Multi-asset trading and investment specialist Saxo Bank will be introducing HTTP/2 and Akamai acceleration for Saxo Bank OpenAPI, the backbone of trading platforms such as SaxoTraderGO.

The change, to be implemented on or shortly after April 1, 2022, aims to optimize performance.

Akamai is a network acceleration provider, which ensures faster and more reliable connectivity from network endpoints to Saxo Banks data centers. Saxo is already using Akamai network acceleration for all connections outside of Europe. After the change Saxo will also accelerate connection for all clients residing within Europe.

HTTP/2 is the successor of HTTP/1.1. With HTTP/2, multiple bidirectional streams are multiplexed over a single TCP connection. Each stream can carry a request/response pair, and multiple requests to a server can be made by using multiple streams.

This functionality essentially provides standard support for “batching” of requests, and it means that going forward you will get the benefit of parallel execution of requests without using Saxo’s current proprietary batching mechanism.

When Saxo Bank introduces HTTP/2, for countries in Europe this protocol upgrade will be combined with a move to Akamai Edge.

The move to Akamai results in better request/response performance. In addition, the responses are gzipped, where in the past it was just plain JSON. This is very standard behavior and most applications would need no change to handle this. But some do.

Once Saxo enables HTTP/2 you may find that your application client library will start sending requests in parallel, possibly resulting in a better experience because of the shorter time to complete all of the calls, which were previously sent in sequence. This is also very standard behavior, and it “should” not break your client.

Saxo recommends that you verify that your application will work smoothly after the transition. For this purpose Saxo has prepared a new host: gateway.home.saxo instead of gateway.saxobank.com. You may use this domain and url to test if your app is ready for the upgrade. After the test, move back to gateway.saxobank.com.

For more information on what to fix, you are encouraged to read the following Saxo blog.

Saxo regularly updates its OpenAPI. It offers:

• Access to all resources and functionality required to build a high-performance multi-asset trading platform.
• Better integration with Saxo Bank for partners and affiliates through a growing set of resources, such as Saxo’s Onboarding API.