Financial-grade cloud-native full-stack solution
SOFAStack™ (Scalable Open Financial Architecture Stack) is a technology stack for building financial-grade, cloud-native distributed applications. It includes all the components required to build a financial-grade, cloud-native architecture and represents best practices established through extensive use in financial scenarios. It provides a full stack of products for distributed middleware, application operations and management (O&M), technical risk assurance, and R&D efficiency. The solution covers the entire application lifecycle: design, development, delivery, runtime, and O&M. It is compatible with microservice runtime environments such as Dubbo and Spring Cloud and enables a smooth migration of applications to a distributed architecture.
Design phase - Architecture planning and orchestration: Provides standards for architecture administration, management of architectural assets, and architecture health checks. It offers best practices and product support for building a unified technology platform.
Development phase - Agile efficiency and security: Offers capabilities for low-code orchestration, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), end-to-end intelligent testing, and security scans for code and images. These features accelerate agile development and ensure application security.
Delivery phase - Application change control: Provides dual-mode application releases, federated cluster releases, and change defense mechanisms. These features ensure a stable and reliable transition to a cloud-native architecture.
Runtime phase - Service administration and control: Offers dual-mode microservices, high-performance transactional consistency, a cell-based architecture for active geo-redundancy, and an open-source compatible framework. This helps modernize traditional applications and manage services at runtime.
O&M phase - Technical risk assurance: Provides unified application O&M, financial-grade high availability (HA) assurance, fund security reconciliation, and a cloud management Service Catalog. This improves data center stability and makes production O&M more intelligent.
Five generations of architecture and massive-scale financial transaction technology
Over the past twelve years, Ant Group engineers have pioneered a distributed architecture for SOFAStack that is a significant departure from traditional architectures in the finance industry. Internally at Ant Group, SOFAStack has evolved through five architectural generations. It is now widely used across all financial scenarios, including payments, credit, funds, insurance, and banking. It has supported Ant Group through major events such as the Double 11 and Double 12 sales promotions and the Chinese New Year red envelope campaigns. It set a transaction record of 544,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Today, the fifth generation of SOFAStack has fully embraced cloud-native. Its Service Mesh architecture has been implemented at a massive scale within Ant Group and successfully handled the peak traffic of the Double 11 sales promotion. This generation of SOFA has evolved from a framework for distributed services and transactions into an architectural solution for building open and scalable financial-grade systems.
A complete and mature industry-leading solution
SOFAStack addresses a key pain point for traditional financial customers during their digital transformation: the lack of mature, stable, financial-grade distributed architecture products and technical expertise to support a transition from a centralized to a distributed architecture. The SOFAStack solution offers the following advantages:
Complete solution: A complete platform technology solution that covers the full application lifecycle (design, development, runtime, and O&M) and provides financial-grade technical risk assurance.
Technology integration: Integrates and adapts to heterogeneous applications for a smooth migration from traditional architectures. The Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform abstracts away underlying differences and is compatible with heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Open source ecosystem: SOFAStack has extensive community contributions across multiple open source projects and continuously works to set the standard in various technical fields of financial-grade cloud-native. It has open-sourced its middleware and is compatible with the broader cloud-native community ecosystem.
Stable and efficient: Ultra-large-scale active geo-redundancy deployment meets financial-grade HA requirements and ensures an optimal balance between cost and business continuity.
Proven in real-world scenarios: Developed and iterated based on Ant Group's business scenarios, it has been tested by over a decade of major sales promotions across all financial scenarios. The solution has been implemented and validated by dozens of financial enterprise customers.
Embracing the open source ecosystem for a promising future
In the future, SOFAStack will continue to explore the implementation of cloud-native technologies in financial scenarios. It will leverage Ant Group's financial-grade scenarios to establish a blueprint for financial-grade cloud-native solutions. At the same time, SOFAStack will actively embrace and participate in the open source community, contributing its best practices and experience back to the community. It will build cloud-native technology in collaboration with the community, partners, and customers. This will promote the implementation, maturation, and continuous development of cloud-native technology, allowing the entire industry to share the technological benefits of the cloud-native era.