The Challenge

The trading platform processes high volumes of investment transactions daily, making system reliability critical to revenue. The team recently faced a near-downtime event, highlighting the urgency of an infrastructure upgrade to ensure an ultra-high level of availability to prevent even momentary trading interruptions. To meet their performance and resilience objectives, the team outlined the following goals for the initiative:

  • Be fully resilient to hardware and software failures: Given the critical nature of investment trading, any downtime substantially impacts revenue. Need to ensure no loss of transaction in-case of a failure in a high transaction volume workload.

  • Perform major PostgreSQL upgrades with near-zero downtime: A need to support extended trading hours has taken away the opportunity to perform upgrades within scheduled maintenance windows.

  • Implement logical replication: Historically reliant on physical streaming replication, they wanted to explore a logical replication approach, which could further minimize downtime.

  • Eliminate vendor lock-in: To maintain flexibility, they sought a distributed database solution where the source code is available.

Solution Evaluation

The company considered various solutions, including other Postgres or Postgres-adjacent vendors, as part of their competitive analysis. The key evaluation criteria were that the solution had to be open source (or source code available) and fully based on standard Postgres, in addition to meeting the goals outlined above.

Solution Implementation

pgEdge Platform was selected for its high availability (HA) features and logical replication capabilities, which met their requirements for a near-zero downtime environment. Transitioning from a bare-metal PostgreSQL setup, the company moved to a pgEdge Platform cluster to enhance resilience, performance, and scalability.

Expected Benefits

The implementation of pgEdge Platform is anticipated to yield the following benefits:

  • Near-Zero Downtime Upgrades: Supporting uninterrupted transaction processing, even during major updates.

  • High Availability (HA): Enhancing system reliability with multi-node redundancy to mitigate downtime risk. Deploy architecture with pgEdge cluster that provides zero RTO and RPO.

  • Improved Performance & Elimination of Single Points of Failure): Ensuring continuous, high-performance trading operations without any dependency on a single node.

  • Tools for checking cluster data integrity: Ensuring data consistency across the cluster nodes and having tools available to readily find and address any inconsistencies caused between the nodes

“pgEdge is an innovative platform for those needing long-distance data synchronization. Support staff are eager to help, creative and always bring up ideas to solve customer problems.”

Database Engineer, Large Global Investment Management Firm, from NPS survey

Conclusion

This case study illustrates how this global investment management firm strategically advanced their trading platform’s resilience and performance, aligning with their vision of innovation-driven, high-quality investment management.