Preface

Financial-grade cloud-native

The past few years have been a golden age for the rapid adoption of cloud-native concepts. The emergence of new technologies, such as microservices, containers, serverless architecture, and service mesh, has sparked waves of innovation in the tech community, and many developers have enthusiastically embraced them.

However, the adoption of cloud-native technologies in business scenarios, particularly for finance, still faces many challenges. Because the finance industry has strict performance and security requirements, many companies remain hesitant to adopt cloud-native technologies.

This whitepaper shares Ant Group's perspectives and practical experience with "financial-grade cloud-native", including its expertise in related technical fields.

We hope this case study sparks a broader discussion about financial-grade cloud-native.

Middleware and PaaS

The industry lacks a single, standard definition for middleware and PaaS. To ensure clarity and prevent confusion, this section defines how these terms are used in this whitepaper:

Middleware

• Broad-sense middleware

  In a broad sense, middleware is software that resides between application systems and system software. It uses the basic services provided by system software to connect different parts of an application system or different applications across a network, which allows them to share resources and features.

  Another widely accepted definition comes from IDC: Middleware is an independent system software service program that distributed application software uses to share resources across different technologies. Middleware resides on top of the client and server operating systems and manages compute resources and network communications.

  Broad-sense middleware includes the narrow-sense middleware described below and aPaaS, which is a form of PaaS.

• Narrow-sense middleware

  In this whitepaper, middleware is also used in a narrow sense. This refers to the basic components that run on an aPaaS and are closely related to an application's runtime, such as microservices, message communication, and service mesh.

  Note

  Except in "Chapter 4: Introduction to the SOFAStack Product Family", where "middleware" is used in its narrow sense, all other mentions of "middleware" in this whitepaper refer to middleware in its broad sense. In this context, it is equivalent to the cloud-native technology stack.

PaaS

Simply put, PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a layer in the cloud architecture that provides application infrastructure services.

is positioned in the middle layer, between the SaaS and IaaS layers. In traditional on-premises deployment models, the types of application infrastructure are not

Examples include application servers, databases, Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), Business Process Management (BPM), portals, message middleware, and remote object invocation middleware.

Gartner divides PaaS platforms into two categories: Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) for application deployment and runtime, and Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). However, the term PaaS platform usually refers to aPaaS. In the cloud-native context of this whitepaper, PaaS refers to an aPaaS built on containers and Kubernetes.

SOFAStack financial-grade cloud-native technology stack

SOFAStack is a technology stack for building financial-grade, cloud-native distributed applications. It contains the components required to build and run these applications and consists of three main parts: distributed middleware (in the narrow sense), operations management (aPaaS), and R&D efficiency. SOFAStack provides a one-stop solution for the entire application lifecycle, which includes development, deployment, release, monitoring, operations and maintenance (O&M), and project management. It is also compatible with popular open source microservice applications, such as Dubbo and Spring Cloud.