What were you setting out to do when you engineered Aeron and what were the key guiding design principles that were involved?
Aeron was created over 10 years ago by Martin Thompson and Todd Montgomery with the goal of developing a tool that could meet the essential, non-negotiable quality attributes that every modern trading system needs:
- Performance [low latency coupled with high throughput]
- Resilience
- Consistency
- Scalability
- Security
Typically, firms have to compromise on at least one of these attributes. Aeron was designed to ensure all can be met, leveraging advanced technology principles (such as RAFT consensus-based state machine replication) to achieve this and deploy on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
What are the main components of the Aeron software suite?
Aeron comprises three main components: Aeron Transport, Aeron Archive, and Aeron Cluster. Aeron Transport handles high-performance messaging with microsecond latency and extremely high throughput, Aeron Archive provides ultra-fast storage and replay ensuring zero message loss, and Aeron Cluster offers high availability and consensus-based resilience for distributed systems.
What types of firms are utilising Aeron to build highly available, mission-critical trading systems? (See MAN case study following this article)
A diverse range of firms within the financial sector utilize Aeron, including investment banks, hedge funds, crypto exchanges and proprietary trading firms. These organizations rely on Aeron to build highly available, mission-critical trading systems that require robust performance and 99.999% uptime. (in real terms, this equates to 5 minutes of downtime per year). For example, MAN Group, a leading hedge fund, replaced its commercial messaging tool with Aeron to improve the latency of its FX execution system. The firm’s technology team subsequently integrated it into an equities and futures trading platform for communicating signals to algo execution engines.
Please tell us a little about the key features and functionality of Aeron.
Aeron is engineered for very demanding front-office trading environments. It achieves ultra-low latency – less than 100 microseconds in the cloud and 18 microseconds on physical hardware. The system handles high throughput, processing over 1 million msg/sec while maintaining microsecond latency. It also ensures 24/7 availability through hot system upgrades and automatic failover, guaranteeing zero downtime. Its brokerless architecture reduces hardware and operational costs whilst end-to-end encryption ensures secure communications.
What direct benefits does Aeron deliver and how can it help trading firms to bring their projects to life faster and with greater confidence?
Using Aeron, firms can build a high-performance messaging layer that significantly improves latency statistics and predictability. Companies can ensure higher resilience to spikes in message volume and provide instant recovery in case of failures, which is crucial for mission-critical or 24/7 applications. The open-source nature of Aeron gives firms greater control over its functionality and roadmap, allowing for customization and future-proofing of their trading systems.
You also offer a premium version of Aeron. What does this provide?
The premium version of Aeron complements the open-source software and is for people who want to use Aeron at an enterprise level. It includes additional software components for advanced monitoring, enhanced security and performance, as well as tooling for accelerated development, architectural design consulting and complete support with enterprise-level SLAs.
There is also an open-source version of Aeron. Why is that increasingly attractive for many firms looking to build electronic trading systems?
Aeron, as all open-source technology, leverages the collective knowledge from a global community. This ultimately enhances innovation and problem-solving capabilities. Open-source also offers significant cost benefits by eliminating licensing fees and reducing hardware and operational expenses. Additionally, firms can avoid vendor lock-in, gaining the freedom to customize and evolve their technology stack as needed. However, most importantly, access to the source code ensures transparency and allows firms to maintain control over their product roadmap, ensuring they can adapt quickly to market changes and regulatory requirements.
How has feedback from the community of Aeron users helped to influence the way you have been adding to the solution and improving it?
Aeron has 7500+ stars on Github with over 900 forks. The community is sizable and active, and has helped to significantly shape our roadmap. Community input has led to the introduction of new features, most recently the Aeron Insights tool, which provides actionable intelligence on cluster health, reducing the time to detect and respond to risks. Additionally, the community’s involvement in early adopter programs, such as the SBE Domain Mapper, has been crucial in refining these tools before their general release. Further, regular community meetups provide a platform for people to share their experiences and challenges, which we use to develop better software and improve our product documentation.
What support is available to help firms take their Aeron implementation to the next level?
There are a multitude of resources available. Documentation and training materials cover Aeron Transport, Aeron Cluster, and high-performance application development in general. Firms can access expert assistance, including support SLAs, bug fixes, software releases, and developer advice. Additional developer resources, such as detailed benchmark results, help optimize Aeron use. Professional consulting and development services are available via Aeron’s parent Adaptive, whilst Aeron Premium provides additional features such as real-time monitoring, simplified SBE handling, or disk usage management.
What plans do you have for the future development of Aeron?
We have a few things on our roadmap, such as enhanced tooling and documentation, to make Aeron easier to adopt. We are also looking to add scalability to the mix, allowing large firms that need high resilience to scale with confidence. And of course, we continue to work with our Cloud partners at AWS and Google to push the performance limits on the cloud.
How can trading firms get more information about Aeron?
You can visit Aeron.io, visit Github, or simply drop our engineers a note.
Case Study: Man Group leverages Aeron to improve the latency of its FX execution system
By Oskar Wantola, CFA , Head of Execution Technology and Tim Raggatt, Staff Engineer, Execution Technology at Man Group.
