If you’re an online trading platform, you need to make certain that extreme high availability is a key component of your database environment. Here’s why.
Online trading platforms have seen a rapid rise in the last decade, with the emergence of apps and platforms such as Robinhood and E*Trade which have promised to democratize a practice that was once seen as the purview of professionals only. Nowadays, anyone can easily dip their toe into the world of trading—much to the benefit of platform providers.
In order to take advantage of this ever-growing market, online trading platforms must be able to provide their customers with a few vital guarantees: (1) that sensitive data relating to trades will be protected, (2) that data loss is eradicated or minimized in the event of an unexpected technology failure and (3) that the platform will not experience unnecessary downtime that could jeopardize time-sensitive trades, losing users money in the process.
Without extreme high availability, your electronic trading platform simply cannot promise these essential capabilities. As a result, your customers are likely to take their business elsewhere. With extreme high availability, however, you can ensure the integrity of your data and the satisfaction of your customers. Users don’t lose money, and you don’t lose users.
In this blog we’ll explore:
- The true power of extreme high availability;
- How EDB Postgres Distributed can turn high availability into extreme high availability;
- Why online trading applications and platforms can’t afford to take high availability for granted.
Always-on trading your users trust
Similar to other organizations in the banking and finance sector, online trading platforms must prioritize extreme high availability in order to maintain customer trust and market reputation. Your customers expect successful and secure transactions, and they expect them with split-second efficiency. Extreme high availability ensures they are reliably able to access your platform whenever they want.
When many people think of trading, they picture the stereotypical chaos of the New York Stock Exchange, where you have to buy and sell at a moment’s notice, lest you lose out on a great opportunity or find yourself stuck with value-less assets. While this might be an exaggeration of the reality of trading, it’s still what your customers envision. As such, when they want to complete a transaction and your application is down because of a database failure, they might very well feel that you’ve robbed them of a serious win. And they won’t look kindly on that.
Whether planned or unplanned, unnecessary application downtime from database outages is the biggest threat to your market share and your reputation among your customers. When money is on the line, few users are interested in giving the platform that failed them a second chance, let alone a third or a forth.
The impact of an outage on your reputation goes even further, however. Not only does excessive downtime promote the idea that your platform is ill-equipped to handle a customer’s trading needs, it also suggests that you’re not fit to handle their data. After all, the sort of financial information with which your customers entrust you is incredibly sensitive. If your application is constantly crashing, why would your users assume their data isn’t being lost or mismanaged in the process?
By prioritizing extreme high availability for your database, however, you can avoid all of this, ensure the constant performance of your customer-facing solutions and build a reputation as the trading platform for anyone—veteran or novice—to put their trust in.
Achieving extreme high availability with EDB
As defined by EDB, extreme high availability provides organizations with up to five 9s of database availability, whether they’re on-premises, in the cloud or leveraging hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures. The promise of five nines means that their database will be functioning 99.999% of the time—nearly zero downtime. For payment processing providers, this means that your applications won’t see more than five and a half minutes of downtime in a year. On a daily basis, that amounts to just 864 milliseconds.
How does EDB accomplish this? With EDB Postgres Distributed—our extreme high availability solution—we address scheduled and unscheduled outages alike, strengthening Postgres’s reliability and disaster recovery capabilities. While this primarily allows EDB Postgres Distributed to neutralize the negative impact of unscheduled downtime, it also minimizes the downtime businesses often write off as unavoidable, such as during a Postgres database upgrade.
Via multi-master replication and data distribution with advanced conflict management, data-loss protection and throughput up to 5X faster than Postgres native logical replication, EDB Postgres Distributed ensures that your database is functioning at peak performance, even during necessary maintenance. This extreme high availability is how we define an “Always On” database.
Ensure constant uptime, no matter what
When evaluating high availability options for a database, trading application providers should put themselves in the shoes of their users first.
To meet their expectations, you need to be able to handle massive amounts of user activity during peak trading hours. You need to be on your toes 24/7, ready to meet the dynamic demands of your market and your users.
With a solution that guarantees you genuine extreme high availability, your database can provide all of that, without breaking a sweat.
Lead the way in the online trading market
The world of online trading platforms is allowing more and more people to take control of their financial futures and creating new opportunities for innovation among application and platform providers looking to become leaders in the market. In order to compete, however, these providers need to be sure they have a database that can keep pace with the demands of the industry and expectations of their users.
That’s why so many businesses like yours choose EDB Postgres Distributed: it combines the reliability of Postgres databases with extreme high availability. For trading platforms, it offers incredible speed, flexibility and near-zero downtime, no matter your data and transaction volume. This puts providers like yours in the best possible position to scale, grow and evolve.