Overview

Scalable Open Financial Architecture Stack (SOFAStack™) is a collection of distributed middleware components tested by the internal financial business of Ant Group for over ten years. SOFAStack™ is used as a distributed architecture for applications used in the key financial transaction systems of Alipay. Alipay is an e-wallet platform that provides services to more than 800 million users. SOFAStack™ provides full-stack solutions for service creation, application development, deployments and releases, service governance, monitoring and O&M, and disaster recovery for high availability. SOFAStack™ can help prevent risks that occur due to digital transformation in the finance industry. SOFAStack™ is compatible with microservices runtimes, such as Dubbo and Spring Cloud, and provides services that cover the entire lifecycle of applications. SOFAStack™ allows enterprises to develop different types of applications that adopt a distributed architecture.

Full-Stack and Open-Source

SOFAStack™ is developed based on the accumulated experience and expertise of Ant Group and uses open-source financial transaction technologies. SOFAStack™ is backward compatible and allows users to integrate classic architectures into their financial applications. SOFAStack™ is developed based on open standards. This service allows you to use all resources in the open-source ecosystem. The technology stack of SOFAStack™ is open-source and consists of software developed by open-source communities. You can install and remove different types of components separately and replace or integrate the components with other open-source components.

Meet the Requirements of Financial Asset Security and Lossless Disaster Recovery

SOFAStack™ provides all the required components to develop a cloud-native architecture for financial enterprises. This way, the enterprises can focus on business development and innovation. SOFAStack™ is a tested service and can handle challenges in extreme scenarios in the finance industry. SOFAStack™ ensures that distributed architectures can withstand the heavy loads of transactions in high concurrency scenarios. SOFAStack™ also ensures the integrity of data and the high availability of services in system expansion, disaster recovery, and version release scenarios.

Build a Cloud-Native Architecture to Support Active Geo-redundancy and Unlimited Expansion

SOFAStack™ ensures high reliability and scalability during application development to help simplify the O&M of cloud-native applications. SOFAStack™ allows enterprises to transform their disaster recovery systems from a single data center to active-active disaster recovery, three data centers across two regions, or active geo-redundancy. This way, enterprises can expand their systems and schedule resources across multiple data centers to increase the utilization of server resources, improve the disaster recovery capability, and ensure business continuity.

Benefits

Reduce Learning Costs by 92%

Developers can use the cloud-native capabilities of SOFAStack™ to develop applications without understanding the full-stack. This helps reduce the costs of technical training.

Improve Development Efficiency by 80%

SOFAStack™ reduces the technical skill gap between developers and distributed middleware and reduces the time required to understand complex business logic. Developers can use microservices technology and reuse existing components to simplify application development.

Save O&M Manpower by 90%

SOFAStack™ provides O&M capabilities such as resource scaling, monitoring, and alerting. SOFAStack™ also provides distributed middleware components and adopts the service mesh architecture to reduce the complexity of managing and maintaining cloud-native applications.

Meet Compliance Requirements

SOFAStack™ normalizes the disaster recovery standards for cloud-native applications to ensure security compliance and high availability. This reduces information technology risks in financial services.

Improve Business and Resource Elasticity

Resources in SOFAStack™ can be launched within a few milliseconds to meet the requirements of fast business development and expansion.

Features

Middleware

SOFAStack™ allows financial enterprises to seamlessly migrate applications that use traditional architectures. Enterprises can use SOFAStack™ to handle the challenges related to service upgrades and releases, service and data expansion, transaction consistency, second-level disaster recovery, and resource scaling and scheduling. Microservices Based on Microservices and Service Mesh Modes Provides SDKs, the microservices architecture, and the service mesh architecture to allow enterprises to develop distributed systems that provide high performance and are highly scalable, cost-effective, lightweight, and intrusion-free. Message Queues Supports asynchronous decoupling and load shifting based on Apache RocketMQ. Distributed Transactions Provides distributed transaction middleware developed by Ant Group for financial enterprises to ensure the eventual consistency of transactions in large-scale distributed computing environments. Task Scheduling Supports distributed computing jobs and allows financial enterprises to schedule, monitor, and maintain jobs in different business systems in a standardized, automated, visualized, and centralized manner. API Gateways Helps enterprises manage service APIs used by internal and external users. This ensures the efficiency, security, and reliability of intercommunication between systems isolated by networks and ensures the security of internal systems. Data Access Proxies Provides distributed database middleware for financial enterprises to support horizontal partitioning, seamless scaling, and read and write splitting.

Operations & Maintenance

SOFAStack™ Cloud Application Fabric Engine (CAFE) provides Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities, such as application management, releases and deployment, operation orchestration, monitoring and analytics, and disaster recovery. You can use the capabilities during the entire lifecycle of application development to meet the requirements for managing and maintaining financial applications that use classic architectures or cloud-native architectures. This helps enterprises seamlessly migrate their applications from traditional architectures and reduces information technology risks. Services for Containerized Applications Provides standard Kubernetes capabilities and features developed by Ant Group to allow enterprises to manage and release applications during the lifecycle of the applications. Real-Time Business Monitoring Helps O&M engineers, R&D engineers, and site reliability engineers quickly identify issues, locate causes, analyze issues, and resolve issues. This ensures the high availability of your applications. Services for Classic Applications Allows you to manage and control application releases based on VMware modes. This way, you can update applications or distribute traffic among multiple application versions through a data center.

Research and Development Efficiency

SOFAStack™ is developed based on the accumulated experience and expertise of Ant Group in the Internet finance industry. SOFAStack™ is a one-stop intelligent R&D platform designed to help financial enterprises complete digital transformation. SOFAStack™ allows agile, reliable, and innovative application development and delivery and can help reduce compliance risks and ensure the quality of the delivered applications. SOFAStack™ allows enterprises to develop financial applications that support high availability and continuous iterations. Continuous Delivery Provides best practices based on Gitflow Workflow. Users can orchestrate components to scan code, evaluate code, perform automated testing, and automate compiling and deployment. Continuous delivery can significantly improve the efficiency of research and development. Project Collaboration SOFAStack™ is a simple, easy-to-use, and integrated R&D collaboration platform. SOFAStack™ allows you to manage the R&D requirements, jobs, defects, iterations, and dashboards of different projects in multiple dimensions. SOFAStack™ also provides best practices for project management to support lightweight, agile development.