In our recent Aeron Community MeetUp in London, Deepak Dhayatker, CTO at Rapid Addition, shared technical insights into the firm’s approach to building robust, low-latency trading infrastructure. The session focused on the architectural challenges faced by Rapid Addition, their evaluation of Aeron, and the practical benefits realized from its adoption. This blog summarizes the key highlights from Deepak’s presentation. For a comprehensive technical deep-dive, we recommend watching the full recorded talk.
Who is Rapid Addition and what do they do?
Rapid Addition is a UK-based FIX technology specialist and provider of electronic trading solutions. Its scalable trading platforms, which are used by investment banks, asset managers, exchanges, and trading venues worldwide, have been designed to meet the demanding requirements of modern electronic trading, where performance, reliability, and determinism are critical.
Technical challenges in modern trading system design
As trading volumes and market complexity increase, so do the demands on trading infrastructure. Rapid Addition identified several core challenges when designing its trading platform:
As trading volumes and market complexity increase, so do the demands on trading infrastructure. Rapid Addition identified several core challenges when designing its trading platform:
- Deterministic performance: Consistent, predictable latency is essential for fair and efficient trading.
- Fault tolerance: Systems must remain available and correct, even in the face of hardware or software failures.
- Scalability: The architecture must support increasing message rates and evolving business requirements.
- Operational simplicity: Reducing operational overhead and complexity is key to maintaining system reliability.
Traditional approaches, often based on legacy messaging middleware or monolithic architectures, struggled to deliver the required combination of throughput, resilience, and maintainability that Rapid Addition was looking to achieve.
Choosing Aeron as its messaging transport – The Why?
Rapid Addition’s trading platform architecture, the RA Platform, is built around a set of modular components, each optimized for performance and reliability. It leverages Aeron’s high-throughput open source technology as its messaging layer.
The core stack includes Aeron Transport for ultra-low-latency messaging and Aeron Archive for reliable message storage and replay. While Rapid Addition conducted a proof of concept with Aeron Cluster several years ago, they did not adopt it in production at that time and are currently reevaluating due to increased client use cases. Rapid Addition is also closely following the development of Aeron Sequencer and is particularly interested in its potential for further enhancing deterministic event sequencing. Lastly, the firm is making use of Agrona, a library with low garbage, high performance data structures.
The RA Platform has the ability to deliver microsecond-level latency, deterministic behaviour, and operational transparency, all of which are critical for modern trading infrastructure. Aeron’s open-source model and active community was an important component in achieving this. Further deciding factors included:
- Support for strong consistency
- Reduced delivery and operational risk via a mature and well-tested transport layer
- Consistently low latency, even under peak loads
- Comprehensive tooling for observability, monitoring, and debugging
- Cloud-friendly architecture
- Brokerless transport layer
Rapid Addition typical Aeron use cases
Rapid Addition uses Aeron Transport as a low-latency, brokerless messaging system to enable fast and reliable point-to-point communication between backend servers, feed data to frontends, and replicate state between primary and secondary instances. Aeron also supports the RA Platform to enable clients to efficiently publish and consume real-time pricing data, by helping integration with third-party price feeds.
Additionally, Aeron Archive provides durable message storage and replay capabilities, which Rapid Addition has built on to support slow or recovering subscribers and ensure reliable recovery after failures. The RA Platform architecture, incorporating Aeron, enables key workflows such as streaming messages between hubs and database writers, supporting in-memory caching for UI requests, enabling historical data queries, and facilitating seamless failover and recovery during system updates or outages.
Benefits Rapid Addition is seeing from using Aeron
Since integrating Aeron into its core platform, Rapid Addition has realized several key benefits and accelerated the build of highly performant electronic trading solutions. These include:
- Consistent low latency: Achieving sub-100 microsecond round-trip times in production, supporting latency-sensitive trading strategies, especially on the Cloud.
- Deterministic state management: The architecture’s single-threaded processing and command log approach have simplified debugging, testing, and compliance.
- Scalability: Modular components allow the platform to scale with increasing message rates and evolving business requirements.
- Operational efficiency: Automated recovery and robust observability features have reduced manual intervention and improved reliability.
Additionally, Rapid Addition is looking at Aeron Premium which offers further performance improvements with features such as kernel bypass, encryption and sequencer architecture.
Nobody’s perfect – improvement suggestions from Rapid Addition
Rapid Addition noted that while Aeron meets all their core requirements, there is always room for community feedback and improvement, something Aeron parent Adaptive highly encourages.
It highlighted opportunities for enhanced observability—such as more granular metrics and built-in divergence detection—as well as further optimization of snapshotting and integration tooling which would be useful additional capabilities.
Use Case Example: Global Order Routing Network – built on the RA Platform using Aeron
A standout example of Aeron’s impact is Rapid Addition’s re-platforming of a global order routing network for a tier-1 financial institution. The RA Platform, leveraging Aeron Transport and Aeron Archive, was deployed on Cloud to support thousands of counterparty connections for real-time order routing across multiple locations. The new platform was designed to provide deterministic latency and guaranteed delivery, while operating 24/6.
Rapid Addition’s’s modular design allows for seamless scaling and the addition of new instances to support future growth, all while maintaining high throughput, ultra high availability and reliability. This use case demonstrates how the RA Platform and Aeron’s core components support mission-critical trading workflows at scale.
For a comprehensive technical deep-dive, including architectural diagrams and code-level insights, watch the full recording of Deepak Dhayatker’s presentation from the Aeron Community MeetUp in London.