Global
Case Study
Deutsche Börse: Leveraging AWS for Rapid Infrastructure Evolution
About Deutsche Börse Group
The Deutsche Börse is the German stock exchange providing a marketplace for the trading of shares and other securities. It is also a transaction services provider and gives companies and investors access to global capital markets.
Given the extreme time pressure that we were under to deliver a mission-critical platform, together with Ness we decided to use AWS for Development, QA, and UAT, which proved to be the right move, allowing us to hit the ground running. The Ness team created a strong partnership with my team to deliver the project.
The Challenge
In 2017, the Deutsche Börse needed an approved publication arrangement (APA) developed for its RRH business to support MiFID II regulations. The APA had to be fully operational by January 3, 2018. The service provides real-time MiFID II trade-reporting services to around 3000 different financial services clients. After an open RFP process, the Deutsche Börse approached Ness to build this system, resulting in an on-time, problem-free launch. The Deutsche Börse then approached Ness again in May 2018 to expand its system to allow the Börse to process twenty times the volume of messages, with no increase in latency, and to deliver the system to its on-premises hardware within 4 months.
The Solution
Though the implementation was technical, Ness was ultimately recruited by the business unit at the Deutsche Börse to provide an implementation of its service. This required Ness to determine and implement both technical and business requirements. The stakeholder group also included the internal client IT team and the Bafin (German Financial Regulator), as the choice of technology, infrastructure, and cloud provider was decided in tandem with all three groups.
Ness’s deep domain knowledge in regulatory reporting and financial services was crucial to understanding and proposing a viable solution to the client’s need and satisfying all stakeholders. Ness’s domain expertise in combination with its technology acumen allowed for delivery of the service under very tight constraints.
The client’s hardware-procurement timelines and costs precluded the option to develop and test on premises. Instead, Ness developed, tested, and certified the needed infrastructure in AWS and applied the resulting topology and tuning recommendations for the onsite infrastructure.
Results and Benefits
For Deutsche Börse, Ness:
- Proposed a radical infrastructure overhaul of the client systems that included the replacement of their existing Qpid bus with Confluent Kafka, involving architecture changes and configuration tuning.
- Implemented an automated CI/CD system that built both environment and application to find the optimal configuration, allowing developers and testers to create production-scale infrastructure on demand, both cost- and time-effectively.
Finding optimal configuration required executing hundreds of performance tests with 100s of millions of messages flowing through a complex, mission-critical infrastructure, and it would have been impossible in the few weeks available without the elasticity and repeatability provided by AWS.
Additional 3rd-party technology used for this solution included:
- Docker Swarm: client chosen Docker orchestration framework
- Redis: in-memory cache
- Confluent Kafka: scalable replay log
- TICK: monitoring framework
- Greylog: log aggregation
- Jenkins: CI/CD pipeline
