Cloud Architecture

An API gateway is the front door to your financial services platform. Every API request — from mobile apps, partner integrations, and internal services — passes through it. The gateway must enforce authentication, rate limiting, and security policies while maintaining the performance and availability that financial services demand. We have deployed Kong, Ambassador, and AWS API Gateway in production at financial institutions. The choice depends on your deployment model, security requirements, and team capabilities. Each has distinct trade-offs for regulated environments. ...

The belief that cloud cannot deliver sub-millisecond trading latency is outdated. The constraint is not the cloud provider — it is how you architect within the cloud. Firms that treat AWS, GCP, or Azure as a data centre with better networking get data-centre performance. Firms that treat the cloud as a programmable substrate get latency numbers that surprise their counterparties. We have deployed trading systems on AWS and GCP that consistently achieve round-trip latencies under 500 microseconds for order-to-acknowledge paths. The architecture is fundamentally different from on-premise trading infrastructure, but the performance is comparable. ...

Edge computing brings processing closer to the data source. For financial services, this means processing transactions, analysing risk, and detecting fraud at the network edge — closer to customers, exchanges, and data sources — rather than in a centralised cloud data centre. Edge computing is not new. Trading firms have colocated with exchanges for decades to minimise latency. But the cloud providers’ edge offerings — AWS Wavelength, GCP Distributed Cloud, Azure Edge Zones — have made edge computing accessible to a broader range of financial services firms. ...

In March 2020, most banks had cloud migration plans measured in years. By June 2020, those plans were measured in weeks. The pandemic did not create the need for cloud migration — it removed the organisational resistance that had been blocking it for a decade. We helped three tier-one banks accelerate their cloud migration timelines by 18-24 months during the first wave of lockdowns. The technical challenges were manageable. The organisational and compliance challenges were not. Here is what we learned about crisis-driven cloud migration in regulated environments. ...