In recent years, cloud-native technologies have rapidly developed and matured. These technologies, characterized by containers, microservices, and dynamic orchestration, are driven by the momentum of the Kubernetes platform. This trend has not only reshaped the service architecture and market landscape for cloud computing vendors but has also driven collaborative evolution across four layers: application infrastructure, application software architecture, development patterns, and deployment architecture. This evolution brings new business value and technical advantages to enterprises and organizations in various industries, including the finance sector.
Quantifiable benefits
The interviewed enterprises achieved the following quantifiable benefits. The benefit amounts shown are risk-adjusted present values (PV) estimated based on customer usage:
92% reduction in developer learning costs
Before using a distributed microservices architecture, the interviewed customers chose an open source development path. To develop on microservice components, developers needed to understand the entire IT infrastructure and its underlying logic. This required full-stack learning. With the cloud-native capabilities of Ant SOFAStack, developers no longer need to understand the full stack to achieve code complete. This greatly reduces developer learning costs.
80% increase in application development efficiency
After adopting Ant SOFAStack, developers at the interviewed enterprises no longer need to understand the complex details of distributed middleware or spend significant effort on business logic. They can also use commercial support for the microservices model to accelerate the microservicization and reuse of business logic. Continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities simplify the application development cycle. The cloud-native foundation also makes it possible to adopt a data mid-end and a Business Mid-end.
90% savings in O&M labor costs
The SOFAStack platform provides interviewed enterprises with one-stop O&M capabilities, such as elastic scaling and monitoring and alerting. Native support for distributed middleware and service mesh reduces the complexity of cloud-native application O&M. This frees O&M engineers from manual monitoring and management jobs and improves their event-driven business response capabilities. This saves labor costs for the enterprise. The ratio of O&M engineers to developers decreased from 1:10 to 1:100.
Non-quantifiable benefits
Increased revenue from supporting business bursts
When the interviewed enterprises faced sudden increases in business volume, the container instances on the SOFAStack platform optimized resource startup speed to the millisecond level. Combined with the elastic scaling capability of container clusters, Transactions Per Second (TPS) increased from 3,000–5,000 a few years ago to a peak of 50,000. This supports business expansion and opens new possibilities for revenue growth.
Resource savings from elastic scaling
The on-demand elastic scaling capability of the SOFAStack platform eliminates much of the initial work, such as machine procurement and reserved inventory configuration. It provides more flexible support for highly dynamic businesses through on-demand scaling.
Ensured compliance and high system availability
With increasingly strict banking regulations, the core links of the SOFAStack cloud-native architecture have unified standards for disaster recovery. This ensures enterprise compliance and high system availability. It also reduces compliance risks for financial enterprises.
Improved employee experience
After adopting SOFAStack, employees in both the business and technology departments of the interviewed enterprises were able to optimize their work and improve efficiency. This had a positive indirect impact on the employee experience.
For more information, see The Total Economic Impact of Ant SOFAStack: Financial-Grade Cloud-Native Market Trends and the Cost Savings and Business Advantages of a Cloud-Native Platform.