Smooth migration and heterogeneous governance
Solution architecture
The dual-mode microservice platform uses both SOFA microservices and Service Mesh microservices. It provides microservice management and governance for both the SOFA framework and the Service Mesh architecture. This resolves integration and transition issues with legacy systems during a technology transformation. This helps financial institutions smoothly transition from a traditional, centralized microservice architecture to a cloud-native architecture.
Solution advantages
Multi-protocol compatibility
You can build microservice applications on the cloud using Ant Group's time-tested SOFA microservice framework. The platform also supports native Dubbo and Spring Cloud applications on the cloud. You do not need to build self-managed services that microservices depend on, such as ZooKeeper, Eureka, or Consul. This greatly reduces operation and maintenance (O&M) costs.
Cross-platform and non-intrusive
Business application systems connect through a lightweight Service Mesh architecture. This provides a non-intrusive service registration and governance solution for applications, reducing transformation costs. The solution also supports container and virtual machine platforms. This meets the needs of enterprise users who have not yet containerized their applications but want to transition to a Service Mesh architecture.
Simple, easy to use, and easy to maintain
The microservice platform provides a centralized, graphical, and user-friendly management platform. It meets enterprise-level requirements for advanced features. It simplifies service management, service governance, observability, and configuration management for distributed applications. This allows users to easily manage and govern application services in a unified way.
Customer use cases
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Spring Cloud open source enhancement
SpringCloud SOFA provides enterprise-level capabilities based on the Spring Cloud ecosystem. It helps developers easily use these components with the Spring Cloud programming model to develop distributed application services.
Solution architecture
Solution advantages
Embrace the ecosystem
The solution seamlessly integrates with the Spring Boot and Spring Cloud ecosystems, resulting in a low learning curve. You can simply import the starter for the corresponding middleware to automatically import the required dependencies and complete the necessary configurations. The platform also supports capability extensions.
Out-of-the-box
The solution is simple and easy to connect. Each middleware is a pluggable component.
Observability
A comprehensive visual interface provides significant convenience for development and operations.
Financial-grade quality assurance
The solution is built on best practices refined by Ant Group over many years to ensure business continuity and stability.
One-stop, financial-grade distributed architecture solution
The solution provides products such as SOFABoot, a registration center, a unified API gateway, MSMQ, task scheduling, distributed transactions, a data access agent, distributed tracing, and service mesh. These products help customers easily transition various applications to a distributed architecture.
Customer use cases
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Unified technology mid-end
Solution architecture
The solution provides end-to-end technology mid-end capabilities across the architecture, development, runtime, and O&M phases. It offers architecture governance and low-code development capabilities while meeting non-functional requirements such as high performance, high availability, high reliability, and scalability.
Solution advantages
Cloud-native application development and governance
Architecture administration, low-code service orchestration, and standardized application templates and components
End-to-end solution
Architecture > Development > Runtime > O&M
Strengths of basic individual components
The solution includes full-stack microservice products and components, open source enhancements, service mesh, MSMQ, distributed transactions, task scheduling, and more.
Architecture oriented towards the desired state, evolving to an active geo-redundancy architecture
Single data center → same-city active-active → active geo-redundancy → hybrid cloud
Financial-grade application PaaS, supporting secure production
Heterogeneous IaaS Adaptation | Multi-cluster | Application Management | Observability | Disaster Recovery
Mesh-based heterogeneous integration for smooth cloud migration of existing applications
Decouples infrastructure from business and supports multiple languages, protocols, and platforms.
Customer use cases
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Unified application O&M
Solution architecture
Distributed systems and cloud adoption provide strong technical support for business innovation in commercial banking financial technology (FinTech). Compared to stable applications on the traditional cloud, agile applications in a distributed architecture have much more complex deployment modes and O&M methods. O&M systems designed for traditional, stable business systems cannot meet the needs of agile businesses. This creates O&M challenges for information technology (IT) teams.
Unified Application O&M is a solution of products and services based on the experience and practices of Alibaba and Ant Group. It addresses the pain points of financial industry customers during their transition to distributed architectures and the cloud. It helps O&M engineers effectively integrate existing tools and experience. It also standardizes, automates, and streamlines processes to improve emergency response efficiency and fault localization capabilities across the entire business trace in a distributed architecture.
