Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Trading up: Fidelity Investments takes trading to the cloud (FSI317)

Summary

• Fidelity Investments modernized their trading stack to handle increased trading volumes and to scale more effectively.
• The project began in 2019 and is now running in production.
• Key reasons for the modernization included capacity constraints, outdated technology, cost savings, and the need for speed to market.
• The trading landscape changed drastically in 2019 due to fractional trading, zero commissions, and meme stocks, leading to a significant increase in trading volumes.
• Fidelity built a development team skilled in cloud operations, focusing on high availability and resilience, including handling of availability zone and region failures.
• They shortened release cycles, implemented CI/CD pipelines, and developed custom chaos and performance testing frameworks.
• Challenges included integrating with legacy systems, handling complex order types, and dealing with hardware changes in the cloud.
• The architecture utilizes AWS services like DynamoDB and MSK, and includes custom-built components like FIX engines for Kubernetes.
• Fidelity's order management system operates in a hot-hot multi-region setup, ensuring seamless failover and customer service continuity.
• The platform resiliency is achieved through Kubernetes for application logic, allowing for scaling and failover across regions.
• Fidelity's cloud platform hosts 5,700 applications, focusing on security, compliance, infrastructure, and developer experience.
• The FinOps model is critical for managing costs effectively in the cloud.
• Observability tools are being reimagined for the cloud environment to reduce noise and improve MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery).
• A new data pattern using DynamoDB for caching and synchronization across regions has been implemented.
• Collaboration across security, platform, SRE, and application teams is key to the success of Fidelity's cloud platform.

Insights

• Fidelity's journey to the cloud was driven by the need to handle unprecedented trading volumes and the limitations of their legacy systems.
• The transition to the cloud involved not only technological changes but also a cultural shift within the organization, emphasizing collaboration and continuous learning.
• The use of AWS services and custom-built solutions demonstrates the flexibility and scalability of cloud architectures, especially for latency-sensitive applications like trading systems.
• The hot-hot multi-region setup is a strategic approach to ensure high availability and disaster recovery, which is critical for financial services.
• Fidelity's focus on developer experience and open-source contributions indicates a commitment to innovation and community engagement within the cloud ecosystem.
• The FinOps model and the reimagining of observability tools highlight the importance of cost management and operational efficiency in cloud deployments.
• The presentation underscores the ongoing evolution of cloud platforms in financial services, where performance, reliability, and security are paramount.