Market data fan-out

DesignHard50 minBloomberg and Citadel style

Your task

Design a market-data fan-out system that distributes live price ticks for 100,000 instruments to 500,000 subscribers (web, mobile, and pro terminals). Updates arrive at up to 2M ticks/sec from exchanges; web clients want <250 ms freshness while pro terminals demand <5 ms. Many instruments are quiet while a few (e.g., a hot crypto pair on a volatile day) carry 90% of the volume. How do you fan this out without overwhelming clients or the network?

It covers

  • Market data
  • Low latency
  • Multicast
  • Conflation