Halon Entertainment
Hedge fund analytics platform improves performance computing with AWS Graviton
Infrastructure & DevOps Modernization
Financial Services
Caylent's expertise in Graviton migrations led to the best price/performance compute and freed up our product engineers' time so it could be better spent focusing on developing product features
SEI Novus offers a portfolio analytics platform for hedge funds and other financial allocators such as pension funds, global wealth, sovereign wealth and family offices, that need to be able to manage billions of dollars of investments. The company was founded in 2007 by a group of investors, data scientists and engineers to build a foundation that the world’s top investors use to identify prospects and profitable returns for their portfolio..
Challenge
SEI Novus recognized that their antiquated on-premises hosting environment was becoming too costly and inefficient to support business operations and keep pace with the agility needed from their product development teams. Looking for a more cost effective and scalable solution, SEI Novus decided to migrate their infrastructure to the AWS cloud, on containerized microservices hosted in Amazon EKS with Amazon EC2 Load Balancers.
Maximizing price/performance is a trend that has seen many technology companies transitioning to ARM chipsets due to their significant efficiency and performance improvements. As part of their modernization journey, SEI Novus identified AWS Graviton based solutions as an opportunity for long term investment that could result in significant cost savings.
Solution
Wanting to keep their internal engineers focused on product features and innovation, SEI Novus engaged Caylent to migrate their container compute infrastructure from x86 based Amazon EC2 instances to AWS Graviton based EC2 instances. Instead of moving their entire platform at once, SEI elected to keep a mix of both AWS Graviton and traditional x86 AMD processors for their Amazon EC2 Spot instances, so that they had the ability to utilize AWS Graviton when optimal and transition at a pace suitable to their needs.
Prior to the container and application migration effort, the Caylent team identified a “quick win” by migrating SEI Novus’s MySQL databases hosted on Amazon RDS to AWS Graviton instances. Caylent’s clients have experienced comparable quick price performance wins by configuring managed services like Amazon RDS, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon OpenSearch, or Amazon EMR to utilize Graviton compute options.
In SEI Novus’ case, no changes were needed to the application code. The joint team reconfigured the Docker containers to run on both AWS Graviton and x86 instances.
Outcome
Following the adoption of AWS Graviton, SEI Novus realized savings of 5 – 10% in their Spot instances. These improvements are expected to scale up as AWS Graviton offerings mature and utilization scales since AWS Graviton2-based EC2 instances can deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable x86-based instances. Recently announced AWS Graviton3-based processors take these performance gains further by 25%. Adopting AWS Graviton, hence, has opened up opportunities for SEI Novus to continue to improve efficiency and bring down costs over time.
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