DriveWealth – Building a high-performance trading platform powered by Aeron

Retooling DriveWealth’s tech stack: Using Aeron Cluster to build a resilient OMS & Internalization Engine

DriveWealth‘s mission to democratize investing in U.S. securities globally necessitates a robust and scalable infrastructure. To achieve this, the firm used Aeron to successfully build a resilient OMS and Internalization Engine. At the recent Aeron Community MeetUp in Chicago, Kevin Young, VP of Engineering, Head of Core Trade, shared insights into this journey; highlighting the motivations, challenges, and strategic decisions that shaped this evolution.

Addressing the challenge: handling high throughput

DriveWealth transitioned from a B2C model to offering brokerage-as-a-service to fintechs globally. This shift introduced challenges the business needed to overcome:

• High volume of orders: Processing over 2 million small retail orders, amounting to a total notional value of over a billion dollars, daily.
• Regulatory compliance: Low-value orders often need to be internalized, and must then be reported to Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) services within 10 seconds of execution.
• Bursty volume: Especially at market open, requiring high throughput to avoid regulatory penalties.

← Watch DriveWealth’s recording now

Technical requirements for DriveWealth’s new trading platform

• Resilient architecture: The platform needed to handle high volume days seamlessly and ensure zero downtime when infrastructure issues occur.
• Low latency and high throughput: Low latency was crucial to drive throughput and scale, allowing for high performance without expensive infrastructure scaling.Th
• Cost efficiency: Keeping costs down was essential; for instance some counterparties, like exchanges and regulatory agencies, charge per FIX session.

Implementing Aeron for high performance and resilience

DriveWealth chose Aeron for its single-threaded architecture, zero garbage collection (GC), and low latency capabilities. The initial implementation focused on retooling its internalization engine and allowed the firm to handle hundreds of thousands of orders, even during peak trading periods, without compromising on performance.

The journey did not stop there. DriveWealth has since expanded the use of Aeron across its trading architecture, deploying an OMS cluster and integrating various gateways for seamless order routing. The firm has innovatively addressed challenges such as gateway failure resilience to achieve a level of robustness that is crucial in maintaining uninterrupted operations in a 24×5 trading environment.

Here’s how DriveWealth implemented the technology

• Aeron Transport: Used for communication between gateways and the Aeron Cluster.
• High throughput hardware: Deployed on bare metal with CPU and network accelerators in a colocation data center (NY4).
• Performance-engineered code: Low latency code base using off-heap memory and performant data structures from Agrona.
• Aeron Cluster: Ensures resiliency across multiple server failures with the Raft consensus protocol.
• FIX gateway: Routing orders to multiple points of liquidity.

For an overview of DriveWealth’s detailed implementation strategy, including insights into their cluster design, market data processing, and hybrid environment running on AWS, please watch the full recording here. Visit Aeron Transport and Aeron Cluster datasheets to learn more about the Aeron technology used.

Lessons learnt from DriveWealth’s Aeron implementation

• AeronStat is very powerful and worth investing time in.
• Payload size is the biggest latency factor once sound engineering principles are followed.
• Fostering an engineering mind-shift from object-oriented and multi-threading approaches to one that is deterministic-focused is key.
  DriveWealth’s future technology plans.

What’s next?

Looking forward, DriveWealth plans to explore live cluster updates and multicast capabilities to optimize its trading infrastructure further. Live cluster updates will allow DriveWealth to deploy code changes without downtime, a crucial capability given their continuous trading operations. Additionally, leveraging multicast will enable the firm to achieve greater efficiencies by distributing messages more effectively across its gateways.

DriveWealth’s success story with Aeron underscores the importance of choosing the right technology to meet demanding financial services requirements.