S&P Global Market Intelligence Increases Agility and Resilience of Its Primary Issuance Platform Using AWS Well-Architected Tool and AWS Trusted Advisor

S&P Global Market Intelligence offers the IssueBook application to bring together over 200 banks that underwrite bonds for many of the world’s leading organizations. The application processes the majority of US investment-grade bond issuances, which totaled over $4.3 trillion in 2020. Previously, the company issued each of its clients—typically Fortune 500 corporations—its own server on premises. This setup made it incredibly complex to make small changes to the systems. “Our motivation was to become more agile and resilient,” says Shrivastava. “We also wanted to accelerate our time to market with new features and deployments.”

The company set out to build a single-tenant system on AWS in which each instance of the IssueBook application serves a single client. It used the AWS Well-Architected Tool to get a comprehensive overview of its architecture. “We used it to lay out actionable processes focused on all aspects of running a mission-critical workload in production,” says Shrivastava.

Because S&P Global Market Intelligence provides critical services to its clients, the company reduced risk by staggering the migration to AWS. The business carefully selected several global regions to migrate at a time to reduce the likelihood that any issues would spread to other clients. “Our clients see that we are modernizing our platform and responding to their needs faster than before,” says Shrivastava.

In the new architecture, S&P Global Market Intelligence deploys its application using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. It then uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, to remove the operational overhead of managing its servers. “AWS Fargate has given us a big lift by being able to have containerized workloads without having to manage a cluster and the hardware ourselves,” says Jeremy Leisy, director and solutions architect at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

By simplifying its architecture, S&P Global Market Intelligence reduced its deployment timelines, accelerated delivery by using infrastructure as code, and reduced new client onboarding time. “There are a lot of things that we’ve been able to accomplish using AWS,” says Leisy. “Using managed services has been a huge lift for us to do further modernization.”

S&P Global Market Intelligence also used a managed service to streamline its Oracle database management. By using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle, a commercial database that makes it simple to set up and scale Oracle deployments in the cloud, the company has greatly increased its agility. It can now scale its environments with new Oracle database instances within a weekend release. Moreover, using Amazon RDS for Oracle has reduced costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. “When clients have increased volumes, we can quickly bring up a new Amazon RDS for Oracle instance, repurpose them to a different instance, and get them up and running in no time,” says Abhishek Singhal, executive director at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

After its new infrastructure was in place, S&P Global Market Intelligence started optimizing its systems. To identify cost-saving opportunities, it used AWS Trusted Advisor, which provides recommendations aligned with AWS best practices. S&P Global Market Intelligence acted on those recommendations and has gained cost efficiency by using Amazon RDS Reserved Instances, which offer a significant discount when database instances are reserved for a 1- or 3-year term.

By transforming its architecture and using smaller, independent units, S&P Global Market Intelligence has made its infrastructure more resilient. “That agility has led to fast delivery on key client deliverables, and, due to having multiple Availability Zones, we don’t foresee having downtime issues,” says Singhal.