Cloud-only is dead
A growing consensus of industry analyses says ‘cloud-only’ won’t reliably meet sub-millisecond trading needs — hybrid architectures are the new baseline for execution-critical platforms, combining on‑prem/colo for order paths with cloud for analytics and resilience, two recent pieces argued. The pieces stress performance determinism, regulatory/data-residency constraints, and the need for workload portability as primary drivers of the shift.
AWS Local Zones claim) application placement can reduce cloud-to-exchange round‑trip times to the order of 1 millisecond in New York and Chicago. A 2025 UCSD FPGA implementation measured end‑to‑end trading-path latency at 433 nanoseconds reported), and an IEEE review observed) FPGAs routinely deliver deterministic sub‑microsecond processing favored by HFT teams. Practitioner benchmarks and technical guides show kernel‑bypass stacks—DPDK, AF_XDP and RDMA—produce single‑digit microsecond tail latencies when combined with CPU isolation and NUMA tuning documented). Equinix’s NY4 IBX in Secaucus is explicitly cataloged as a financial‑market colocation hub with direct interconnections to major US exchange ecosystems documented). JPMorgan’s infrastructure public profile lists a hybrid estate spanning 32 global data centers plus all three major public clouds reported), while Goldman Sachs’ Atlas rebuild emphasizes lower latency and modular deployment for execution platforms in firm disclosures outlined). The EU’s Financial Data Access (FiDA) framework was proposed on June 28, 2023 and carries implementation timelines of roughly 18–42 months post‑enactment, creating concrete on‑shore processing and governance requirements for some trading data flows tracked). Vendor stacks advertise network and jitter reductions via hardware/firmware approaches—NVIDIA’s Rivermax/FastSocket and Mellanox ConnectX solutions are cited in vendor materials as enabling dropless UDP reception and lower processing overhead for market feeds demonstrated). Market sizing estimates place the global HFT sector at $10.36 billion in 2024 with a projection to $16.03 billion by 2030, supporting continued capital investment in colocation, FPGA acceleration and kernel‑bypass pipelines for execution‑critical systems reported).
