Cloud

In the 18 months since 2025, three changes in capital markets infrastructure have moved from conference-stage hype to actual production impact faster than anything in the previous decade. T+1 settlement has compressed post-trade processing from a multi-day reconciliation exercise to a same-day engineering problem. Cloud-native trading systems — not just cloud-hosted monoliths, but genuinely distributed, event-sourced architectures — are running production workloads at institutions that five years ago would have dismissed the suggestion. And AI-powered risk engines, built on streaming data platforms rather than overnight batch runs, are giving trading desks risk visibility that was unimaginable with end-of-day VaR. If you are designing or modernising capital markets infrastructure right now, these three shifts determine whether your platform will be competitive in two years or whether you will be explaining to management why the competition executes faster, settles cleaner, and prices risk more accurately. ...

If you are a platform engineer, CTO, or infrastructure architect at a financial services firm operating in Europe, DORA is no longer something your compliance team handles in a spreadsheet. As of January 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act imposes legally binding technical requirements that reach into your cloud architecture, your incident response runbooks, and your vendor contracts. Non-compliance carries penalties of up to 2% of global annual turnover, and the 19 critical ICT third-party providers — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others — are now under direct regulatory oversight for the first time. What is striking is how few engineers at regulated firms understand the technical depth of what DORA actually demands. It reads like a regulation, but it lands like an architecture review. ...

Running cloud infrastructure for regulated financial services is not the same as running cloud for a SaaS startup. Every resource must be auditable. Every network path must be justified. Every configuration change must be traceable to an approved change request. This guide covers the architecture patterns, compliance frameworks, and operational practices we have used to build cloud platforms at HSBC, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and NatWest Markets. ...

The operational overhead of managing physical or virtual servers—ranging from patching OS vulnerabilities to manually configuring scaling groups—has long been a persistent bottleneck for engineering teams. The fundamental problem being solved by serverless architecture is the decoupling of infrastructure management from application delivery. By abstracting the hardware layer and scaling on demand, teams can focus strictly on core application logic. In this article, we’ll examine the primary solutions across modern hyperscalers, detailing the differences between event-driven Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) and serverless container deployments. ...