Solution advantages
Dual-mode application deployment
The solution supports low-cost upgrades and transformations, allowing you to migrate existing applications to the cloud at a low cost.
Comprehensive O&M and governance for unitized architectures
The solution provides a unitized architecture for O&M and control, including unitized disaster recovery, monitoring, traffic shifting, canary releases, and metadata management.
Federated control
The solution provides federated control for unified management of multiple clusters from a single perspective and is compatible with heterogeneous data centers.
Strong change risk control to reduce change risks
The solution provides comprehensive application O&M assurance capabilities to achieve fast and stable architecture upgrades.
Service Catalog
You can customize the change service orchestration to improve O&M efficiency.
Customer use cases
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High availability and disaster recovery
Solution architecture
The 'five data centers across three regions' deployment mode is a technical innovation. This architecture solution avoids latency from cross-data-center and cross-city access. It enables a true active geo-redundancy deployment. It not only eliminates the separate cold backup center found in traditional 'two-region, three-data-center' architectures but also enhances disaster recovery and high availability. This provides significant advantages in cost, scalability, and high availability.
Solution advantages
Ensure data security and business continuity
The solution eliminates a critical flaw of traditional architectures where activating disaster recovery could lead to data damage or loss. This ensures financial-grade data integrity and consistency.
Lossless disaster recovery across multiple data centers and regions
The solution implements a unitized architecture for a true active geo-redundancy deployment. This supports more stable, efficient, and cost-effective financial-grade services. It also significantly upgrades disaster recovery capabilities to a lossless level across different regions.
Improve data center resource utilization
The solution eliminates the shortcomings of the traditional 'two-region, three-data-center' architecture, such as having a separate cold backup center that does not provide services during normal operation. This greatly reduces operating costs.
Customer use cases
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Xinchuang Architecture
Solution architecture
With changes in global technology and ecosystems, building an innovative and secure IT system has become a key focus for the country and its financial customers. This involves using domestically produced key systems, applications, and hardware to develop self-developed chips, platforms, and an ecosystem.
As a technology company with a strong financial background, Ant Group has proactively tackled these technical challenges. It is the first to launch solutions for innovative and secure scenarios in the finance industry, such as heterogeneous compatibility across multiple processors and operating systems. The solutions adapt to third-party Central Processing Units (CPUs) and operating systems. This helps financial institutions achieve innovation in IT applications faster, more stably, and more effectively. It also deepens the application in pilot scenarios, including office systems, general business systems, and critical business systems.
Solution advantages
Independent R&D
The solution is a completely self-developed financial distributed architecture, refined over 5 architectural iterations and 12 years.
Open source and open
Over 10 core components have been open-sourced on GitHub. We continuously operate the SOFA community and have a complete Independent Software Vendor (ISV) ecosystem.
Mature product
The product is proven in practice by numerous customers, such as MYbank, Tianhong Asset Management, ICBC, PSBC, China CITIC Bank, Zhejiang Rural Credit, and Bank of Nanjing. It is a leading commercial product by market share in the Chinese mainland.
Customer use cases
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Financial-grade cloud-native
Solution architecture
With the growth of the Internet and the digital economy, financial institutions must undergo digital transformation, make their businesses more agile, and adapt services to specific scenarios to handle the impact of new business models. During this transformation, they often face pain points such as inflexible IT system architectures, long business delivery cycles, low O&M efficiency, and low reliability. Financial enterprises can use a range of cloud-native technologies, such as container-based agile infrastructure and microservice architectures, to solve these problems. The finance industry has always been heavily regulated, with high security and complexity requirements. With reforms in financial supervision, regulatory authorities have very strict requirements for the construction and O&M of financial IT systems. This necessitates a financial-grade cloud-native solution that is secure, reliable, and high-performing.
Ant Group's self-developed financial-grade distributed architecture platform focuses on providing financial users with full-stack infrastructure capabilities. It ensures risk security while enabling agile iteration of business requirements. It also meets the needs for active geo-redundancy and low-cost, rapid scale-out. The platform resolves the difficulties of transitioning from traditional centralized architectures and builds a large-scale, high-availability distributed system architecture to support financial business innovation.
Solution advantages
Asset loss prevention and lossless disaster recovery
The solution ensures the system can handle high-concurrency transactions in a distributed architecture. It guarantees no data loss and service availability during system expansion, disaster recovery, and update releases.
