A decade of Ant Middleware
Since its founding, Ant Group has used technology to reshape payment and micro-loan services. We believe five foundational technologies will remain the cornerstones of financial technology innovation: blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), security, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing. However, the most fundamental capability among these is computing power. Only by continuously improving computing power can we adapt to the ever-changing applications of the future. For Ant Group, this means solving two critical computing problems: online transaction processing and financial-grade data intelligence. In a narrow sense, these are the problems of On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). The first step to achieving large-scale, financial-grade transaction technology is the implementation of distributed financial middleware.
The evolution of middleware represents the upgrade and transformation of a technical architecture. This evolution is closely related to a company's organizational model and business practices. In theory, middleware acts as a connecting layer that abstracts away the underlying heterogeneous hardware, software, and network resources. It provides a unified computing environment and manages the entire application lifecycle, including development, operations, and maintenance. This role makes middleware very valuable to a business. According to Conway's law, the design of a software and system architecture is closely related to a company's organizational structure, business processes, and communication methods. Therefore, as a business grows to a massive scale and develops through rapid iterations, the quality and capability of its middleware directly determine the success of its technical architecture. With the rise of digital commerce, middleware has become part of the digital business itself. Previously, middleware was not visible to the business and did not provide direct value to end users. Ant Group is a technology company that aims to bring equitable financial services to the world. As a native digital enterprise and a representative of digital commerce, Ant Group has forged its own path for more than a decade. Since establishing Alipay in 2004, it has developed a proprietary, financial-grade middleware technology for large-scale Internet finance applications.
Since the first Double 11 event in 2008, Ant Group has faced massive traffic surges every year. This has pushed the company to constantly break through the limits of existing technology, leading to unprecedented technical achievements in the finance realm. Specifically, the middleware technology, developed in-house over ten years, handled a peak of 544,000 transactions per second during Double 11 in 2019. In contrast, the peak during Double 11 in 2010 was only 20,000 transactions per minute.
