Understanding the layout of the electronic trading ecosystem
First, we start by providing the higher-level layout of the electronic trading ecosystem we will be building in the rest of this book. Before we get into the details, we start with the disclaimer that this is a simplified design of what happens in practice in electronic trading markets. Simplification was necessary to limit the scope to what can be covered in this book; however, it is still an accurate but simplified representation of what you will find in practice. The other thing to note is that the goal here is to understand the design and implementation of low-latency applications, so we ask you to focus more on the application of C++ and computer science principles that we apply and less on the details of the trading ecosystem itself.
Now, let us kick off this introduction by defining and explaining the overall topology of the electronic trading ecosystem and the components involved.