Jeff Bauer from Forbes.com starts by describing his business challenge: Make real-time quotes available the website, do it fast & cheap and the history of real-time quote availability and how the owners, availability and price of real-time data has changed overtime.
Decided to use BATS exchange for real-time data, gave them access to streaming data, but the data was in a raw format. Forbes didn’t have the infrastructure to transform the raw data into response to real-time stock quote requests. Forbes is a publishing company, not a technology provider.
Forbes.com decided to partner with Xignite. With that segue, Joel York of Xignite is up to explain why cloud computing made sense for this particular application. Xignite is a cloud services platform for “new generation” financials applications.
Xignite offers market data as a service, in the cloud. Xignite has been doing this for 5-8 years.
Xignite leverages Amazon EC2 in the Forbes solution. The biggest driver of this choice is the huge variation in compute needs that correspond to when the markets are open. Owning infrastructure would have it nearly (comparatively) unused on the weekends and during the week when markets aren’t up.
The heart of the solution is a ticker plant. Xignite shared that they are a Microsoft development shop.
Here’s a press release on the Forbes solution.
Interesting point in the Q&A, by being a cloud services provider — data services — rather than a cloud application provider (SaaS), it is easier to inject customization for a customer. Essentially, you can use the same services in a variety of compositions. [Yes, sounds like SOA]. A SaaS application designed for multi-tenants does not welcome customization, because that breaks the (economy of scale) business model of the provider. Joel comments that client customization needs drove creation of Force.com.
Now, the Q&A is talking about security and how the Forbes.com real-time quote application was low risk, because it’s not Forbes’ data going out to the cloud (to Amazon). It is third party data that is widely available.
Other questions asked, what about maintaining SLAs? Xignite uses Rightscale. From the answer, I can’t tell if the SLA is between Xignite & Amazon, Xignite & Forbes or both.
Always good to see/hear a case study. Another coming next.
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