For Stock Brokers, It’s All About Speed, Security, and Reliability

Information is the life blood of the stock market. For stock exchanges, having the ability to provide up-to-date
information of a large scale and in real-time is critical to the success of buyers and sellers and the health of the
market. As stock exchanges seek to streamline internal processes, ingest more and more data sources, deliver information
to end users faster, and build a more robust disaster recovery footprint, they’ve increasingly turned to digitalization
and the many benefits of running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

However, many financial services companies, including stock exchanges, have built applications initially designed to run
on legacy infrastructure. And while many legacy applications can move to AWS with little or no re-architecting, they
aren’t designed to take advantage of the many benefits cloud-native services and cloud-optimized applications bring to
end users. For one major stock exchange, the mission to replace and improve existing applications by moving them to AWS
proved a mighty challenge given the current state of its legacy applications. Luckily, the experts at Stelligent, an AWS
Premier Consulting Partner and AWS DevOps and Financial Services Competency Partner, were able to help the stock
exchange rewrite and replatform 11 applications on AWS.

Rewriting and Replatforming Applications on AWS with the Help of Stelligent

Legacy code can prove challenging to modify, iterate, and track changes for consistently and efficiently, particularly
when its initial creation can date back decades and code authors no longer work for the company. The stock exchange,
whose legacy code dated back to 1996, didn’t have the in-house expertise or institutional knowledge to turn to for a
deep understanding of its legacy application code, limiting the exchange’s ability to reproduce builds and deployments
of its workloads.

The exchange sought to move its on-premises disaster recovery (DR) environments, specifically its messaging and queuing
workloads powering the delivery of change to the rest of its business applications, to AWS to improve scalability as
well as remove development bottlenecks. Having already engaged with the AWS Professional Services team to create a Kafka
cluster of brokers and build out a framework to sit on top of Kafka and handle message publishing and subscribing, the
team knew some workloads could run on AWS in the current state. But they also understood some workloads would need to be
re-architected to run on and take advantage of AWS.

The exchange needed to conduct an archeological dig of millions of lines of code to understand the current state of all
workloads and introduce necessary changes to optimize applications on AWS and requested AWS Professional Services’ help
in identifying an AWS Consulting Partner with application transformation expertise. Already very familiar with
Stelligent’s deep expertise in digital transformation and automation best practices, the ProServe team reached out to
Stelligent about the customer’s pain points, seeking to help the customer re-architect its applications for AWS.

Once brought into the engagement, Stelligent took the following steps:

1. 
   The team embedded with the stock exchange’s development team to review all of its applications together, discuss
   strategy for application replatforming on AWS, and examine the capabilities of the exchange’s current framework for
   integration
   
2. Stelligent then explained different options for implementation
3. 
   Focusing on the long-tail, Stelligent surveyed 19 post-trading workloads and did a full
   archeological dig on 11 workloads of various sizes
   
4. 
   Following the full archeological application dig, Stelligent rewrote the applications to support
   Kafka while running on AWS by adding shims, reworking pieces of the application code to
   enable the application to run as needed on AWS
   
5. 
   After reworking the applications to run on AWS, Stelligent helped the team deploy the applications
   to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instances
   

Having the Experts Roll Up Their Sleeves to Drive Application Transformation

By working closely with the exchange’s development team throughout the engagement,
the Stelligent team brought their deep expertise in software engineering to successfully
evaluate the exchange’s legacy code and help the company better understand its
environment. With Stelligent’s help, the exchange quickly learned valuable information
about its legacy code and what it does, and how to approach re-architecting applications
for AWS effectively and efficiently