Open source ecosystem
Open source projects
In April 2018, Ant Group announced that it was open-sourcing SOFAStack, its financial-grade distributed architecture. With the trust and support of the community, the project has accumulated over 34,000 stars and more than 100 enterprise users. The project aims to become a benchmark for financial-grade, cloud-native solutions across multiple technical fields. (Statistics as of February 21, 2020).
SOFAStack currently includes the following open source projects:
Core projects
These projects provide a platform that addresses challenges in large-scale publishing, monitoring, and auditing. The platform integrates cloud-native features such as containers, Serverless, and Mesh to improve Operations and Maintenance (O&M) efficiency.
Incubating projects
SOFADashboard, a one-stop management and control platform.
Core tools
The core tools include several projects. SOFABolt is a network communication framework. SOFAJRaft is a production-grade, high-performance Java implementation of Raft. SOFAActs is an automated testing framework. SOFAArk is a lightweight class isolation container.
Ecosystem projects
This category includes MOSN and Seata. MOSN is a high-performance, scalable, and secure network proxy. Seata is a simple, scalable, and distributed transaction framework.
SOFAStack also actively participates in several major open source communities. For example, SOFAStack Message Queue (SOFAMQ) has contributed to the OpenMessaging community.
Open source activities
Beyond the projects themselves, SOFAStack promotes an open approach to its operations. This approach attracts many external developers to community activities. These activities have helped build online and offline developer communities centered around SOFAStack technology.
Active global online and offline communities
To date, SOFAStack has hosted or attended multiple technical evangelism events in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and San Diego, USA.
Additionally, monthly online technical live streams have greatly boosted community engagement. To date, 12 live streams have been held on technical topics such as microservices and distributed transactions, reaching over 100,000 developers.
Active community collaboration
The SOFAStack community launched SOFALab, a collaborative project to create a series of articles on source code analysis. This series is co-authored by the Ant Group SOFA team and community source code enthusiasts, and it details the design and implementation of the code for various components.
To date, the SOFALab open source contribution program has released four series: SOFARPC, SOFABolt, SOFATracer, and SOFAJRaft. Another 4
SOFARegistry, SOFABoot, SOFAArk, and MOSN are developed in collaboration.
Open source influence
International influence
Academic influence