In this article we explore how MAN Group leveraged Aeron’s Open-Source technology to improve the latency of our firms FX Execution System.
Man Group embarked on a project to enhance its FX execution system, aiming to reduce latency and achieve high levels of system reliability under heavy data loads, therefore improving execution quality for its clients.
Technology used: Aeron Transport and Aeron Archive
Technical challenges:
Navigating the existing infrastructure & shifting the system to a new host.
Integrating Aeron, an open-source technology, within Man Group’s tech stack ensuring improved performance without service interruptions.
The roll-out: Starting with a trial, Aeron was initially deployed in a ‘production-like’ simulation environment to ensure its performance over a range of different traffic profiles.
The test criteria: Aeron needed to:
Demonstrate its ability to handle short-lived bursts of intense quoting activity across multiple providers. Maintain minimal latency when quote streams were slow-moving and messages infrequent.
The outcome: Man Group deployed Aeron in production, fully replacing its legacy middleware solution. Aeron continues to provide high-performance messaging, outperforming the legacy solution by at least one order of magnitude across every percentile.
The Process
Industry challenge
In FX markets, speed is important. Liquidity conditions are dynamic and change in real-time, so orders must be sent promptly to minimise the risk of hitting stale quotes and being rejected.
Execution systems are the engines through which investment firms access and interact with markets, combining rich functionality with high performance. Hedge funds understand that having the right tools is beneficial – a system that lags peers is a strategic disadvantage.
The brief – from commercial to open source
FX execution systems are multi-layered, facilitating the entire FX trading lifecycle. Each element of the system communicates via Inter-Process Communication (IPC) to complete the trading flow. The bigger and more sophisticated the system, the greater the number of components and services to run simultaneously.
Man Group’s use case centred around its multicast RFQ protocol. The system needed to be able to take orders from upstream and compare them in real time with the available liquidity streamed from multiple liquidity providers. The quotes are then aggregated and fed into an algorithm which decides when best to execute orders against which liquidity.
To achieve this, latency is key. The algo must be aware of the most up-to-date quote data in order to make informed trading decisions. Any delay between receiving data to execution can result in changes in price, impacting the cost of the trade or perhaps even missing out altogether.
Man Group was looking for fast and reliable technology to meet the following selection criteria:
- Open-source tech to give the firm greater control of its functionality and roadmap.
- Predictable, ultra-low latency.
- Reliability under the highest data loads.
- Proven industry use cases and references.
The goal was to build a fully fault-tolerant, low-latency messaging layer.
Technical challenges
When Man Group decided to move away from its legacy messaging tool and started to integrate Aeron, a key technical challenge was navigating the existing infrastructure and shifting the system to a new host. For example, the Linux kernel – which manages the interaction between software and hardware – caused issues with Aeron’s idle strategy holding back immediate performance improvements.
These issues were overcome by creating a virtual environment, simulating the execution system, to test the new software under multiple loads and ease implementation. Parameterising variables such as the number of quotes, their rate of quoting, and idle strategy enabled the tech team to tune the deployment appropriately. The system showed how Aeron could support the low latency messaging needs and helped the development team to productionise the technology.
Migration to Aeron
Man Group’s technology team realised they would need to move the application to an alternative host to address the kernel idle strategy limitation. However, to avoid migrating the commercial IPC solution, Aeron had to be tuned to the existing host and rolled out there first. The simulator enabled them to do this with confidence.
The two-phase rollout strategy meant that the latency gains were achieved incrementally:
1. Aeron deployed alongside the application and IPC migrated. At this point the latency testing saw:
a. Small gains in lower percentiles, e.g. 10%
b. A slightly more stable median in a similar latency range.
c. Upper percentiles, e.g. 99%, remain similar due to the kernel idle strategy issue.
2. Application migrated to an alternative host, resolving the kernel incompatibility issue. At this point, latency benefits were seen across all percentiles, particularly the upper ones.
Aeron Roll-out
Over the course of the year-long project, Aeron was used to build two key components:
A new, low-latency messaging layer: Aeron Transport became the vehicle for an updated IPC protocol capable of supporting multicast RFQ, trading instructions and system availability messages. As predicted, the new platform unlocked significant performance gains.
Message persistence: Man Group later began using Aeron Archive for the recording and replay of inbound FIX messaging streams. The persisted streams may be used for real-time monitoring, offline analysis, and counterparty simulation in lower (pre-production) environments. Use of Archive gives confidence that messages can be relayed from latency-sensitive trading processes without blocking or backpressure.
Benefits of Aeron – in a nutshell
Man Group replaced its legacy technology with a state-of-the-art, open-source solution. Leveraging Aeron Transport and Archive technology, the firm was able to:
- Build a high-performance messaging layer.
- Improve its latency statistics and predictability.
- Ensure higher resilience to spikes of messages and instant recovery in case of failures.
- Future-proof its FX execution system.
- Build resiliency into the system so reporting processes do not interfere with trading activity.
The Future
Man Group has added Aeron to its toolkit of approved technologies for any projects with low-latency requirements. The firm’s technology team subsequently integrated it into an equities and futures trading platform for communicating signals to algo execution engines.