Distributed Design Pattern: Data Federation for Real-Time Querying

[Financial Portfolio Management Use Case]

In modern financial institutions, data is increasingly distributed across various internal systems, third-party services, and cloud environments. For senior architects designing scalable systems, ensuring real-time, consistent access to financial data is a challenge that can’t be underestimated. Consider the complexity of querying diverse data sources — from live market data feeds to internal portfolio databases and client analytics systems — and presenting it as a unified view.

Problem Context:

As the financial sector moves towards more distributed architectures, especially in cloud-native environments, systems need to ensure that data across all sources is up-to-date and consistent in real-time. This means avoiding stale data reads, which could result in misinformed trades or investment decisions.

For example, a stock trading platform queries live price data from multiple sources. If one of the sources returns outdated prices, a trade might be executed based on inaccurate information, leading to financial losses. This problem is…