Inside the year-long test a global high-frequency trading firm gave CIQ, and what it took to turn a one-year renewal into a three-year commitment
The hardest Enterprise Linux customer to win is the one who doesn't need you. A firm that builds its own hardware, runs a modified kernel, and keeps kernel engineers on staff already has the expertise most vendors are selling. It needs a vendor that can keep pace with an engineering team that already moves fast, and it will know within a year whether that vendor actually can.
That's the test a global high-frequency trading firm gave CIQ.
At a glance
- Who: A global high-frequency trading firm (name withheld), active in futures, options, equities, and digital asset markets worldwide
- What they run: Roughly 15,000 servers in production, global caches at more than 100 sites, and two large compute clusters, all on infrastructure the firm builds and operates itself
- What's on it: RLC Pro with Long Term Support, standardized across the firm's certified and frozen production environment
- What changed: A one-year renewal became a three-year agreement, with contract value growing each year through 2029
- Why RLC Pro: CIQ-built signed kernels and backports delivered against the firm's own certification schedule, not an upstream release calendar
A firm that builds its own infrastructure, down to the kernel
This firm assembles its own hardware, runs a lightly modified Linux kernel with in-house drivers, and employs kernel engineers who maintain code upstream. It controls what it mirrors internally, freezes the operating system versions it certifies, and moves its fleet to a new version on its own schedule, not a vendor's.
An environment this specialized needs an Enterprise Linux vendor whose engineering can actually match it. The firm looked to CIQ for the parts of the stack outside its own remit: kernel backports its engineers request, package builds for the architectures it runs, and a supported distribution its teams can standardize on while keeping full control of what they mirror and when they upgrade.
The challenge: earning a place next to an in-house kernel team
This is a firm that keeps kernel engineers on staff, so any vendor relationship has to earn its place next to that team, not just fill a gap in it.
At a prior renewal, the firm set that bar explicitly. It renewed for a single year instead of a longer term, and named the pace it expected: kernel backports and package builds delivered against its own certification schedule, not an upstream release calendar. For a firm that freezes its operating system before production, that pace is the whole relationship. A slow backport isn't a minor inconvenience, it's a gap the firm's own engineers have to cover themselves.
CIQ treated that one-year renewal as the brief for the year ahead.
The solution: signed kernels and backports on the firm's own schedule
CIQ rebuilt how it produces and ships kernels and tightened turnaround on the requests the firm's engineers filed. Two changes mattered most.
CIQ consolidated to CIQ-built, signed kernels across every supported Rocky Linux version. The firm upgrades to Long Term Support without signing-key friction, and gets vendor-controlled builds across every minor version instead of relying on community artifacts for the versions it runs in production.
CIQ's engineering team also took on the specific backports and package builds the firm's production engineers requested, and matched their timeline rather than an upstream one.
Three requests that tested CIQ
Custom FUSE kernel module patches. The firm maintains its own FUSE kernel module. CIQ backported the specific patches the firm's engineers needed, rather than pointing them toward a generic upstream fix.
Package builds for architectures most vendors don't prioritize. CIQ built full systemd package sets for the aarch64 and i686 targets the firm actually deploys, along with analysis of a custom glibc build the firm had maintained internally for years.
A same-day turnaround, tested against a real deadline. After the firm moved to a new Rocky Linux 9.6 LTS repository, a follow-up package request came in. CIQ resolved it the same day.
Through the year, the firm also pushed CIQ on forward-looking hardware, asking it to validate Rocky Linux on the latest NVIDIA accelerated systems ahead of the firm's own deployment plans. Those requests moved the account from reactive ticket handling to joint roadmap planning.
The result
The firm signed a three-year agreement with CIQ, with contract value growing each year of the term, through 2029. The customer that would not commit beyond 12 months a year earlier chose to anchor its production Linux on RLC Pro for three.
"CIQ operates like an extension of our own engineering team: fast, disciplined, and focused on exactly what we need. That's worth three years." – Infrastructure lead, global high-frequency trading firm
The firm has also set its upgrade path with CIQ, planning to move directly to Rocky Linux 10.2 and adopt RLC Pro 10 as soon as it's production-ready. CIQ has made that work a priority for the account.
The same discipline, applied to security response
The speed and discipline this firm tested isn't unique to one demanding account. It's the same standard CIQ holds itself to when a kernel vulnerability hits every customer at once, not just one.
- While you were innovating, we were watching the kernel: why CIQ engineers running the same platform they support means the vulnerabilities that matter to customers are ones CIQ already lives with
- Copy Fail is a local privilege escalation exploit. Here's what CIQ did about it: patched kernels in production nearly a week ahead of other distributions
- Another local privilege escalation exploit, and here's what CIQ did: the same response pattern, repeated on a second, unrelated CVE
Built on a partnership that keeps proving itself
None of this happens without CIQ's engineering treating every request as seriously as the firm's own kernel team would. Signed kernels built consistently across every version, backports turned around against the customer's schedule instead of CIQ's convenience, and an account run on joint roadmap planning instead of reactive tickets: that's not a marketing position; it's what earned three years of trust from a firm that didn't need to give it.
If your team runs with that same discipline, certifying its own OS and unwilling to wait on a slow vendor, CIQ is built to match it. Talk to CIQ about RLC Pro.
