Macquarie Group has shifted its core trading and settlement system Calypso into the public cloud in the space of a single weekend.
Calypso is a NASDAQ-built commercial off-the-shelf solution that performs currency settlements for the whole group, as well as front-to-back trading.
The version of Calypso in use pre-dates cloud architecture and had been running in a data centre that was “shutting down”.
As such, the group decided to move Calypso onto Amazon Web Services cloud, following the path of other applications, including its SAP core banking system.
Macquarie Group program manager of commodities and global markets post trade technology Justin Buckland said Calypso’s “mission-critical” status meant the group had to get the migration right in one go for the project to be successful.”
“We wanted to get ourselves into an evergreen position and that means being on the current versions so we can start to take advantage of what is offered in cloud from AWS,” he told the AWS Financial Services Symposium in Sydney.
As the version of Calypso used was “really not built for cloud” and “very integrated and …complex”, Buckland noted it would be a logistical challenge, as well as a technological one, to carry out the migration.
Following four weeks of preparation by teams spanning risk, compliance, enablement and cyber security, Buckland’s team carried out the migration over a single weekend, tracking the go-live down to “the minute”.
The result, he said, was: “Crickets”.
“With that large risk, our mission had to be that the business didn’t notice the change,” Buckland said.
“We went live, and it was actually really successful.”
The group now intends to upgrade the Calypso platform to a newer, cloud-friendly version.
Alongside the core system, Macquarie Group also moved the database underpinning Calypso to AWS public cloud infrastructure, specifically Amazon Aurora.
“A significant amount of our effort was moving from a database that was end-of-life to [Amazon Aurora],” Buckland said.
The group was able to leverage its cloud deployment platform Arturo as part of the database migration.
According to Craig Edwards, Macquarie domain architect for commodities and global markets platform strategy, the move had led to significant improvements in the team’s monitoring and observability of Calypso.