SOFAStack™ (Scalable Open Financial Architecture Stack) provides the components and best practices for building a financial-grade, cloud-native architecture. These practices have been refined through use in demanding financial scenarios. SOFAStack offers a full-stack solution for project management, microservice application development, deployment, monitoring, operations and maintenance (O&M), and high-availability (HA) disaster recovery. It is compatible with microservice environments such as Dubbo and Spring Cloud, and helps you easily transition your applications to a distributed architecture.
Introduction to SOFAStack
The name SOFAStack originates from SOFA (Service Oriented Fabric Architecture). SOFA is a financial-grade distributed middleware developed by Ant Group over more than a decade. It embodies the distributed architecture practices refined through use in critical financial transaction systems since the founding of Alipay.
The service architecture of SOFAStack is shown in the following figure:
All SOFAStack products and technologies have been tested in the demanding financial scenarios of Ant Group. This lets you iterate on business requirements quickly while ensuring the security of financial transactions. SOFAStack meets the needs for active geo-redundancy and low-cost, rapid scale-out. It also solves the challenges of migrating from traditional centralized architectures. You can use it to build large-scale, HA distributed systems that support financial business innovation. SOFAStack is designed to meet the demands of financial services and pass rigorous tests, making cloud computing more attuned to finance. It is built on three core principles: open, financial-grade, and cloud-native.
Fully open and community-driven: SOFAStack is built on the practices developed at Ant Group and opens the entire field of financial transaction technology. The technology is backward compatible, allowing integration with traditional architectures. It adopts open technical standards and embraces the open source ecosystem. The technology stack is fully open source, community-neutral, and compatible with other open source projects. Its components are pluggable, allowing you to integrate or replace them with other open source components. For more information, see the SOFAStack open source website.
Financial-grade security and reliability: SOFAStack provides all the components needed for building a financial-grade, cloud-native architecture. This lets you focus on business development and meet both current and future needs. It has been tested in large-scale, demanding financial scenarios. SOFAStack handles high-concurrency transactions in a distributed architecture. It ensures data integrity and service availability during system scale-out, disaster recovery, and updates.
Cloud-native architecture for geo-redundancy and scalability: You can use SOFAStack to quickly build a cloud-native microservice system. You can develop cloud-native applications that are more reliable, scalable, and easier to maintain. At the architectural level, SOFAStack provides an evolution path from a single data center to same-city active-active, two-region three-data-center, and active geo-redundancy architectures. This lets you scale and schedule system capacity across multiple data centers. It makes full use of server resources, provides data center-level disaster recovery, and ensures business continuity.