Deutsche Börse Group Launches Data Analytics Platform in Rapid Time using AWS

Deutsche Börse Group, an international exchange organization, built and launched A7, a new cloud-based data analytics platform, in just 4 months using Amazon Web Services (AWS). A7 provides its clients with easier access to the historical market data from the Eurex, Xetra, and EEX trading platforms in nanosecond granularity. Market participants can use the platform to back-test and improve their algorithms, maximize the effectiveness of their trading strategies, or to increase investment returns. 

Using A7, clients are able to quickly grasp market situations, drill down easily into the market microstructure, and alter their own trading algorithms and strategies accordingly. The full order-book depth of buy and sell orders can be seen in a single view, along with market data messages, reference data, and other individual sources. The ready-to-use service provides fast and direct access to tailored metrics based on Deutsche Börse Group’s most comprehensive market data, without customers having to invest in new technology.

Clients’ growing demand for an easier and more cost-effective way to access the detailed historical market data for their trading algorithms led Deutsche Börse Group to the development of A7. The usage of highly granular un-normalized order-by-order market data for all traded instruments on Eurex and Xetra makes this tool unique. Typically, these premium market data feeds are usually only available at co-location, which requires large investment from the client’s side. 

“There is a significant group of customers who want simple and easy-to-use access to most granular market data without implementing solutions or the need for raw data,” says Sven Wohlfarth, head of data services operations at Deutsche Börse Group. “This is the group of customers we built A7 for.”

Facing the competitive trading landscape, speed to market was a primary consideration for Deutsche Börse Group in launching the A7 platform. The historical market data was already stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and so building it on AWS made the most sense. “Time to market was really important for us,” explains Zoltan Vekony, lead developer in data services at Deutsche Börse Group. 

“We needed flexible and scalable infrastructure for A7, and building on AWS was the most efficient way to allocate new resources for the application.” Deutsche Börse Group’s A7 development team—including both business and IT people—built the analytics platform in just 4 months, launching it in July 2020. “Developing A7 was a joint team effort, its success also relied on the strong cooperation and communication between business and IT,” says Wohlfarth.

By using the A7 analytics platform, market participants can now easily and quickly access detailed market data and analytics through a browser-based front end and via APIs. A7 covers all Eurex-, Xetra- and EEX-traded instruments. The available content includes historical as well as intraday data. Using AWS means that both the storage and the compute processes for the historical market data are co-located in the cloud. Deutsche Börse Group’s clients submit their algorithms to the A7 platform, the compute and calculation is then run in the cloud right next to the data stored in Amazon S3. This functionality sets the new offer apart from the previous raw market data service as clients don’t need to download the 60 TB of market data. “It also enables faster processing and analysis,” says Wohlfarth. 

“With A7, we are facilitating the entry for customers who are interested in getting the highest quality, most granular data from Deutsche Börse Group with a ready-to-use service in a cost efficient way and with scalable functionalities.” Multicast streams capture and transfer the 60 TB of historical market data to Amazon S3 buckets. For the application infrastructure, the A7 service uses the managed Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to compute the data, transform it, and convert it into the the proper format for analysis; Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is used for metadata. Security and authentication of users is managed by Amazon Cognito.

AWS brings greater flexibility. “We don’t need to wait for delivery, and we can easily change the infrastructure and architecture,” explains Vekony. “The flexibility is a huge benefit.” Apart from easy browser-based access, an important benefit of A7 is that Deutsche Börse Group’s clients are now able to consume exactly the same data that is provided during live trading via the market data streams. This means that algorithm results can be checked against the real-world results.“Without that market data, it would be difficult for clients to form proper decisions or train their algorithms so that they can trade even more successfully,” says Wohlfarth.