Boerse Stuttgart Group Boosts Performance by Migrating Mission-Critical Oracle Database to AWS

Boerse Stuttgart Group’s data platform is critical to the smooth operation of trade activity. It manages data at every stage of the process—pre-trade, trade, and post-trade—and comprises three Oracle databases. The Security Master Data (SMD) database holds information related to financial instruments such as equities, bonds, and structured securities. The database of the Quality Liquidity Provider (QLP) receives up to 10 billion quotes daily detailing security price changes. And there is iCubex, which, at around 60 TB, combines data from both SMD and QLP databases, providing investors with all the relevant trading information they need for any listed financial instrument.

The central data engineering team faces two significant challenges. “To give you an idea of scale,” says Christian Seemann, team lead IT system technology at Boerse Stuttgart Group, “in 2010, there were 350,000 tradable instruments on the exchange. In 2025, there’s more than 2.6 million.” Along with increasing data volumes, the market changes rapidly: 50,000 new listings a day, 50,000 de-listings, and potentially 600 price changes for a single product every second. All of this was testing the limits of the on-premises infrastructure. With its data center in Stuttgart set to close, the business needed a solution fast.

Boerse Stuttgart Group decided to build on AWS. The goal: migrate to Amazon RDS for Oracle, a fully managed commercial database that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Oracle deployments in the cloud. “We saw that we’d need help with planning and implementation,” says Seemann. “So we worked alongside our AWS account team and customer solutions manager to find the right partner for our complex and time-sensitive lift-and-shift project.”

This led Seemann to Apps Associates. “Technical knowledge—both AWS and Oracle—was important, but so was culture and mindset,” says Seemann. “Apps Associates proved to be a great fit from all perspectives.”

With customers across Europe, the exchange group is regulated by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), among others. “Digital sovereignty is important to us,” says Seemann. “We have requirements for individual services that data processing and storage takes place in Germany, which is why we use the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. In future, we’ll likely use the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region to meet the data residency requirements of our Switzerland subsidiary.”

Boerse Stuttgart Group worked closely alongside AWS to identify and meet its unique digital sovereignty needs with the advanced set of sovereignty controls and security features available in the AWS Cloud. This included using Amazon RDS for Oracle—which is built to comply with Germany’s Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) standard and the ISO-27001 framework—and automatically handles failover in case of infrastructure events. The team also uses AWS Control Tower, which allows it to set up and govern a secure, multi-account environment quickly, and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) with customer-managed keys for data encryption across workloads.

“Both our internal security standards and financial services regulations require disaster recovery tests once a year, as well as with every big change of infrastructure,” says Seemann. “Amazon RDS for Oracle has failover event detection, which automates failover when events occur, so we significantly streamlined the process compared to on-premises. It used to take us several days to perform the correct configuration and complete failover tests on-premises. With AWS, we can initiate manual failover with the click of a button or via an API call.”

Apps Associates also assessed the company’s Oracle workloads to rightsize them to AWS and, as Seemann says, “find out if this huge migration was possible.” For this, it used the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), which models deployment options based on resource use. “The OLA was very useful,” says Seemann. “It gave us insight into the current environment and then transposed that onto AWS. On-premises it’s not feasible, but on AWS, you can visualize the architecture with the click of a button.” Apps Associates also guided Boerse Stuttgart Group through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven framework to assess, mobilize, and migrate and modernize.

With the deadline to vacate its data center looming, Seemann and his team had 42 hours to complete the migration over the first weekend of November. This included moving the SMD and iCubex databases to Amazon RDS for Oracle. Plus, the team migrated its reporting, web processing, and extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

“There was a lot of pressure,” Seemann says. “We had to ensure all the technical components were in place so we could be fully operational in time for the markets opening on Monday. On top of that, the U.S. election was happening on the following Tuesday, so our trading department was getting nervous. Did we really think we could do it?”

At 23:00 on Friday, a team of 60—including Boerse Stuttgart Group—began the migration.  “We didn’t have to worry,” says Seemann, “because we had a powerful implementation partner by our side in Apps Associates. We had a cultural connection, which was key to our success. And the availability of the AWS Enterprise Support team and their assistance, day or night, meant we got all the help we needed, in the moment we needed it.”

Following the migration, Boerse Stuttgart Group has increased platform performance and reduced maintenance time for the central data engineering team. “Since migration, we haven’t had any disruption to data delivery. Due to the stability of the AWS Cloud and our improved throughput rate, the whole environment is 15 percent faster,” says Seemann. “Plus we’ve freed about 2 days a month on maintenance. Team members no longer come in on weekends to install patches and restart servers. That’s all automated for us on AWS.”

Boerse Stuttgart Group, which in 2024 recorded the highest revenues in its history, is continuing to modernize and scale its infrastructure—and its strategic partnership with AWS is helping to accelerate this transformation. “For us, the migration to AWS was a springboard for a total re-architecting of our environment to support our growth,” says Seemann. “On a technical level, this will involve reducing dependencies and separating out transactional and analytics use cases, which will help us optimize performance and give development teams the ability to move faster.”