Active geo-redundancy and unlimited scalability
The solution allows system capacity to be expanded and scheduled across multiple data centers. This makes full use of server resources, provides data center-level disaster recovery, and ensures business continuity.
Full-stack openness and open source collaboration
The technology stack is fully open source and co-developed. It remains community-neutral and is compatible with the community and the open source ecosystem. Components are pluggable. SOFAStack components can be integrated with or replaced by other open source components.
Customer use cases
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Internet finance mid-end
Based on Alipay's technology system and ecosystem, this solution helps banks build an Internet finance mid-end. This opens up collaboration in business areas such as consumer finance, corporate finance, and wealth management. By leveraging the Internet finance ecosystem, banks can improve their business structure, overcome time and space limitations, expand revenue sources, upgrade risk control capabilities, and enhance financial service efficiency to achieve an 'Internet Plus' transformation.
Solution architecture
Based on the best practices of Ant Group's mid-end strategy and architecture, this solution abstracts enterprise-level public capabilities to form a Business Mid-end system. This system is built on customer service, operational services, and a distributed financial core suite. It creates an open, scalable, component-based, and distributed business architecture. This architecture supports rapid, efficient, and low-cost business innovation to meet the fast-changing development needs of Internet scenarios.
Solution advantages
Powerful business support capabilities
The solution abstracts enterprise-level public capabilities to form major capability centers, which are then integrated into the Business Mid-end. This enhances business agility with powerful reusable technology, supporting rapid, efficient, and low-cost innovation.
Rapid iteration and innovation capabilities
The solution implements a grand mid-end strategy. Based on capability centers and the distributed financial core suite, it supports rapid product combination and innovation. Backed by a powerful Business Mid-end, it enables rapid product iteration to meet changing demands.
Standardization and scalability
The mid-end hides technical complexity from the business. This allows mid-end participants to collaborate and develop using unified standards, which reduces coordination costs. It can be customized, extended, or configured based on existing system capabilities. This improves reusability while meeting diverse requirements.
Distributed technology capabilities
The solution provides a financial-grade distributed framework and a financial-grade distributed database. It supports multiple tenants and high-concurrency business scenarios with massive numbers of users. It also provides mid-end capabilities for big data and artificial intelligence, and supports an active geo-redundancy architecture for the distributed financial core system.
Customer use cases
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Internet banking
In the era of digital banking, the comprehensive digital transformation of retail banking involves creating an online bank. This uses FinTech to fully digitize, intelligentize, and create an ecosystem for bank channels, customers, products, and risk control. The IT architecture adopts a 'large mid-end, small front-end' model to achieve rapid business innovation. The technology uses a financial-grade distributed architecture to build dual-mode IT capabilities.
Solution architecture
An internet bank is a new type of banking system built using internet methods and architecture. It uses an internet-centric approach to build platforms and ecosystems by integrating e-commerce, local lifestyle services, and financial scenarios. This process improves the efficiency of financial services by making them online, intelligent, and part of an integrated ecosystem.
Problems it can solve
Online business: Improves service efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances the user experience.
Intelligent decision-making: Implements a business decision-making system based on data intelligence.
Ecological platform: Opens up financial capabilities to empower the ecosystem.
Agile architecture: Achieves agility with financial-grade cloud-native technology.
Architecture advantages
Independent R&D: Core financial technologies are developed in-house.
Agility: A financial-grade distributed architecture allows for rapid iteration and elastic scaling.
Cost-effectiveness: The solution provides high reliability, high performance, low cost, and flexible expansion.
Solution advantages
Financial-grade cloud-native architecture system
Technically, the solution introduces Alibaba's full-stack cloud-native architecture technology system. This includes the Apsara platform, an enterprise-level distributed architecture platform, the OceanBase database, a big data platform, Mobile PaaS, and a risk control platform. This achieves comprehensive cloudification of Internet finance and big data services, improving the efficiency of IT delivery.
Dual mid-end architecture drives the transition from IT to DT
Following the 'large mid-end, small front-end' architectural concept, the solution builds a dual mid-end system with a Business Mid-end and a data mid-end. This approach, where technology builds the stage for business to perform, improves the efficiency of business innovation and reduces its cost.
