Sichuan Rural Credit Union
Customer profile
Sichuan Provincial Rural Credit Union was established in June 2005. It serves agriculture, rural areas, farmers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and county-level economies. The union is dedicated to helping farmers prosper. It focuses on service innovation and credit investment to increase farmer income, improve agricultural efficiency, and promote rural economic growth. These efforts also contribute to the rapid growth of rural credit unions.
Business challenges
The existing IT system has effectively supported business operations. However, the current IT environment faces major challenges in meeting future business development needs. The main challenges are:
Challenges of the traditional architecture
The next generation of banking systems must serve a massive number of customers from different backgrounds. This generates an enormous volume of transactions and data. This is a common technical challenge for the banking industry. Distributed architecture and cloud computing have become the recognized solutions. Key features of a distributed system include high scalability, high processing efficiency, strong fault tolerance, and a low total cost of ownership. These features can solve the performance bottlenecks of traditional architectures. They also meet the high reliability requirements of the financial industry. Siloed systems, non-shared resources, and long deployment cycles make it difficult to launch new services quickly.
Limited rapid response capability
The rapid growth of the mobile Internet has greatly changed customer behavior and preferences. The banking business is also evolving. Business departments are becoming more specialized. New models such as the platform economy and sharing economy are driving innovation in financial service models. This places new demands on the core system's support capabilities and responsiveness. The architecture and technical capabilities of the traditional core system have become a bottleneck that limits the level and speed of product innovation.
Increasing demand for business continuity
The traditional two-region, three-data-center model for cross-data center expansion and cross-region disaster recovery cannot effectively handle business workloads across regions. In terms of cost, the disaster recovery system is only used during a disaster. This results in low resource utilization and high costs. In terms of disaster recovery capability, the system is on cold standby. This leads to low disaster recovery effectiveness and high switchover risks.
Upgraded operating model
China's interest rate liberalization reform is largely complete. Market competition in the banking industry is becoming more intense. Cross-industry competitors from the Internet finance sector have entered traditional financial fields such as payment and financing. This has significantly impacted the branch-based business model of commercial banks. The change in the overall competitive landscape means that banks need a more powerful delivery platform than ever before. This platform must support a new, large-scale, efficient, and low-cost operating system.
Therefore, the provincial credit union initiated this project to migrate from its mainframe. It will build a distributed cloud platform to address the current challenges in its IT architecture. The goals are to achieve rapid application deployment, optimize application performance, improve application efficiency, simplify operations management, and increase availability.
Solution
The distributed cloud platform project enables the complete cloud migration of business application systems and the migration of the core system from the mainframe. This allows for a rapid response to business requirements. It ensures the stable and rapid growth of the credit union's business. It also meets the high availability and security requirements of regulatory authorities. As a result, the credit union can enter the top tier of the industry, better serve rural areas, agriculture, and farmers, and achieve inclusive finance. The main goals are:
Create a secure, reliable, independent, and controllable system by gradually adopting independent, secure, and controllable technical platforms and architectural solutions to ensure IT architecture stability and information security.
Rapidly develop new business platforms, such as for the mobile Internet. Further promote market-oriented reforms to drive business development and innovation.
Customer value
The project achieves the following technical goals:
Build the IaaS layer of the cloud platform
Build a "one cloud, three zones" architecture. This means a unified cloud platform manages cloud resources and services in the development and testing zone, the DMZ, and the internal network zone.
Prepare compute, storage, and network resource pools for deploying new systems to the private cloud. Support the migration of existing x86 and minicomputer systems to the cloud by allowing for the smooth scaling of resource pools.
Build cloud management features to meet the custom requirements of the development, testing, and production zones for cloud services throughout the application lifecycle.
Manage compute, storage, and network resources in a centralized, service-oriented way. This allows for rapid and elastic allocation to support upper-layer applications. Provide on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud computing for each credit union entity.
Build the infrastructure and productivity tools to support a cloud-native application architecture.
Build the PaaS layer of the cloud platform, create a distributed system ecosystem, and implement a distributed cloud-native architecture
Implementing a distributed cloud-native architecture requires continuous innovation in technical specifications, infrastructure, productivity tools, and organizational processes:
Establish a development and runtime platform for distributed architecture. Integrate and encapsulate interfaces for distributed databases, distributed caches, microservice frameworks, and service management and publication processes. This supports the development and management of distributed applications and reduces their development costs.
Implement a DevOps system to support the distributed architecture. This improves development and testing efficiency, increases deployment efficiency, reduces deployment risks, and enhances collaboration between teams. It also breaks down the barriers between development and O&M teams.
For distributed application system O&M, a set of O&M tools is essential to manage large-scale distributed database clusters. These tools must provide management and maintenance features such as automated deployment, unified metric and log monitoring, an O&M management workbench, database version rolling upgrades, and canary releases. This automates O&M, reduces its complexity, and improves its efficiency.
Implement a distributed active-active architecture from the application to the data layer
The next-generation IT architecture built by Sichuan Rural Credit Union must align with advanced industry practices and ensure the ability to continuously iterate and evolve. Currently, this requires implementing a two-region, three-data-center active geo-redundancy architecture. The active-active mechanism covers the access, application, and data layers. A traffic distribution mechanism is established at the access layer, and a disaster recovery switchover mechanism is built based on the active-active architecture.
Establish an enterprise-level architecture specification system
Formulate unified technical specifications at the provincial credit union level. These specifications standardize, constrain, and guide the daily work of each application project team. This ensures that these plans can be implemented and executed effectively.