Xignite Debuts Microservices to Scale Data Management in the Cloud

Web services data provider Xignite is preparing to unveil a suite of cloud microservices for data management, storage and distribution in the cloud. The firm says this will help companies already moving from in-house operations to cloud storage for certain data and functions to migrate from monolithic legacy data architectures to more agile and less expensive cloud services and data sources.

Stephane Dubois, CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based Xignite, says the company has been working on the suite of microservices, dubbed Xignite Enterprise Microservices, for around three years, and is already  using them in-house to support its own data management and distribution activities.

“When you are building a cloud, you architect it in a certain way, and if you do it right, you end up building microservices,” Dubois says. “We built them out of necessity to allow us to scale, and now we are offering them to our clients.”

In fact, existing clients have already been using the microservices indirectly without realizing, because their APIs call data from Xignite’s architecture, which already uses the suite. However, Dubois says he expects interest to come mostly from completely new clients. These would consist of the top tier of banks, asset managers and financial technology vendors that handle large volumes of data, or have very broad coverage requirements, for whom Xignite’s existing API delivery—which currently supports 12 billion API calls per day from more than 750 financial and fintech clients—is no longer sufficient.

“It’s about reliability and cost. We’ve been using APIs for a long time. Initially they were monolithic … and over time they scaled fairly well, but eventually you run into limitations. Microservices are smaller components that, at an enterprise level, you can scale up as you need and scale down when you don’t … and you can do at a much lower cost than the type of on-premise infrastructures that firms have deployed today,” Dubois (pictured) says.

Xignite Enterprise Microservices initially provides microservices covering seven areas of data and data management, each combining data from different sources that fall under the same data type: Xignite Real-Time Microservice, for distribution of real-time data internally and externally via the cloud; Xignite Optimization Microservice, which provides data caching and entitlements control for reference datasets such as Bloomberg Data Licence; Xignite Entitlements and Usage Microservice, which provides transparent reports on data usage; Xignite Data Lake Microservice, which creates a data lake to eliminate legacy infrastructure; Xignite Reference Data Microservice, which aggregates, normalizes, stores and indexes reference data from multiple vendors; Xignite Historical Microservice, which integrates sources of historical data with security master and corporate actions data to provide a normalized and adjusted historical view; and Xignite Fundamental Microservice, which allows firms to capture time-series data structures.

This list may add new microservices over time, such as analytics, though Dubois says the initial lineup “covers all the kinds of data we deal with as a company.”

Xignite developed the microservices in-house, with the exception of the Optimization microservice, for which it leveraged an existing partnership with UK-based data technology vendor Xpansion FTS to integrate its Xmon product, which uses caching to minimize duplicate requests for data.

Dubois expects to run the microservices as a managed service for many clients, either connecting to data via the cloud or via feed handlers in a co-location site, and says they could be up and running for clients in a matter of weeks if Xignite already has pre-built connectors for a firm’s data sources. If not, Xignite can build connectors within “a couple of months,” he says.