1) Charles Schwab modernized its trading architecture to use Aerospike as an intraday system of record, moving applications from the mainframe to .NET on distributed databases. 2) The modernization strategy involved 3 phases - migrating all read applications, then write applications, and building new capabilities with Aerospike as the system of record. 3) Current stats show Aerospike storing over 150TB of data with 75 billion transactions per day at sub-millisecond latencies and over 2 million transactions per minute of throughput.

1. App Modernization with Aerospike
as an Intraday System of Record
Venkat Thamminana
Managing Director, Portfolio
Management Technology
Charles Schwab

2. Proprietary & Confidential | All rights reserved. © 2023 Aerospike, Inc.
Modernization goals
a. Vision- Build better, faster and cheaper solutions
b. Architectural principles
i. One operational data store
ii. No local caching at VM level
iii.Maximum code reuse
iv.Avoid or minimize calls outside CLR/JVM
v. App tier is just business logic and on light weight VMs
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Trading architecture view- 2014 vs now
2014 view
a. All the core trading applications are on
mainframe
b. Limited skillset
c. Scaling is costly
d. Development takes time
e. Constraints on latency & throughput
f. Availability- DR is a challenge
Current view
a. All the client interfacing applications
are decoupled from mainframe
b. DB2 is retained as system of record for
legacy applications
c. Developed on dotNet platform with
aerospike as distributed database
d. Horizontally scalable
e. Latency is in 30 milliseconds and
throughput is 2 M transactions/min
f. Deployed in multiple data centers with
zone isolation strategy for high
availability
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Modernization Strategy followed
a. Aerospike as intraday system of record
i. Migrate all the read apps
i. Have all the data in aerospike with near real time refresh
ii. Daily refresh, intraday refresh & weekly refresh as needed
iii. Deploy the business logic on app tier with data in aerospike
ii. Migrate write apps, retain DB2 as system of record
i. Post the transactions real time onto aerospike
ii. Async process to update data in DB2
b. Aerospike as system of record
i. Build all new capabilities
ii. Build for the resiliency for data
i. Not to leverage XDR- XDR can propagate data loss/corruption that happens in
one DC to other DCs making it harder to restore
ii. Zone isolation where each zone will have 100% of data.
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A view of current stats
a. Aerospike DB level
a. Data stored per zone
a. ~150 TB
b. Transaction volumes
a. 75 Billions in a typical day
b. 20 Billion writes
c. 55 Billion reads
c. Latency
a. 99.9% of all read as well as writes are < 1 millisecond
d. Throughput
a. 1.1M/sec- Reads, 0.45 M/sec- writes
b. Application level
a. Latency- ~30 millisecond/transaction
b. Throughput- 2 M/min
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1st
phase- all read applications are
migrated
2nd
phase- all write applications are
migrated
3rd
phase- All new capabilities are
developed with aerospike as system
of record.
Modernization journey- 3 phases

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Zone Isolation deployment- multi zone view
Key call outs
• A new zone can be setup without disturbing
any other zone. Only interaction with other
zone is through async messaging apps.
• Failover from active zone to another zone
will be very quick and involve routing all the
channels traffic at load balancer level. Data is
consistent in all aerospike clusters, so no
impact to client experience with fail over.
• The failover process will remain same with
zonal fail over or regional failover.
• We have opportunity to handle all the
channel traffic across multiple zones. (50%
from zone 1 and 50% from zone2). True
active-active setup.
• Any changes, to write or apps, can be
promoted to one zone. After validating the
change in the zone, the changes can be
promoted to all zones.
• Ready for cloud deployment, can route the
channel traffic in a canary mode to minimize
risk.
Txns
Intraday
events
SOD files
KAFKA multi node cluster
NAS folder
SOR database
File Data loader
Intraday data
loader
Txn posting
Aero
spike
Read
services
Write
services
Zone 1 (Active)
Service layer
File loaders
Async message
processors
Async
Messaging
Systems of
record
Txn
generators
Service
Consumers
Web & Mobile channels
Async Messaging/Kafka
Zone2
Read
services
Write
services
File Data loader
Intraday data
loader
Txn posting
Aero
spike
Read
services
Write
services
Read
services
Write
services

8. Proprietary & Confidential | All rights reserved. © 2023 Aerospike, Inc.
In closing
a. Modernization journey is very rewarding
b. Met all the objectives we started with
c. Aerospike exceeded our expectations and became a critical
component in the eco system
d. Developed an industry leading performance reporting capability with
aerospike as system of record
Coming next
a. Make the applications cloud ready
b. Deploy in public cloud
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