While financial markets have always cared about latency, it’s not a topic often discussed in other industries. This past week, I stumbled across a couple of excellent blog posts on the subject of latency, primarily as related to web and cloud infrastructures.

First Todd Hoff posted on website scalability with his expansive Latency is everywhere and it costs you sales post. Nati Shalom of Gigaspaces built upon that post to include sweeping architectural suggestions from the perspective of a leading data grid provider.

Both are fascinating reads and highlight all the usual sources of latency as well as some that are less obvious. Highly recommended.

There is no one-size-fits-all set of suggestions for dealing with latency, which is why both of these posts are so encyclopedic. The latency hot spots in a web application with 500 milliseconds of latency will be completely different than a 50 millisecond database access application and different still from a market data system with less than 100 microseconds of latency. The same way you wouldn’t use your hammer and drill to fix a watch, you need special precision tools.

I’ll go more into detail on ultra-low latency issues tomorrow.

Solace

Solace helps large enterprises become modern and real-time by giving them everything they need to make their business operations and customer interactions event-driven. With PubSub+, the market’s first and only event management platform, the company provides a comprehensive way to create, document, discover and stream events from where they are produced to where they need to be consumed – securely, reliably, quickly, and guaranteed.

Behind Solace technology is the world’s leading group of data movement experts, with nearly 20 years of experience helping global enterprises solve some of the most demanding challenges in a variety of industries – from capital markets, retail, and gaming to space, aviation, and automotive.

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