Strategic partners
Ant Group collaborates with many industry Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and has strategic partnerships with numerous financial institutions. They work together on technology and its application in various scenarios, focusing on joint innovation in fintech and distributed architecture to build an open fintech ecosystem.
Ant Group offers more than 50 open technology products and over 50 digital finance solutions. Through more than 200 partners, Ant Group has supported the digital transformation of over 200 financial institutions. These institutions include more than 100 banks, 60 insurance companies, and 40 fund and securities companies.
Technology partners
Open source technology community
Open source project layout
In April 2018, Ant Group open-sourced SOFAStack, its financial-grade distributed architecture. Backed by community trust and support, the project has gained over 25,000 stars and attracted more than 100 enterprise users. The project continues to set the standard for financial-grade cloud-native technology in several fields. (Data as of July 22, 2021)
SOFAStack currently includes the following open source projects:
Main projects: SOFABoot, a development framework based on Spring Boot. SOFARPC, a production-grade Java Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework. SOFATracer, a distributed tracing system. SOFARegistry, a high availability (HA) service registry.
Incubation projects: SOFADashboard, a one-stop management platform.
Main tools: SOFABolt, a network communication framework. SOFAJRaft, a production-grade high-performance Java implementation. SOFAActs, an automated testing framework. SOFAArk, a lightweight class isolation container.
Ecosystem projects: MOSN, a high-performance and scalable secure network proxy. Seata, a simple, scalable, and autonomous transaction framework.
SOFAStack also actively participates in several important open source communities. For example, SOFAStack Message Queue (SOFAMQ) contributes to the OpenMessaging community.
Activities and community
SOFALab source code co-building
SOFALab is a collaborative initiative in the SOFAStack community to create a series of articles that analyze the source code. This series explains the code design and implementation of each component. The articles are written by the Ant SOFA team and source code enthusiasts.
To date, the SOFALab source code co-building initiative has completed four series covering SOFARPC, SOFABolt, SOFATracer, and SOFAJRaft.
Beyond project-specific activities, SOFAStack maintains an open approach. It encourages external developers to join community activities and build online and offline developer communities around its technology.
Global online and offline community activity
To date, the SOFAStack community has organized or participated in many technology evangelism events in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and San Diego. Regular monthly online technical livestreams also boost community engagement. Twenty live online events have been held on topics such as microservices and distributed transactions, reaching an audience of over 500,000 developers.
Working together to build the cloud-native technology community