Network Support For Scalable And High Performance Cloud Exchanges

Financial exchanges are migrating to the public cloud, but the best-effort nature of the cloud fabric is at odds with the stringent networking requirements of the exchanges. We present Onyx, a system for meeting such requirements which uses many well-studied techniques in a new context as well as introduces new techniques that enable a scalable cloud financial exchange. An overlay multicast tree is used to disseminate data to 1000 participants with ≤ 1 μs difference in data reception time between any two participants, crucial for maintaining fair competition. Several techniques for mitigating latency variance are introduced. Onyx also presents a scheduling policy for trade orders that enhances an exchange's performance and gracefully services bursty traffic. Onyx achieves ≈50% lower latency than the AWS multicast service [1]. Onyx outperforms an existing system, CloudEx [2] in terms of supported number of participants, exchange's throughput and multicast latency. Onyx's techniques can be applied to other existing systems (e.g., DBO) to enhance their performance.