SOFAStack provides a set of middleware to quickly build financial-grade distributed architectures. This middleware incorporates best practices tested in demanding financial scenarios. To use SOFA middleware, such as microservices or message queues, you can use the SOFABoot framework for development.
SOFABoot
SOFABoot is a development framework from Ant Group that is based on Spring Boot. It enhances the capabilities of Spring Boot and provides lightweight integration for SOFA middleware, allowing each middleware to function as a pluggable component. After integrating the SOFABoot framework, you only need to import the starter for the corresponding middleware. SOFABoot then automatically imports the required dependencies, applies the necessary configurations, and handles subsequent tasks such as health checks and service monitoring. This allows developers to focus on business logic, saving development time and future maintenance costs.
Developing with the SOFABoot framework is similar to developing a "Spring Boot application + SOFA middleware". You can download the SOFABoot project package directly from GitHub or quickly create a SOFABoot project locally using Maven. For more information, see SOFABoot Quick Start.
Microservice platform
The SOFAStack microservice platform provides common solutions for distributed applications. You can use the microservice framework to develop and host applications. When an application starts, it is automatically registered with the service registry. You can then manage and administer services in the microservice platform console.
The microservice platform uses microservices and a service mesh to provide management and administration capabilities that support both the SOFA framework and the Service Mesh architecture. For the SOFA framework, the platform provides microservices that include Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services, dynamic configuration, traffic throttling, and circuit breaking. The service mesh uses Service Mesh technology to support native Dubbo, Spring Cloud, and SOFA frameworks. It non-intrusively provides service management and administration for Dubbo, Spring Cloud, and SOFA applications.
For more information about the microservice platform, see What is the microservice platform.
Message queue
SOFAStack Message Queue is a distributed message middleware built on Apache RocketMQ. It is deeply integrated with the Scalable Open Financial Architecture (SOFAStack). It provides asynchronous decoupling and peak-load shifting for distributed application systems. The service supports multiple message types, such as transactional, ordered, and scheduled messages, and provides financial-grade features such as high reliability, high throughput, and low latency.
For more information about Message Queue, see What is Message Queue.
Distributed tracing
SOFAStack Distributed Tracing is a financial-grade solution for application observability in distributed, microservice, and cloud-native architectures. Using distributed tracing, Operations and Maintenance (O&M) engineers, developers, and architects can clearly visualize the complex call relationships, performance metrics, error information, and associated logs between applications and services in large-scale microservice architectures. This enables DevOps tasks such as root cause analysis, service administration, application development and testing, performance management, performance tuning, architecture control, and fault attribution.
For more information about distributed tracing, see What is distributed tracing.
Task scheduling
SOFAStack Task Scheduling provides a distributed framework for processing tasks. It offers standardized, automated, visual, and centralized scheduling, monitoring, and operations management for tasks across different business systems in financial enterprises. This ensures that all tasks run in an orderly and efficient manner, which greatly reduces development and O&M costs.
For more information about task scheduling, see What is task scheduling.
Distributed transaction
SOFAStack Distributed Transaction is a financial-grade distributed transaction middleware developed by Ant Group. It ensures the eventual consistency of business activities in large-scale distributed environments. Within Ant Group, it is widely used in core financial processes such as trades, transfers, and red packets to support financial operations for hundreds of millions of users.
For more information about distributed transactions, see What is a distributed transaction.
API Gateway
SOFAStack API Gateway is an API management platform that helps enterprises uniformly manage internal and external APIs. It provides high-performance, highly reliable, and secure communication between network-isolated systems, while ensuring the security of internal systems. It meets the needs of enterprises that expose their services to external partners, require interconnection in a hybrid cloud, or need communication between heterogeneous systems on a corporate intranet. It helps customers innovate in various business scenarios.
For more information about API Gateway, see What is a unified API gateway.