Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Nasdaq: Moving mission-critical, low-latency workloads to AWS (FSI312)

Summary

• NASDAQ is moving mission-critical, low-latency workloads to AWS, leveraging AWS Outposts.
• Mark Murphy (SVP at NASDAQ), Nate Sammons (Cloud Architect at NASDAQ), and George Smith (Cloud Architect at AWS) presented the journey, challenges, and future plans.
• NASDAQ is a global technology provider for markets, owning and operating over 30 exchanges and powering 130 others worldwide.
• Liquidity is crucial for marketplaces, and NASDAQ aims to use AWS infrastructure and NASDAQ trading technology to reduce friction for liquidity providers, especially in emerging economies.
• NASDAQ has been working with AWS for over a decade, moving surrounding systems to the cloud, which proved beneficial during extreme market conditions in 2022.
• The greatest challenge was moving the matching engine to the cloud, which required addressing issues like technical debt, latency, uptime, regulation, and determinism.
• AWS Outposts was chosen for its ability to provide sub-millisecond latency and meet the stringent requirements of NASDAQ's trading platform.
• The architecture includes a custom ultra-low latency outpost, bare metal compute, and a network optimized for NASDAQ's needs.
• NASDAQ has a technical and product roadmap for future enhancements, including denser and faster hardware, dynamic deployments, integration of more AWS services, and the ability to run markets in outposts, local zones, and AWS regions.
• A co-location in the cloud product and a private local zone designed for capital markets are planned for the near future.

Insights

• NASDAQ's move to AWS Outposts for mission-critical workloads signifies a major shift in how financial markets can leverage cloud technology for high-performance and low-latency requirements.
• The collaboration between NASDAQ and AWS has resulted in a custom solution that addresses the unique challenges of running a trading platform in the cloud, including regulatory compliance and the need for deterministic performance.
• The use of AWS Outposts allows NASDAQ to maintain control over physical security and data residency while benefiting from AWS's infrastructure and services.
• NASDAQ's approach to static stability and disconnected operation ensures that their markets can continue to function even in the event of network or service disruptions.
• The future roadmap indicates a trend towards more dynamic and automated deployments, suggesting that NASDAQ is looking to further embrace cloud-native principles while maintaining the strict performance and reliability standards required for financial exchanges.
• The introduction of a co-location in the cloud product and a private local zone for capital markets shows NASDAQ's commitment to providing innovative solutions that cater to the evolving needs of their clients and the broader financial industry.