New AWS Local Zones deliver lower latency in Chicago and New York City

There are many trading-related workloads running on AWS today, including FINRA’s Consolidated Audit Trail, Trading Technologies’ order management system and trade surveillance, and Atreyu Group’s pricing risk calculator, that can span thousands of portfolios in seconds. Our trading customers told us they wanted a way to extend AWS regions to be as close as possible to the liquidity centers in Chicago and in the New York metro area. Today we announced the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Chicago and New York City (located in New Jersey) to enable financial services customers to build and deploy lower-latency trading-related applications within one millisecond of trading venues (186 miles = one millisecond at the speed of light).

These new Local Zones provide AWS customers burstable compute on-demand that can be used to help manage volatile trading days, monitor and manage risk, and react faster to models depicting new trading opportunities that are latency-sensitive. Local Zones are ideal for planning exchange failover and disaster recovery scenarios, minimizing Capex, and providing pay when you need it, compute on demand.

There are many AWS regions located in the major global trading centers of London, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong that currently support localized capital markets workloads. The New Jersey and Chicago Local Zones bring unprecedented choice to global customers interested in bringing cloud-based workloads closer to exchange matching engines and market data distribution hubs. We are adding a new AWS region in Switzerland to this growing list in 2022.

Prerak Sanghvi, Chief Technology Officer of Proof Trading, Inc., said of the launch: “At Proof Trading, we have created a low-latency algorithmic trading system for US Equities in the cloud. We are excited about the launch of Amazon Local Zones in Chicago/NY as it will bring our systems closer to the major trading venues located in Chicago/New Jersey. As effective as our cloud-based trading system is, geographical latency was the last remaining difference between our system and on-prem trading systems. We will now be able to offer a more streamlined trading experience to our clients, while continuing to reap the cloud benefits such as agility, scalability, and operational costs.”

While the initial launch features internet access to both locations, customers should expect AWS Direct Connect locations in Equinix CH2 and QTS in Chicago; along with Coresite NY1 and Equinix NY5 in New Jersey to come online in the near future. Customers collocated in any of these locations will easily be able to utilize Direct Connect inside their colocation facility to connect workloads that are latency-sensitive to the closest Local Zone. Local Zones are connected to their closest AWS region via AWS’s high bandwidth and low-latency global backbone, enabling customers to move data to their less latency-sensitive workloads so they are interoperable with workloads running in the region.

The new Local Zones will offer Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Customer feedback will drive what services will be added.

AWS capital markets, trading, fintech and ISV customers are invited to test workloads in either or both Local Zones. They can use the Local Zones to conduct performance testing, can include them in their hybrid deployment strategies, or can utilize them to support on-premises migrations to the cloud that need to happen in a series of steps. Another popular use case we have heard from trading customers is the ability to use the Local Zones to connect into partner solutions such as market data, extranets, and order/execution/risk management platforms.

Along with the New York City Local Zone, we also launched two additional Local Zones in Las Vegas and Portland today. To read more about the launch, please visit the AWS News Blog. To learn more or to get started with a Local Zone, visit the AWS Local Zones webpage.