Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

On July 10, 2019, at the Digital Financial Development Forum of the China Internet Congress, Han Hongyuan, Senior Director of Ant Financial Services Group OceanBase commercialization, delivered a keynote speech, sharing the core technical capabilities of Ant Financial Services Group's distributed architecture and the best business practices of distributed products represented by OceanBase database.

Many people's understanding of Ant Financial Services Group only stays in Alipay. In fact, today's Ant Financial Services Group has gradually grown into a large financial group, covering a wide range of business, including not only more than 870 million real-name registered users, Alipay APP with more than 200 million daily active users, but also sesame credit for 100 million-level mortgage-free business, and online merchant banks that have accumulated more than 1.7 trillion loans.

The background of all these businesses is actually based on a set of technical capabilities of Ant Financial Services Group, which effectively supports the continuous, stable and reliable operation of these businesses through distributed architecture and distributed products. Today, from the point of view of the integrity of technological capabilities, no enterprise can do everything.

As a leading enterprise in the financial technology industry, Ant Financial Services Group and Alibaba Group behind us have worked hard together and have accumulated a lot of technology for many years, covering the whole stack of technology: from the hardware at the bottom to the software of the upper system, and then to the application system of the higher level, we have completely independently developed and independently built the system.

Figure 1: Ant Financial Services Group distributed Financial Core Suite

From the perspective of Ant Financial Services Group's technology accumulation, the overall distributed financial core actually comes from the use of distributed architecture. When the product is organically combined with the distributed architecture, it forms a set of overall supporting capabilities, including massive business processing capabilities and highly reliable and highly available core technical capabilities to help us run all our businesses effectively.

Ant Financial Services Group has a self-developed distributed database and middleware, as well as two big data platforms for technical risk prevention and control and development, operation and maintenance. After completing the construction of such a distributed overall architecture, how to run continuously, stably and reliably under the huge distributed architecture has become a more core problem. After we have done these abstractions at the business level, we have formed our own unique business capabilities of the industry. These products are iterated by exporting to the market to customers and constantly collecting feedback from the market. Instead of studying their own use behind closed doors, these products have actually helped the construction and development of many enterprise business systems.

Figure 2: the value of distributed architecture

Alibaba has large-scale promotional activities every year, and the business has driven the rapid development of technology and created a lot of records that have attracted worldwide attention. There are many factors related to performance and stability in these records, which come from the continuous accumulation and precipitation of technical capabilities behind us. As you can see today, Ant Financial Services Group has been able to achieve 99.99% high availability and more than 250000 high concurrent transactions per second, and so on. Behind these data is the embodiment of the overall technical capability of Ant Financial Services Group's distributed financial core.

Figure the development of 3:OceanBase

In Ant Financial Services Group's overall architecture, there is a very basic element, but also a very core product-our OceanBase distributed database. OceanBase has been developed for nearly ten years. In the past decade, OceanBase has experienced a long process of development. The first version was released in 2010, applied in the core business of Taobao favorites, the 0.5 version was fully applied to the Internet Merchant Bank in 2014, and then to the latest 2.x version released in 2019. At present, a large number of internal and external users are used in the core system.

OceanBase is a distributed relational database with 100% independent intellectual property rights owned by Alibaba and Ant Financial Services Group. OceanBase does not rely on any open source database or storage engine related code, but completely self-developed distributed database products from the first line of code.

Figure 4:OceanBase characteristics

From the point of view of customer use, OceanBase database has a great advantage for users. After we build distributed machines in a distributed way, users still use it in a centralized way. Customers can ignore all background differences and use distributed databases in the same way as traditional centralized databases.

From a performance point of view, OceanBase has created very high performance indicators in 2017. On Singles' Day in 2017, it reached a peak of 256000 transactions per second. When talking about databases, people are often interested in a single performance indicator. In fact, for databases, reliability, availability, and scalability are often more important than a single performance indicator. For a database, whether it can still use the resources quickly after expansion is actually a big challenge in the actual business.

In terms of compatibility, in fact, many financial institutions are already running in traditional databases, and compatibility is a capability that must be considered when we want to migrate these customers from the original database to a more efficient database. So OceanBase has made great efforts to be compatible with the mainstream technology stack, to facilitate users to play the value of existing investment, and to enable users to maintain the original habits.

The last point is also an ability that many financial institutions are very concerned about today-disaster recovery. When the distributed architecture transformation is complete, you can actually take your capabilities to a higher level. As shown in the diagram below, today Ant Financial Services Group / Alipay's main production system and the entire banking system of the online merchant bank we support are actually running on this framework. It is no longer a multi-center disaster preparedness framework, but a multi-location, multi-center and multi-active architecture.

Figure 5: schematic diagram of Ant Financial Services Group's high availability plan for the three places and five centers.

In the case of multi-active architecture, we can actually transfer user traffic arbitrarily between different centers. At the Yunqi Conference in 2018, Hu Xi, deputy CTO of Ant Financial Services Group, simulated digging up the optical cable of nearly half of Alipay servers at the main ATEC forum. As a result, Alipay in the simulated environment completely returned to normal in only 26 seconds. The technical core of this 26-second self-outage server live demonstration is actually the three-place and five-center architecture scheme based on OceanBase.

Figure 6: fiber optic cable cutting at Yunqi Conference in 2018

If you cut any optical fiber today, cutting off any data center will not affect the business operation of Alipay and Internet merchants bank at all. These core technical capabilities of OceanBase database have great room for play and application prospects in many application scenarios of financial institutions. In the future, Ant Financial Services Group OceanBase database will continue to cultivate and polish itself in the field of financial technology, and help more enterprises and more businesses to innovate steadily and continue to grow through iterative products.

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