Cloud choices

I used to love browsing in record shops. Sometimes you'd stumble across music, that you would never ordinarily think of buying. Record shops are still with us of course (vinyl in particular is experiencing a renaissance), however, more broadly the way music is delivered to consumers has changes. Today, we don't seem to own "music" anymore. Instead we stream music stored elsewhere.

What does this have to do with developing trading strategies? Quite a lot! In order to develop and run systematic trading strategies, our "music" alas isn't Lennon and McCartney, but market data and we need to be able to analyse it. The traditional way has been to collect data from external sources and store them locally and do all the processing locally on your own servers. Now of course, with cloud based services such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, in practice, we can do everything remotely. We can store our data on the cloud and also process it there. Locally, we don't need any servers, and instead can rely upon our desktop machines to remote into the cloud. OK, admittedly, none of this is really "news". I use cloud based services for some of my work, and I'm sure many readers do as well.

However, it's worth trying to thing about what questions we need to ask when choosing to move what we do on to the cloud and what we might wish to keep locally. This isn't designed to be a detailed look at measuring the cost of cloud based computation - just a few observations I've made whilst using the cloud recently, for some of my computation work. I'm not going to attempt to compare the cloud providers (mainly, because I haven't actually been a customer of all of them to properly be able to tell the differences and am certainly not an expert on the subject).

Which services should I use from cloud providers?

There are many types of services offered by cloud providers. You can use services such as EC2 on AWS, which literally give you a box on the cloud with an operating system of your choice such as Linux. It's then up to you to manage that box...

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