Customer use cases
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Mainframe/AS400 banking core system migration
The migration of a new-generation core banking system is not only a key task in eliminating mainframes but also crucial for a bank's digital transformation. This core development suite combines highly versatile and stable core business capability components with a technology platform. It was developed based on Ant Group's experience with scenarios such as the Double 11 sales promotions and Yu'e Bao product innovations. It aims to provide standardized, reusable financial services and open programming interfaces for Software as a Service (SaaS). It helps financial institutions quickly build various business products, such as deposits, loans, remittances, and Internet finance. It also shields upper-layer applications from the technical complexities of a distributed architecture, which lowers the learning curve and accelerates the transition.
Solution architecture
The solution is oriented around customer relationships, centered on product relationships, supported by asset and pricing management, and based on an accounting system. As the business grows, you can add new modules, ensuring scalability.
Agile product innovation
The solution fully implements the 'grand mid-end' concept. It organizes and abstracts the atomic capabilities of the Business Mid-end according to business domain functions. These are then integrated into capability components that align with business language. This transforms the entire product production process, from product design and system architecture to the research and development (R&D) flow. Business capabilities that meet specific requirements can be quickly assembled, which reduces trial-and-error costs and enables personalized services.
Multi-dimensional pricing system
Based on a rich set of pricing models, the solution establishes an efficient, flexible, and unified pricing platform. This platform supports diverse pricing needs for fees, interest rates, exchange rates, and tax rates with different rules across various businesses. It can also create corresponding pricing plans based on factors such as customer category, product, service, channel, balance, monetary amount, and number of transactions to provide differentiated pricing services.
Separation of transaction and accounting
The solution provides an accounting and bookkeeping engine that decouples transaction process control from accounting. Through flexible accounting rule settings, it generates accounting information for multiple legal entities, institutions, and sets of books. This meets accounting standard and information disclosure requirements.
Flexible asset core
The solution enables the rapid assembly and generation of different payment tools (such as credit cards and debit cards) and marketing tools (such as red envelopes, vouchers, and points) in complex financial consumption scenarios. It can also seamlessly integrate with cashier systems to meet diverse market demands and promote business development.
Unified asset exchange
The solution shields upper-layer business systems from the business and technical complexities of underlying asset tool processing logic. It provides a single point of access for asset tools to be used in multiple scenarios. It supports business operations in controlling dimensions such as availability, visibility, sorting, and credit control for asset tools in different scenarios. By feeding data on user habits back into the asset exchange process, it delivers a personalized user experience.
Integrated offline interest calculation and settlement
You can flexibly switch to an offline computing mode based on the customer scale. For many accounts, it uses the big data processing capabilities of the offline computing platform to efficiently complete interest calculation and settlement.
Hierarchical and relational account system
The hierarchical and relational account system can be flexibly combined to support various scenarios, such as Internet consumption, e-commerce, platform financing, group account management, and regulatory accounts.
Solution advantages
The solution decouples applications based on the concept of distributed services. It uses flexible transactions to ensure data consistency, creating a large platform with micro-applications. A key feature is 24/7 online availability. It is especially suited for elastic service scenarios with frequent, small-value orders and sudden traffic bursts from events such as flash sales.
Financial-grade high reliability
The solution deeply integrates the OceanBase distributed database and the SOFA financial-grade cloud-native distributed framework. This ensures elastic scaling for applications and data, while providing high availability (Recovery Time Objective (RTO)=0, Recovery Point Objective (RPO)<30s) and consistency. Technical risk control components refined from Ant Group's own business, such as the 'fund reconciliation system' and 'end-to-end stress testing', ensure that financial security and technical risks are effectively controlled in a distributed architecture.
Hotspot account immunity
The solution includes built-in hotspot account solutions such as summary bookkeeping and buffered bookkeeping. By analyzing system operations, it automatically discovers hotspot accounts and makes intelligent decisions. It selects the most suitable hotspot account solution for the current scenario to quickly resolve the issue. This gives the system strong immunity to sudden hotspot account problems in various scenarios.
Reduce total cost of ownership
The solution helps customers quickly build solutions such as 'core business systems' and 'Business Mid-end', which reduces time costs. The open X86 architecture, flexible elastic scheduling, unified information standards, and supporting distributed governance tools help customers perform precise and efficient governance and O&M, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Customer use cases
None
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