Understanding our Architecture
Software, no-matter how well designed, still has significant challenges:
- Maintaining
- Fixing
- Enhancing
- Supporting
Extensibility
To overcome the need to continually add more to the platform as new data requirements emerge, we have opened up certain interfaces to be extensible. Extensibility allows customers to provide their own data to certain endpoints that can act upon information supplied.
We plan to review what we provide, and may add a small number of additional endpoints to increase extensibility.
We are also investigating how we collect core data and make it available to Trade Evaluation and Trade Execution. We focus more on extending functionality than removing - mainly because some of our novel approaches have worked.
Our system is more of an ephemeral system but we may look to couple certain events more tightly if we see benefit.
Core Datasets and The Known Information Snapshot
These are predominantly exchange based data that tell us what the TIS was at that point in time.
We collate, aggregate, and calculate additional fields. These fields belong to certain data types and we offer a range of filters to be applied on them.
We have some plans to increase the number of datasets and review some fields.
What does this mean as a customer?
The key significance is that we are unlikely to add more fields to our Core Datasets unless feature requests are obvious. Core Datasets are largely about what is on the exchange rather than metrics and insights.
Solutions for Adding External Data Sources for Order Execution
Standard Approaches
Customers requiring advanced metrics, analytics and decision making solutions are best placed to:
- Ask us to add additional sidecars (applications) to their instance
- Ask us to build additional sidecars to their instance
- Develop their own sidecars that works with our API and data
Your own External API Endpoint for Cost-Effectiveness
One highly under-appreciated approach is to host your own data architecture, exposing your data to your own sidecar to your instance. An example is that there are many low priced web hosting solutions that can easily retrieve API data and serve it securely.
- A small application hosted on our instance could:
- Perform retrieval of your external data
- Transform it into the shape expected by our Trading API
- Route it to your specific strategies
Many customers have their own analytics and insights. Given that we have set schemas for data and endpoints within our APIs locally it is perfectly possible to work with these endpoints from your own sidecar.
Security and Risks
Each additional inbound/outbound operation increases the attack surface.
Any data exposed via the instance to the outside world can be a risk.