Elenjical Solutions implements world’s first Murex Kubernetes module installation

Leading Murex business partner and system integrator Elenjical Solutions has successfully implemented the world’s first MX.3 Kubernetes upgrade to the Murex financial software platform for trading, treasury, risk, and post-trade operations. The pilot upgrade – the world’s first – was completed in early May for leading South African financial services group Momentum Metropolitan.

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem and reduces the need and expense of maintaining permanent always-on servers. This is because once the calculations are complete, the cluster nodes– and costs associated with running them – are terminated. (A cluster is a logical grouping of tasks or services. Clusters can also be used to isolate applications.)

Containers: flexible and scalable

Murex’s latest version of MX.3, its trading platform, now includes a Kubernetes module option that is compatible with technologies like AWS Fargate or EKS managed node groups to deliver high performance on critical calculation and aggregation services. To price complex derivatives, the Kubernetes module can execute calculations over a grid of CPUs or GPUs. For the most computationally intensive workloads—market risk and reporting—the MX.3 module leverages Kubernetes and containers to benefit from the scalability, flexibility and pay-as-you-go model of the cloud.

In preparation for the upgrade the Elenjical Solutions integration team had access to early versions of the software. The official MX.3 module was then incorporated into a wider Murex system upgrade at Momentum Metropolitan. After an extensive period of testing the system was ultimately installed over a long holiday weekend, ready to go live by the start of the next business day.

An important aspect of the installation – and a particular strength of Elenjical Solutions – was the company’s ability to create ‘infrastructure as code’, allowing the automated deployment of the Kubernetes module.  Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer cloud resources through machine-readable definition files, rather than configuring the data manually. It eliminates the risk of human error, is remarkably stable during the implementation and allows future redeployment of the module at a press of a button.

Elenjical Solutions’ IaC skills are part of its wider expertise in continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CD).

“We have a close and supportive relationship with Murex, and were pleased to be asked to conduct the first global installation of the company’s new Kubernetes module,” says Colyn Van Zyl, the lead executive on the project, “Using the Kubernetes module makes sense: if you are moving operations to the cloud, you should make use of as much elasticity and scalability as you can, otherwise you have a like-for-like ‘lift and shift’ mentality from old physical servers. With that in mind, with the new Kubernetes module you only use resources when you need them, and they disappear the moment your calculations are complete. It’s cheaper, more secure, just as accurate and no slower. We are confident that this module will become a normal part of the Murex system in the future.”