While designing an application, the platform that the application will run on plays a vital part. Capturing the platform in the design ensures that the final product has better performance, is resilient and easier to maintain. Developing a cloud-hosted trading system is no exception. Skills and experience are required to build the product right. The following steps represent an in-depth collection of concepts, best practices, and procedures for building a successful cloud-hosted trading system.

Architecture Analysis and Requirements Gathering

Unlike traditional infrastructure, the cloud presents complexities that need to be well understood before building a system to be hosted on it. The basic assumption of system developers should be that cloud resources may fail. They’ll definitely do at times! From server crashes, switch failures or even a mishap from the service provider, all these will affect the system.

To avoid this, capture these unforeseen cloud failures in system design. Furthermore, infrastructure analysis answer such questions like programming language to be used, database, and other tools for development.

Design a Service-Oriented System

The cloud-hosted systems are best when system components are deployed as a collection of services, APIs. These services are combined to form a composite application.

Service-orientation makes it possible to physically separate the services, execute them on proper machines, and use service manager as well as governance technologies for tracking and managing the services that make up the application.

Also, the design principle allows the reuse of services from other applications and other services. An application can be broken into multiple useful services that can be used by other system applications. This helps avoid re-inventing the wheel for every development while making the process fast and smooth.

Data Decoupling

Data decoupling involves breaking out processing and data into separate components. This is the ideal requirement for a public and private cloud which are a set of complex distributed systems. For a trading system, decoupling of data provides the same benefits as those of breaking the system into services. It gives an option to process and store data on any private or public cloud instance.

For even better performance of the system, caching systems are a proven best practice. These systems locally store mostly accessed data. This improves database performance by reducing the number of read request sent to a physical database.

Enabling Communication between System Components

Service-oriented design and data decoupling are not enough to render your system ready for the cloud. Consider the application components that regularly communicate with each other. Given that these components are distributed across a network and in the open internet, there is a need to configure tolerance for high communication latency.

For these reasons, the design focus should be on optimizing communication between components that make up the application. For a trading system, this could mean combining communication to form a single stream of data and messages.

Design for Performance and Scalability

Cloud workloads are highly unsteady, your system should be designed to handle load variance. With trading systems, overload occurs when traders base grow or logins increase at different hours. The opposite is true for low seasons.

Building a representation model boosts the performance of the system under these conditions. These models are used to study the system and understand the functional requirements in different load conditions. The model helps in understanding the effect of boom instances on the servers, network, and database.

Proper mechanisms are included in the design of the actual system to accommodate the requirements. The best thing about this is that some cloud service providers give capabilities for automatic resources provisioning to the system.

That notwithstanding, however, it is great to understand your system’s workload performance and to define the blueprint and mechanisms for system scaling and descaling.

Designing for performance also means creating application interfaces that enable performance monitoring with application-aware tools.

Build for Failure Tolerance

As seen above, dealing with the failures associated with the infrastructure starts with recognizing that these failures will happen. While building for the cloud, you may decide to let these cloud failures take you by surprise, or better still prepare for this as early as when designing the system.

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To deal with infrastructure reliability issues, special approaches should be employed within the system design. One proven approach is redundancy. The design should include twin or multiple topologies for every operational part of the system. From the server, application logic to a mirrored database.

Accordingly, these redundant parts should be dispersed across different data centers and regions. Place them strategically such that if a part fails, the replica picks up the work simultaneously.

It takes effort but the benefits are worth the work.

Securing the Trading System for Clouds

A lot goes into developing a secure cloud-hosted trading system. For traditional hosting architectures, security is usually an afterthought. For cloud architecture, however, security is paramount to the process. It ought to be a priority especially when it comes to trading systems. At least for the sake of traders’ stake. For this reason, security should be made systemic to every development step.

Implementing a secure trading system involves first finding an approach that is effective for this type of system. This approach should include among other capabilities: the ability to tell and specially handle sensitive data, within several security levels. Authentication and authorization are important steps for every cloud-based system.

The core objective is to design and build a system that is secure on its own and take advantage of the security features of the cloud services. Security policies differ from business to business hence it is a good measure to understand the organization.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a concept that is evolving at a high rate. Experts in different fields agree that it’s a wave that sweeps across industries. From security, health, to environmental conservation, cloud computing is without a doubt a technology worth adopting. This is particularly true for trading organizations. The benefits of cloud-hosted systems far outweigh those of traditional architectures.

Building a cloud-hosted trading system may seem complex and cumbersome. It, however, takes the right team with the right tools and information to come up with this great venture. Get in touch with us today and get started with the first step in building your cloud-hosted trading systems.