Fidelity Investments’ asset management unit is sunsetting its datacenters, so the firm will be supported fully by cloud technology. It has shut down most of them already.

As of this year, the Boston-based investment manager has migrated 98.8% of its applications exclusively to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and plans to stop using physical datacenters soon, said Girish Maraliga, senior vice president of architecture and platforms at Fidelity Investments, who gave a talk about the migration process at the AWS Financial Services Cloud Symposium in Manhattan on May 24.

What began as a migration of Fidelity’s internal trading system in November 2019 culminated in 1,520 applications migrated, 12,000 containers, 4,700 serverless functions, 6,700 Amazon S3 buckets, and 10 petabytes of S3 storage—comprising, Maraliga said, a robust multi-region architecture and a business ready to ingest, store, and use more data than ever before.

“We basically asked [our brokers] to meet us in the cloud, and that was a good pivot point,” Maraliga said. “And frankly, it’s been great.”

The tech transformation impacted the full spectrum of Fidelity’s equity trading staff, including research analysts who provide information to the portfolio management team, which then sends orders to Fidelity’s three trading desks located in Boston, London, and Hong Kong, said John Kerin, Fidelity Investments’ head of asset management and equity technology engineering, who detailed the technicalities of what went into the three-year process.

“The overarching architectural pattern of the trading system is a command query pattern. Based on the orders and instructions received from portfolio managers through to traders, the traders will initiate a set of commands through our public APIs,” Kerin said.

Fidelity’s equity trading system works with the orders provided by portfolio managers to find the best deals and optimal liquidity in the marketplace to engage with external broker-dealers. With $1.5 trillion in assets under management, the system receives 4.25 million indications of interest (IoIs) from brokers every day, which provides the critical liquidity information for Fidelity’s traders.

The investment manager’s original preferred service was Amazon EC2, a cloud computing service that allows users to rent virtual computers to run their own applications. At the migration’s start, Fidelity became a pilot adopter of EKS, Amazon’s managed Kubernetes container service, which—along with AWS Kafka, which is primarily used to build real-time streaming data pipelines—now underpins the division’s system architecture.

While Fidelity’s decision to be free of any datacenters is pioneering in the data-dense, regulated sector of institutional finance, an executive at a large vendor who listened to the talk was impressed, but mildly skeptical of the idea’s practicality.

“My fear is that we’re putting too much data into one enterprise,” they tell WatersTechnology, though they were not authorized to speak on the record. “In financial services, saying that we will not have datacenters—I don’t see that happening for at least one or two more decades. … Every organization is different, but financial data is the new commodity, so it’s imperative that we give data the utmost security. I’m not saying cloud is not secure, but it’s the data of people so we have to be really, really critical about it.”

The equity trading system was one of 80 products in three product lines across Fidelity Asset Management, which have nearly all been migrated. Speaking to WatersTechnology after his talk, Maraliga said the small sliver of on-premises applications that remain will also soon be running on AWS exclusively.

However, he leaves the door open for the potential to utilize other cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, for future capabilities the firm may want down the line. But for now, Maraliga is unconcerned with creating vendor lock-in, as Fidelity Investments, as an enterprise, has a diversified cloud strategy, employing the services, to some degree, of AWS competitors.

As for what’s next, Maraliga says the company is focused on leveraging its cloud technology to enable new business capabilities, such as engineering, developing new quantitative strategies, and developing sustainability- and ESG-centric initiatives.