabilities, experience and expertise. Lastly, as we advance the creation of a non-public native zone throughout the footprint of our New Jersey knowledge middle, we’re excited to allow our clients and companions to carry their workloads in shut proximity to the matching engine.
Nasdaq firmly believes that the cloud will function a hub for innovation within the capital markets within the many years forward. We are going to proceed to deepen our collaboration and broaden capabilities to create new choices in knowledge and analytics, anti-financial crime know-how and market infrastructure options. Furthermore, we imagine that the innovation that happens on account of the cloud will result in extremely highly effective change that may form the way forward for our business.
To study extra about how Nasdaq and AWS will help you execute your cloud journey, contact us.