I used to work in machine maintenance, so I always think about what will happen when the machines involved fail.
NYSE machines hosting the trading server fail: presumably they have hot backups they're ready to switch to but that takes time and will interrupt trading during the cut over. Not to mention that not all failures are hard failures, what if the NIC is downtrained to a lower speed, RAM is slower than it should be, or a single hard drive storing important data crashes? Lots of interesting failure modes. When the NYSE owns their own machines they can handle these cases directly. When they don't and Amazon is responsible for repairing these machines it might take a lot longer to get things fixed. I hope NYSE is thinking about hardware failures and building a system to check performance of their trading servers before letting them become the active host.
Thinking about failures on the side of the traders: basically if they get unlucky then there could be delays as Amazon rerprovisions them replacement servers in the case of failures. This likely impacts what trading strategies are viable, and could cause them to lose money if machines fail at unlucky times.
NYSE machines hosting the trading server fail: presumably they have hot backups they're ready to switch to but that takes time and will interrupt trading during the cut over. Not to mention that not all failures are hard failures, what if the NIC is downtrained to a lower speed, RAM is slower than it should be, or a single hard drive storing important data crashes? Lots of interesting failure modes. When the NYSE owns their own machines they can handle these cases directly. When they don't and Amazon is responsible for repairing these machines it might take a lot longer to get things fixed. I hope NYSE is thinking about hardware failures and building a system to check performance of their trading servers before letting them become the active host.
Thinking about failures on the side of the traders: basically if they get unlucky then there could be delays as Amazon rerprovisions them replacement servers in the case of failures. This likely impacts what trading strategies are viable, and could cause them to lose money if machines fail at unlucky times.