Rezco and Alis Exchange: Building ML models at scale, with clearly defined cloud architecture
About Alis Exchange
Founded by engineers at asset management company Rezco, Alis Exchange is a Luxembourg-based software company with a strong presence in South Africa. Alis Exchange's domain-driven enterprise services platform, Alis Build, and deep software and cloud engineering experience, enable it to empower businesses with customized, business-transforming, cost-effective software solutions at scale.
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Contact usAlong the journey of developing its Alis Alpha solution, Alis has benefited from Google Cloud's differentiated offering to meet the exacting demands of powerful market-forecasting AI systems.
Google Cloud results
- Cuts cost of building AI models from $800 to $100 with clearly defined architecture
- Reduces latency from 15 milliseconds to two milliseconds with efficient infrastructure
- Faster experiments and iterations enable more powerful market forecasts
- Smooth onboarding and offboarding of team members thanks to consistent SRE principles across the organization
Cuts costs and latency with Google Cloud SRE principles
Asset management is a highly competitive space, and with large amounts of market data to analyze, it can be challenging for even the most experienced fund managers to identify the patterns and signals to make the right trades.
Outperforming the market is becoming increasingly difficult. That's why boutique asset management company Rezco first turned to AI to give its global equity portfolio managers an edge. Rezco tasked Alis Exchange with developing an end-to-end system that could analyze financial market data and support the research and analysis efforts of its global equity portfolio managers.
Alis Exchange developed the Alis Alpha system on Google Cloud, in collaboration with the Rezco team. However, as it scaled up its use of the system, and as the sophistication of the models grew, the process and infrastructure became increasingly difficult to manage. "The platform was becoming too complex for our growing team to handle. We realized that if we didn't create some order and structure it properly, it would quickly get out of hand," recalls Jan Krynauw, CEO of Alis Exchange and former Director and Actuary at Rezco.
A simple solution to growing complexity
Krynauw and his team made the decision to take a step back and set about entirely redefining and restructuring the core infrastructure platform to become an efficient and scalable system.
"We turned to Google Cloud, and how it engineers its own architecture. Then we went back to our products and asked, 'what if we used them like Google would?' I can't explain the difference it made. We got a 100 times efficiency gain using the same products in a better way."
—Jan Krynauw, CEO, Alis ExchangeAs Alis Exchange considered how best to build scalable cloud architecture, it realized that instead of creating its own system, it could take inspiration from those who already had significant experience in building cloud architecture at scale.
"We turned to Google Cloud, and how it engineers its own architecture. Then we went back to our products and asked, 'what if we used them like Google would?'" Krynauw explains. "I can't explain the difference it made. We got a 100 times efficiency gain using the same products in a better way."
A structured restructuring, with a definition-first mindset
Alis Exchange set about a wholesale restructuring of its platform, taking six months to redefine everything according to Google Cloud documentation. The team employed what Krynauw calls a 'definition-first mindset' using Protocol Buffers to define every aspect of its architecture, rather than building first and defining things later. This meant that even though they were building a highly complex platform, it remained well ordered and structured and, most importantly, scalable.
The result was a completely restructured domain-driven enterprise services platform named Alis Build, which makes this highly scalable definitions-first approach available to innovative custom business applications.
"Cloud Run is the best solution for running containers. Look at all the stats, the measures, and the history. If you want to run containers in the cloud, Cloud Run is the place. And there's a reason for that. It's because of how it's structured and the elegance behind the products."
—Jan Krynauw, CEO, Alis ExchangeAlis Exchange used the new Alis Build platform to rebuild the Alis Alpha system for Rezco. The resulting system has scaled seamlessly to handle petabyte-scale data processing and hundreds of thousands of distributed and orchestrated operations for every model iteration, with almost no downtime.
The Alis Alpha system uses Cloud Dataflow for its data prepping and Cloud Bigtable as its ultra-low-latency database, with TensorFlow models helping to generate the market insights Rezco data analysts need. The platform runs on Cloud Tensor Processing Units, and underpinning it all is Cloud Run, which acts as an orchestrator to string all the services together.
