EURONEXT.COM/EN

Pan-European Stock
Exchange Relies on Confluent
to Power Event Driven
Trading Platform

As the first pan-European exchange – spanning Belgium, France, Ireland, theNetherlands, Portugal and the UK – Euronext operates regulated securities
and derivatives markets in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris, as well
Headquarters
Amsterdam, Netherlands

as a regulated securities market in Ireland and the UK. Euronext recently
developed a new event-driven trading platform, Optiq®, that provides atenfold increase in capacity and an average performance latency of as low asIndustryFinancial Services

15 micro-seconds for order roundtrip as well as for market data.

Challenge
Develop a new trading platform formarkets across multiple European
countries that supports high-volume,
high-speed trading and provides clientswith access to real-time data.

development organization built using Confluent Platform. Confluent

Solution
Use Confluent Platform to implement
a reliable, scalable persistence layer formarket orders that supports millisecond
latencies and billions of messages
per day.
Results• Reliable 24/5 operations achieved
and maintained• Stringent performance requirements
exceeded• Dedicated, expert support received

Underpinning the Optiq platform is a persistence layer that the Euronext
Platform provides a reliable, scalable streaming infrastructure for Optiq that
supports millisecond latencies with no messages lost. “When we started,Kafka was a new technology to us, and one that we had decided to use for avery critical application in our system,” says Philippe Planchon, Architect andInnovative Trading Solutions Director at Euronext. “With Confluent we felt
supported in our decision and we knew we had the right level of expertiseto get prepared and to help if we encountered any issues. That was a key
element in our success.”

Challenge
In architecting and building Optiq, the Euronext team placed a heavyemphasis on reliability and scalability. “It was a massive project, and a highly
reliable message brokering infrastructure that could scale just by adding
more nodes as our business needs changed was key to the entire effort,”says Phillipe Pujalte, Infrastructure and Operations Director at Euronext.
The performance requirements for this messaging infrastructure wereequally stringent. “We needed the streaming platform to be able to ingest
up to a million orders per second, with real-time latency in the millisecond
range. That’s why we began to investigate Kafka,” Pujalte adds.
Euronext is at the heart of the European economy. Because entire markets
in Europe would depend on the platform, reliability was imperative.
“We were building a mission-critical platform to support the market
capitalization of six European countries,” says Alain Courbebaisse, Chief©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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Information Officer at Euronext. “As an organization webased on Kafka. This gateway handles multiple billions

are also very open source minded, so that was one of ourof messages per day, sending market data to vendors,

criteria for this project as well. And with all of our open

as well as Euronext’s trading members that use thesource efforts we want to ensure we have enterprise

information in their trading strategies.

support.” The recognized need for enterprise-levelsupport had at least three dimensions. Pujalte explains,“As our go-live date grew closer, we wanted to make sure“The new market data gateway pushes a massive amountof data through Kafka,” notes Pujalte. “This projectthat all of our technical implementation decisions werefurther validated that Kafka was the right choice andsound, that we did not have any issues with the way wewas our first step in learning to operate Kafka under real

were deploying the infrastructure and that we were goingproduction conditions.”

to be able to leverage the highest level of capability fromthat infrastructure.”

Solution
After evaluating several streaming platform alternatives,
Euronext selected Confluent Platform with ApacheKafka® for the persistence layer of the Optiq multi-market
trading platform.
The Euronext development team started with a proof
of concept prototype: a Kafka-based matching engine
for an order book with buyers and sellers. Benchmarksof this prototype in which data was pushed to multiple
consumers via Kafka showed that it was capableof meeting the platform’s overall high-performancerequirements.
“With the first benchmark we did with Kafka, we sawthat the capacity to ingest messages up to a rate ofone million per second was easily achieved,” says Pujalte.
“Moreover, the integration of Kafka with our C++ world
was straightforward to implement via the API and library.

Even as the market data gateway went live, the team
was already developing other components, including
the production matching engine and member gateways.
Around this time, the team began working with Confluent
engineers to fine-tune aspects of their implementation
to ensure consistent performance under extremely
heavy load. “Having access Confluent support was a realadvantage for us. Confluent helped us understand how totune our stack to improve performance,” says Pujalte.
Continuing to expand the persistence layer, the teamdeveloped numerous Kafka consumer applications,
including applications that interface with clearinghouses,
monitor market latency, provide gateways used byregulators, push data to an SQL database in supportof market operations, perform replication of data fordisaster recovery, and store records in a data warehousein compliance with regulatory requirements.
The team also development applications that use theKafka Streams API library to perform data enrichment
in real time. For example, they wrote an application

From the start of this large project, it was easy to seethat consumes related trade and order messages andthat Kafka was the right choice for us.”combines information from both to build a more complete

Following the success of the initial proof of concept
effort, the team began a multiphase project to build thetrade message containing all the data required byregulators.

production platform. The first major milestone in thisEuronext is now running the Optiq trading platform, witheffort was to replace the market data gateway layer of

its persistence layer built on Confluent Platform, live inthe existing trading infrastructure with a new version

production on all its cash markets.

©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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We have been very satisfied with Confluent Platform as thebackbone of our persistence engine. The platform has beensuper reliable. We have stringent requirements for realtime
performance and reliability, and we have confirmed – fromproof-of-concept to deployment of a cutting-edge production
trading platform – that we made the right decision.

–Alain Courbebaisse, Chief Information Officer, Euronext

Results
Reliable 24/5 operations achieved and maintained.

millisecond latencies and it can handle multiple millions of“High availability and the ability to operate reliably 24/5

messages per second, sustained for hours.”

is essential for us,” says Pujalte. “Since we went live, wehave never had a major issue with Confluent Platform,
and with our scale, that is very impressive.”

Dedicated, expert support received. “Before we went live,
we worked closely with Confluent engineers, who help
us with the preparation,” says Planchon. “Our mission-

Stringent performance requirements exceeded. “Withcritical trading platform running on Confluent Platform

Confluent Platform we met our most stringent

successfully went live with no significant issues, whichbenchmarks for throughput and latency,” Pujalte says.

confirmed to us that we had the right expertise and the“Confluent Platform supports real-time operations withright support in place.”

Learn More About Euronext
www.euronext.com/en©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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