Challenge
Officially founded in October 2014, Ant Financial originated from
After investigating several technologies, the team chose
"We've seen at least tenfold in improvement in terms of the operations with cloud native technology, which means you can have tenfold increase in terms of output," says Hang. Ant also provides its fully integrated financial cloud platform to business partners around the world, and hopes to power the next generation of digital banking with deep experience in service innovation and technology expertise. Hang says the team hasn't begun to focus on optimizing the Kubernetes platform, either: "Because we're still in the hyper growth stage, we're not in a mode where we do cost saving yet." And the volume of transactions that Alipay handles for over 900 million users worldwide (through its local and global partners) is staggering: 256,000 per second at the peak of Double 11 Singles Day 2017, and total gross merchandise value of $31 billion for Singles Day 2018. With the mission of "bringing the world equal opportunities," Ant Financial is dedicated to creating an open, shared credit system and financial services platform through technology innovations. Combine that with the operations of its other properties—such as the Huabei online credit system, Jiebei lending service, and the 350-million-user
To address those challenges and provide reliable and consistent services to its customers, Ant Financial embraced
The team investigated several technologies, including Docker Swarm and Mesos. "We did a lot of POCs, but we're very careful in terms of production systems, because we want to make sure we don't lose any data," says Hang. "You cannot afford to have a service downtime for one minute; even one second has a very, very big impact. We operate every day under pressure to provide reliable and consistent services to consumers and businesses in China and globally." Ultimately, Hang says Ant chose Kubernetes because it checked all the boxes: a strong community, technology that "will be relevant in the next three to five years," and a good match for the company's engineering talent. "In late 2016, we decided that Kubernetes will be the de facto standard," says Hang. "Looking back, we made the right bet on the right technology. But then we needed to move the production workload from the legacy infrastructure to the latest Kubernetes-enabled platform. We spent a lot of time learning and then training our people to build applications on Kubernetes well." All core financial systems were containerized by November 2017, and the migration to Kubernetes is ongoing. Ant's platform also leverages a number of other CNCF projects, including
Still, there has already been an impact. "Cloud native technology has benefited us greatly in terms of efficiency," says Hang. "In general, we want to make sure our infrastructure is nimble and flexible enough for the work that could happen tomorrow. That's the goal. And with cloud native technology, we've seen at least tenfold improvement in operations, which means you can have tenfold increase in terms of output. Let's say you are operating 10 nodes with one person. With cloud native, tomorrow you can have 100 nodes." Ant also provides its financial cloud platform to partners around the world, and hopes to power the next generation of digital banking with deep experience in service innovation and technology expertise. Hang says the team hasn't begun to focus on optimizing the Kubernetes platform, either: "Because we're still in the hyper growth stage, we're not in a mode where we do cost-saving yet." The CNCF community has also been a valuable asset during Ant Financial's move to cloud native. "If you are applying a new technology, it's very good to have a community to discuss technical problems with other users," says Hang. "We're very grateful for CNCF and this amazing technology, which we need as we continue to scale globally. We're definitely embracing the community and open sourcing more in the future."Solution
Impact