Public and private cloud are high on the agendas of capital markets firms (often as explicit hybrid cloud agendas). The massive scaling and innovative pricing of public cloud platforms can substantially accelerate time to market and reduce costs. Private cloud frameworks like Kubernetes promise greater business agility, as well as cost savings through higher utilization. What can be done with public and private clouds and how to overcome obstacles have become a big source of discussion at STAC Summits, such as this recent panel discussion. In March 2018, the STAC Benchmark Council kicked off the STAC Cloud SIG (special interest group) to prioritize dialog and testing of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions.
But the cloud landscape is a tapestry of diverse offerings—in terms of both technology, SLAs, and pricing models. Standards for performance and price-performance such as STAC Benchmarks can be a useful instrument for navigating this landscape.
STAC began its foray into cloud with a study of AWS instance types under challenging workloads like derivatives valuation and tick data analytics. See this video for a summary (apologies for the video quality).
Since then, several cloud providers have joined the STAC Benchmark Council and are beginning the process of using STAC Benchmarks as a way to improve the engineering of their products for front-office use cases in the capital markets. Solution vendors are also embracing cloud platforms to demonstrate their own value propositions. Click here for a list of recent research and discussions involving cloud (the materials you see listed will depend on your login permissions).