Plain-English primer on CLOBs, market vs. limit orders, price-time priority, and the core design choices behind modern matching engines: latency, reliability, replication, consensus, storage.
For exchange founders, CTOs, product and ops leaders, and market operators who need to understand how orders flow through a CLOB and how matching rules translate into fills.
It’s also for decision-makers weighing architecture trade-offs: cloud vs. bare metal for latency, single vs. replicated engines for reliability, and how consensus, snapshotting, and external storage keep systems consistent and auditable under load.
You’ll learn how CLOB mechanics drive price formation, how market vs. limit vs. stop orders behave, and why price-time priority determines who gets filled first. The book then explains the engine as a state machine: what inputs/outputs exist, and which external pieces (gateways, storage) are required for a usable exchange.
You’ll also learn to navigate the big engineering choices: balancing latency and reliability, when to replicate, how consensus keeps replicas consistent, and how snapshots + event logs enable fast recovery and compliant reporting. Finally, you’ll see how to plan for throughput surges and segment workloads, with a reference architecture you can use to brief stakeholders.
