Brokerage houses, investment banks, wealth management firms, exchanges and clearing houses operate their systems in complex distributed computing environments. Many of them are considering or in the process of migrating applications and data to the cloud to take advantage of its low cost and elasticity. Applications that use libraries for FIX protocol communications or application servers dedicated to FIX message routing and transformation (FIX servers) are a critical part of those systems. In the twenty years since FIX protocol was introduced, it has become a global standard for electronic trade communications. Companies operate hundreds of thousands of FIX sessions, processing millions of messages a day. The migration of FIX connectivity to a dynamic infrastructure requires rethinking the way the FIX layer is constructed.
We reflected on the history of EPAM HA solutions for FIX layer, business and technical requirements, and architecture considerations. Read about our approach in this white paper. Further mplementation details can be found in the FIX cluster in the cloud documentation.
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Summary
We created a scalable New Generation Ecosystem (NGE) to host the FIX layer, which takes advantage of the elasticity of dynamic infrastructure. By leveraging shared storage for preserving session states, non-stop management of FIX sessions is achieved. Client session recovery by switching to another node takes only seconds.
Multiple instances of each service can be run; thus, no single point of failure exists in the system. The NGE provides a set of APIs to collect information about platform state and performance, set parameters, and control services. The main FIX Layer use cases such as Order Entry Gateway, Smart Order Router/Message Router, Market Data and Trade Capture/Drop Copy Servers can now be implemented in NGE.