Innovating through AWS Experience-Based Acceleration with LSEG

LSEG’s Markets division operates across multiple global jurisdictions, asset classes, and currencies. As Markets embarked on its journey to AWS, it was required to uphold exceptionally high standards in architectural design and system integrity.

The division needed a collaborative, scalable approach that would facilitate rapid learning, experimentation, and delivery while maintaining the highest standards of security and resilience. “We don’t want to be failing in production, so we need the opportunity to trial things in a safe environment,” says Julian Bullock, head of architecture for Markets at LSEG.

To meet these goals, Markets turned to the AWS EBA program, a hands-on agile methodology that brings together AWS experts and customer teams to solve business challenges through immersive, outcome-driven engagements. This approach helped Markets accelerate optimization while building the internal skills, repeatable patterns, and confidence needed to accelerate its transformation long term.

Through the AWS EBA program, Markets turned the migration journey into a modernization success story, redefining how teams approach innovation by embracing a hands-on cycle of experimentation and delivery. As part of the Markets division, London Clearing House (LCH) was the first to engage in the AWS EBA program. The engagement was centered on the migration of its Collateral Management System to the cloud with containerization on a Kubernetes cluster, setting the tone for transformation. By bringing together engineers, architects, and product owners, the event provided a structured, immersive environment to build new cloud skills, solve challenges in near-real time, resolve blockers to cloud acceleration, and develop repeatable migration and modernization strategies for scale.

Building on that initial success, Markets ran 10 more AWS EBA engagements across multiple businesses. Each engagement targeted a specific goal, such as migrating Java applications to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Others replaced legacy databases with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), simple-to-manage relational databases optimized for total cost of ownership. A team also ran an AWS EBA on Amazon CloudWatch to observe and optimize workloads.

Several AWS EBA engagements centered on proving system resiliency and regulatory compliance, using AWS Fault Injection Service to improve resilience and performance with controlled experiments and robust automated tests. “We used AWS Fault Injection Service to generate faults and see how fast we could detect and respond, as well as to identify areas for improvement,” says Bullock.

AWS EBA engagements consisted of 4–6 weeks of preparation, followed by a 3-day engagement that brought cross-functional teams together for rapid outcomes. The format gave teams a safe space to test, learn, and refine solutions quickly, condensing work that would traditionally take months into a few focused days. “AWS EBA gave us an opportunity to fail fast in a safe environment,” says Bullock. “It was important to try things and not necessarily be successful, because not succeeding was illuminating in itself.”

Over time, participation expanded beyond AWS-led sessions. LSEG established a Cloud Center of Excellence that now designs and leads AWS EBA engagements for additional teams so that lessons learned are shared and applied across the organization. What began as a guided engagement has evolved into a repeatable model that embeds continuous learning, collaboration, and innovation into Markets’ cloud transformation journey.

“The AWS EBA program lets us explore new AWS services before adopting them more broadly,” says Vaibhav Varde, distinguished engineer at LSEG. “It also helps development teams find issues early and empowers engineering teams to learn more quickly.”

Since launching its first AWS EBA engagement, Markets has completed 11 AWS EBA programs. More than 200 engineers across 13 teams strengthened their cloud fluency through AWS EBA participation. Additionally, 12 market infrastructure applications have been re-architected, boosting resilience and modernization. Markets also developed five repeatable migration plans, delivered more than 25 process improvements, and conducted over 10 resilience experiments using AWS Fault Injection Service. To reduce downstream risks, the team identified and resolved more than 60 issues early in the process by clear listing of relevant AWS services, firewall configurations, and permissions.

Building on these achievements, LSEG is now applying its AWS EBA learnings to drive its next wave of innovation across other divisions. The company is migrating containerized workloads to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a service to build, run, and scale production-ready Kubernetes applications.

By institutionalizing the AWS EBA approach, LSEG is creating a lasting culture of innovation that strengthens both operational resilience and customer value while accelerating cloud transformation.