Case Study
Financial
Trading Platform
Java
Spring Framework
Javascript
Gemfire
Kafka
Tibco EMS
Amazon Web ServicesThe Situation
A major financial institution was looking to migrate its treasury liquidity trading platform to the cloud in preparation for onboarding additional product lines and scaling to a more extensive user base. The treasury technology team was forging the path for cloud integration within the organization and establishing patterns that the central cloud adoption team would later recommend for the broader enterprise. This work included replacing critical enterprise middleware systems and data stores with more cloud-friendly alternatives.
Business and technology leadership wanted an appraisal of the trading system before committing to a significant migration project to fully understand the requirements and potential challenges of such an undertaking. The review needed to factor in extra complexities of moving to a new data store, replacing the messaging middleware, and deploying to a fully cloud-based environment to meet their future scalability needs. The client looked to SitePen’s expertise in these areas to conduct a comprehensive system architecture review before the migration began.
The Solution
SitePen met with the client’s technology team for an introduction to the existing platform and progressed into deep-dive investigations into the system’s logical and infrastructure architectural designs, scaling requirements, data models and flows, software delivery lifecycle, as well as a review into the application source code. The process brought together analysis output from the platform’s current state along with improvement recommendations and tradeoff comparisons where multiple options forward were present. The output was further tailored to the client’s goals of cloud adoption and replacement of middleware systems, while ensuring critical system fundamentals of data integrity and resiliency were retained.
A tight project timeline and broad systems platform meant complete analysis of the entire ecosystem was out of scope. However, the client was impressed with the expanse and detail of the investigation and recommendations that SitePen captured within the time available.
As part of replacing the system’s data store, the client also requested that SitePen assemble a proof-of-concept for a fully event-sourced messaging and storage solution. A business function representing a heavily-used interaction flow was selected from the product to prove out the new approach. A working solution was successfully delivered along with further analysis on a range of messaging and storage implementation approaches the client could take when adapting the PoC for production. Recommendations included requirements, project phasing, and tradeoffs for each approach.
The Result
SitePen provided a detailed system architecture review within the client’s optimistic timeframes, including improvement recommendations in many platform areas. The current state analysis and future state improvement options including the event sourcing proof-of-concept were then reviewed with the technology and leadership teams to ensure a complete understanding and to answer any feedback. The set of improvement actions was able to be factored into the team’s upcoming sprints, after which they could devote complete focus to the significant tasks of replacing the platform’s data store, moving the system onto the cloud, and integrating new lines of business onto the platform.
While SitePen identified several areas of improvement, the client was generally on the right track and could continue with their initial project schedule without impact. The leadership group was especially pleased to have external third-party validation that the decisions their delivery teams had made aligned with industry best practices. Overall, the client was left with much greater confidence that their selected path forward and the steps and tradeoffs needed to realize it would be the best possible approach to meet their needs.