Modernizing financial networks: Huatai Securities’ multicast implementation on AWS

This article describes how Huatai Securities implemented multicast communication for their EKS clusters on AWS using Transit Gateway, achieving significant performance improvements for their trading systems.

• Huatai Securities enabled multicast in EKS using AWS Transit Gateway and custom networking plugins
• Solution combines VPC CNI, Host-device plugin, Multus, and custom IPAM for multicast support
• Architecture uses separate subnets for multicast and non-multicast communication within single AZ
• Implementation involves creating Transit Gateway IGMP domain, configuring ENIs, and deploying NetworkAttachmentDefinition
• Testing demonstrated successful multicast communication between pods and EC2 instances
• Achieved 10-fold latency improvement for trading operations using multicast versus unicast
• Multicast latency measured at 0.4ms versus 6ms for TCP unicast traffic

This solution enables financial institutions to deploy containerized trading systems on AWS with multicast capabilities, significantly reducing latency and bandwidth utilization for time-sensitive trading operations.