"Cloud Run is the best solution for running containers," says Krynauw. "Look at all the stats, the measures, and the history. If you want to run containers in the cloud, Cloud Run is the place. And there's a reason for that. It's because of how it's structured and the elegance behind the products."
The unexpected benefits of good architecture
This structured approach, and the decision to apply it to the development of Alis Build, not only gave Alis Exchange a scalable platform that would grow with the business, but had a significant impact in ways Krynauw hadn't anticipated.
"Suddenly, all the communication between these products and services was 10 times quicker and cheaper," Krynauw explains. "Our data costs, our compute costs, everything has become cheaper. Now, a model that used to cost us $800 to train costs just over $100, purely because of that improved communication between services."
Latency has decreased, too, with Alis Build able to request data predictions far more quickly than it could in the previous system. "Latency for a request was previously 15 milliseconds, which was a decent number," Krynauw explains. "However, by adopting the Google Cloud site reliability engineering principles, we were able to reduce latency from 15 to two milliseconds, which quickly adds up. The low costs allow us to move faster too. We can run 10 times more models, because it's 10 times cheaper to run them."
Giving fund managers a competitive edge with fast AI models
With Alis Build, Alis Exchange has also been able to build the Alpha Cockpit, an improved version of its original AI-centered portfolio manager workbench. This tool presents Rezco's portfolio managers with a single number for each stock, representing the chances of that stock outperforming the market, and so serving as a signal for whether to trade it. Behind the simplicity of that single number, the Alis Build platform is running complex machine-learning models on a vast array of financial-market data to identify patterns and trends and run forecasts that no human would be capable of doing. For Krynauw, the accuracy of these signals is thanks to the speed at which the Alis Build platform can operate, due to its low-latency, low-cost architecture.
"The market has changed over the last five years, and signals that used to work no longer do," explains Krynauw. "So the speed of learning is our number one KPI. The faster we can explore, the faster we can move through that model cycle iteration and generate accurate signals. With our API calls now 10 times quicker and lighter, those opportunities suddenly open up."
With the definition-first methodology in the Alis Exchange DNA, Krynauw's team has worked to instill the same way of thinking across Rezco, training team members to become what they call Alis Builders. Developing this consistency across the company means that team sustainability becomes easier, too, with onboarding and offboarding far smoother thanks to every part of the system being well-organized, defined, and documented.
Defining the path to innovation
Alis Exchange is now taking its Alis Build platform to new clients both in South Africa and in Europe, helping them to take their own business logic into the cloud in a systematic and structured manner. In doing so, it is enabling clients to make use of the cloud's potential to expand their businesses in a simple, efficient, and scalable manner.
In one recent project, Alis Exchange helped a growing business that was unable to keep up with its reporting requirements to build a new cloud-based system, based on Cloud Run, that can generate hundreds of thousands of reports in seconds. With such efficiencies, Alis Exchange is freeing companies to focus on innovation.
"We wouldn't have been able to build this platform at scale if we had to figure it out on our own. We learned from Google Cloud. How we continue to combine its solutions will be key to our ability to innovate long into the future."
—Jan Krynauw, CEO, Alis ExchangeAs Alis Exchange continues to build up its own client base and help businesses scale in the cloud, it is keeping abreast of new and emerging Google Cloud solutions that will help with the platform's ongoing development.
"We wouldn't have been able to build this platform at scale if we had to figure it out on our own. We learned from Google Cloud," explains Krynauw. "How we continue to combine its solutions will be key to our ability to innovate long into the future."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Alis Exchange
Founded by engineers at asset management company Rezco, Alis Exchange is a Luxembourg-based software company with a strong presence in South Africa. Alis Exchange's domain-driven enterprise services platform, Alis Build, and deep software and cloud engineering experience, enable it to empower businesses with customized, business-transforming, cost-effective software solutions at scale.