Scaling 5x Faster While Reducing Costs by Up to 80% Using AWS with QUODD

QUODD provides access to reliable and comprehensive market and financial services data and helps enterprise customers build financial applications. QUODD’s API Marketplace was first launched by Xignite in 2003. These commercial REST APIs, used by nearly 1,000 customers worldwide, were QUODD’s first market data offering to run natively in AWS. However, much of its technical stack relied on legacy Microsoft .NET Framework code, burdened with additional Windows Server licensing costs. “We couldn’t redesign and rewrite the main API framework, but we knew there were many improvements to be made in that area,” says Qin Yu, vice president of engineering at QUODD. The company faced issues with cost, slow development time, and a difficult deployment process. When it launched a new server, engineers had to wait 10 or more minutes for the infrastructure to spin up.

It was difficult to quantify the magnitude of the opportunity for value-added improvements. That changed when QUODD worked alongside AWS AML. By designing cloud-optimized architectures that eliminated the Microsoft licenses and used Linux, .NET Core, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)—a fully managed container orchestration service—engineers demonstrated the business value of modernization. QUODD also used the AWS AML Business Case Tool to show executives the benefits of AWS Cloud modernization, the cost-optimization opportunities of moving to a Microsoft Windows Server–free architecture, and the return on investment of replacing legacy Microsoft workloads with modernized AWS Cloud architectures. The company set out to make good on that opportunity. “We directly increased speed to scale from 10 or more minutes to 2 minutes,” says Yu.

QUODD started working alongside AWS AML in summer 2021. The first phase was to analyze its infrastructure and identify candidates for modernization at a high level. In the fall, the company commenced the next phase: the hands-on-keyboard, lab-training portion of AWS AML. Because QUODD offers 50–60 different services with more than 1,000 API end points, engineers spent 3–4 months carefully building a framework to lay the foundation for the modernized architecture. It was critical for the new solution to support legacy and modernized API calls, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery. With the proof of concept in place, engineers proceeded to the business logic phase, migrating one service at a time to AWS. “The first big service was ready to run in production within 3 months,” says Yu. As of summer 2023, about 70 percent of QUODD services run on the new Microsoft Windows Server license–free infrastructure.

The benefits were immediate. In addition to exceeding expectations for Microsoft license elimination, cost reduction, and speed to scale, the modernization initiative delivered some unexpected results. QUODD customers are now enjoying faster response times for API calls due to a significant latency improvement. “We didn’t expect latency to drop because of our engagement with AWS AML,” says Yu. “But we dropped from an average of 40 ms to between 14–20 ms per API call.”

Technical operations are also more productive with modern architectures in place. The previous legacy solution used one monolithic Microsoft Windows Server–influenced code base, so QUODD had to run tens of thousands of tests every time it deployed an update. With microservices, the Microsoft Windows Server dependencies are eliminated, and it’s much simpler and faster to deploy enhancements. And because the new system uses infrastructure as code, the team can reproduce environments so that testing environments match production—which was not possible prior to AWS AML. “The team loves to use new technology,” says Yu. “The buy-in from the executive team was great for us.” QUODD now completes 10 times as many deployments as before, and deployment times have fallen from an average of 3 hours a day to less than 30 minutes.

The modernization strategy has significantly reduced the reliance on legacy Microsoft technologies and the number of server instances that QUODD has to run. The company used to have as many as 350 Microsoft Windows Servers operational, and that number is much smaller now. The leaner system has also delivered lower Microsoft Windows Server licensing costs. QUODD is now iterating best-practice architectural patterns across its technical estate. “As our system evolves, having consistent patterns and best practices established is very important,” says Kirk.