Jane Street: State machine replication and the modern exchange

Electronic exchanges play an important role in the world's financial system, acting as focal points where actors from across the world meet
to trade with each other.

But building an exchange is a difficult technical challenge, requiring high transaction rates, low, determinstic response times, and serious
reliability.

We'll look at the question of how to design an exchange through the lens of JX, a system that, while not an exchange, is similar in design
to many major US exchanges. JX is designed from the ground up around state machine replication, a classic distributed systems technique.
This choice has profound affects on the resulting system, providing a simple framework for building a reliable platform, while at the same
time requiring very careful performance engineering to make it work effectively. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the design, and
consider the lessons it provides for other transaction processing systems.