Improving Performance, Scalability, and Customer Trust by Migrating to AWS with FXGT.com

Founded in 2019, FXGT.com is an award-winning, licensed online broker using advanced technology to strive for seamless trading experiences. It operates in markets across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia under multiple licenses from regulatory authorities, including the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the Seychelles, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in South Africa, and the Vanuatu Financial Services Commission (VFSC). In addition, the FXGT brand is also licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) operating under FXGT.eu and provides services only to institutional clients. It offers customers a wide range of tradable assets, focusing on contracts for difference (CFD) in foreign exchange trading, stocks, commodities, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, and other diverse indices. The company aims to provide its customers with innovative tools and insights as well as earning customer trust through robust risk management and policies, such as keeping customers’ accounts separate from the company’s funds while providing protection and security of client’s funds.

User traffic on FXGT.com can fluctuate wildly. FXGT.com was running its services on in-house and third-party data centers, which were not always elastic enough to meet these spikes in demand. Among other technical challenges, the service experienced slow performance and latency issues. In 2020, the company chose to migrate to the cloud and, after evaluating several providers, selected AWS. “We decided on AWS because it provides a wide range of services, global infrastructure, and helpful support teams,” says Kapoulas. The company began its self-managed migration in 2021, and by 2022, its workloads were running successfully on AWS, including its core trade servers, which are powered by MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.

On AWS, FXGT.com can scale its databases and systems automatically when traffic spikes. “Companies like us have anomaly traffic: Sometimes traffic is very low; sometimes it’s huge. It depends on the market,” says Kapoulas. “With the scalability that using AWS provides, we can automatically scale based on the load to handle these traffic fluctuations without downtime.” The company can now double or triple its capacity in less than 3–4 minutes. By scaling based on load, FXGT.com also optimizes costs because it does not keep unnecessary systems running when traffic is low.

To analyze its large volumes of data, FXGT.com uses Amazon Redshift as a cloud data warehouse. Amazon Redshift integrates with AWS Glue—a serverless data integration service—and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service—so that FXGT.com can use AWS Glue to pull data that has been uploaded to Amazon S3 from on-premises jobs into Amazon Redshift. FXGT.com also uses AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)—a managed migration and replication service—to migrate data from its database on Amazon Aurora—a relational database service built for the cloud at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility—into Amazon Redshift to run large-scale analytics.

The company also uses Amazon Redshift to provide near real-time reports to employees and customers. For example, the marketing team can get reports on how many new clients were referred from a specific affiliate, and customers can see their account performance. “Amazon Redshift is very fast,” says Kapoulas. “We’ve sped up reporting to clients and to employees, and on Amazon Redshift, we don’t have to worry about the size of the data—which is growing bigger and bigger.” With these reports, FXGT.com directors and teams—including marketing, accounting, and media teams—can monitor operations and make quick, data-driven business decisions.

Since migrating to AWS, FXGT.com has increased performance speed and decreased latency for its virtual private server (VPS) customers to as low as 3 milliseconds, one of the lowest latencies in the industry. FXGT.com provides VPSs to eligible MetaTrader 4 customers using Amazon Lightsail, a service that offers simple-to-use VPS instances, containers, storage, databases, and more at a cost-effective monthly price. FXGT.com has also built disaster recovery into its AWS architecture, deploying in multiple regions. The company uses several AWS services to create security groups and manage access, and it uses AWS Security Hub, which automates AWS security checks and centralizes security alerts, on top of activating encryption within other AWS services.

FXGT.com also uses Amazon CloudWatch, a service that monitors applications, responds to performance changes, optimizes resource use, and provides insights into operational health. The company receives alerts from Amazon CloudWatch through Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), a fully managed pub/sub service for application messaging, so that the team can monitor performance and traffic and take action when needed. Because of tools like this, FXGT.com can manage its entire AWS environment with five to six people. It has also reduced maintenance times from 5–10 minutes to 20–30 seconds.

Going forward, FXGT.com is looking to add additional AWS services for use cases such as machine learning and translation. “Whenever we need a new capability to help our business, AWS already has a solution, and one that will integrate with our existing systems,” says Kapoulas. The team will also implement Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, an in-memory data store built for the cloud, into its production workloads in 2024.

The migration has helped FXGT.com remain competitive—and even win awards—in a market where businesses need to demonstrate high standards to keep customers. “By migrating to AWS, we increased performance, increased security, and decreased latency, which has helped to increase our client base,” says Kapoulas. “The robust and scalable cloud computing environment that AWS offers is outstanding.”