HKEx Eyes Event-Driven Architecture

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) is looking to adopt an event-driven architecture as part of its three-year technology roadmap. 

An event-driven architecture—the software architecture and model for designing applications—will help the exchange to build different types of data and analytics products. The architecture uses events to trigger and communicate between separate services, particularly in modern applications that use microservices.

Speaking at a session at the AWS Financial Services Cloud Symposium Online earlier today, Derek Yeung, data architect at HKEx, outlined some of the benefits of implementing that architecture.

First, he said, total cost of ownership will dramatically decrease, as the infrastructure is taken care of by the provider. 

“Also, it fits very well into the traditional product development lifecycle, so it allows us to do things in a way more agile fashion,” he said.

There’s also an element of traceability. Yeung said HKEx has spent a lot of time doing data lineage work. “We can also leverage those capabilities to trace how the application goes: What was the logic we implemented across each of the microservices?” he said. 

By design, an event-driven architecture is highly resilient and will allow HKEx to move into a hyper-cloud or a multi-cloud strategy, he said. Using the public cloud has allowed HKEx to realize a total cost of data that is six times lower than an on-premise solution. 

HKEx has been using AWS to help with everything from data governance, to its data lake, to data security, to its data architecture. 

“Where it’s possible, we will put our major workload on AWS instead of putting it on-prem,” Yeung said. 

The exchange is currently building its enterprise data bus, which collects all the data sitting within the organization in an event-driven manner. 

“We definitely want to invest in the future, rather than just building a data sourcing mechanism that puts all that data into a data lake. We also want to take this chance to move ourselves into a more event-driven architecture. The enterprise data bus, the core design principle is real time, so we want to build a bus that allows us to throw data from one end to the other, in a real-time fashion,” he said.

The first initiative in HKEx’s three-year technology roadmap, which it laid out in February 2019, was to work on its next-generation post-trade platform. 

Apart from that, the exchange said it would execute an enterprise data strategy to integrate its data architecture, digitize and automate workflows within the group, and establish central data governance ownership to support ongoing technological innovation. 

“Within our three-year strategy, we are fully committed to investing in our data platform. One of the key visions here is we definitely want to put ourselves into a more cloud-native infrastructure and cloud-native architecture,” Yeung said.