SteelEye Saves 50% in Costs with a Modern Architecture for Financial Compliance Built Using AWS

Founded in 2017, SteelEye helps over 180 global clients consolidate and analyze financial data across trading systems, communication channels, and regulatory frameworks. “Our integrated surveillance solution helps financial services firms meet their regulatory obligations, enhance their operational efficiency, and manage risk effectively,” says David Haines, chief technology officer, chief information security officer, and cofounder at SteelEye. “We combine advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to help compliance teams efficiently monitor, report, and manage data across various channels and asset classes.”

As SteelEye’s customer base grew, infrastructure costs became a critical challenge. The company’s previous architecture was inefficient in achieving the required isolation for each customer, leading to significant operational and cost overhead. Additionally, SteelEye relied on manual processes for applying security patches and updates. This manual intervention made it increasingly difficult to consistently meet service-level agreements and uphold security commitments as the business scaled.

SteelEye saw an opportunity to modernize its architecture by implementing a more efficient design to optimize infrastructure costs while maintaining performance and reliability. Already running 95 percent of its infrastructure on AWS, SteelEye chose to adopt AWS Graviton and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which run fault-tolerant workloads for up to a 90 percent discount compared to Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing. After consulting with solutions architects from AWS to validate its new architectural design, SteelEye began to build the new environment.

In 6 months, SteelEye redesigned its solution around a fleet architecture that consolidates multiple Kubernetes clusters into a single control plane. The new environment maintains the stringent levels of customer data isolation that SteelEye’s clients demand. Using this design, SteelEye can run its solution across cloud environments, meeting the needs of clients who use multiple cloud providers. The business can also offer three tiers of service: multitenancy for most clients, dedicated tenancy for those who require more isolation, and dedicated fleets for those with custom requirements.

To optimize costs and performance, SteelEye migrated most of its compute workloads to AWS Graviton and began using Spot Instances for 20–25 percent of its compute needs. The company implemented Karpenter, an open-source Kubernetes node lifecycle manager developed by AWS. Karpenter optimizes costs by identifying and removing underused nodes, replacing expensive nodes with more affordable alternatives, and consolidating pods from smaller nodes onto larger, more efficient ones. After implementing the new architecture, SteelEye reduced its cloud hosting costs by 50 percent.

“With our new architecture on AWS, we protect revenue by keeping existing clients happy with a speedy and more reliable solution,” says Haines. “We can also generate more revenue by unlocking portions of the market that weren’t previously accessible within an acceptable margin.”

The new architecture has also improved SteelEye’s operational resilience. Thanks to Karpenter’s automated instance rotation, 99 percent of system bugs are now patched within 7 days. “We’ve designed and deployed our fleet architecture such that if a node goes down, it’s automatically restored within minutes to keep our service-level agreements intact,” says Haines. “The improvement in our overall posture—from operational resilience to security to cost—has been extraordinary.”

By modernizing its architecture on AWS, SteelEye transformed both its technology stack and its business model. The migration to AWS Graviton and Spot Instances significantly lowered hosting costs, while the modern design reduced operational complexity, strengthened security through automated patching, and accelerated recovery from node failures. SteelEye is reinvesting these resources into research and development efforts that benefit its product.

By breaking the tight coupling between infrastructure costs and customer growth, SteelEye can expand confidently into new markets, particularly among Tier 1 financial institutions. As the company continues to grow its global customer base, it can maintain the high security and compliance standards that financial institutions demand while keeping operational costs in check.