Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - How Santander built a cloud-native trading platform at scale (FSI311)

Summary

Santander built a cloud-native electronic trading platform called Darwin for financial products on AWS.
The platform serves corporate and financial institution clients with products like bonds and swaps.
The initiative aimed to improve speed, time to market, cost-effectiveness, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).
The team consists of 50 developers and business technologists, with AWS regions in Europe and the U.S.
They adopted a microservices architecture, domain-driven design, and an event-driven architecture.
The platform uses AWS services like Elastic Cache, DynamoDB, OpenSearch, S3, ECS, Fargate, and others.
Santander's cloud strategy includes compliance with regulations, security, and encryption.
The project faced challenges in talent acquisition, regulatory compliance, and aligning with the group's landing zone.
The journey is ongoing, with more asset classes and geographies to be rolled out.

Santander's cloud-native approach allowed them to leverage AWS managed services, reducing the need for in-house maintenance and enabling faster deployment.
The use of microservices architecture and domain-driven design facilitated better communication between business and IT, and improved the agility and resilience of the platform.
The decision to use AWS ECS and Fargate over Kubernetes was driven by the need for simplicity and compliance with regulatory requirements.
Santander's global presence required a cloud solution that could support a distributed system with high-speed persistent storage, which DynamoDB provided.
The company's cloud strategy had to accommodate strict security and compliance measures, including encrypted traffic, managed identity services, and strict role boundaries for developers.
The use of AWS services like CloudWatch, X-Ray, and OpenSearch for monitoring and logging provided real-time insights and helped in quick issue detection.
The project highlighted the importance of early inclusion of security and CTO teams in cloud projects to address compliance and security proactively.
Talent acquisition for cloud engineers remains a challenge, emphasizing the need for skilled professionals in the cloud domain.