For example: The world is not the world, it is the world – Diamond Sutra
The concept of “middle Stage” :

But now it blots out the sky, is talked about, has become climate. As an old saying goes, if you cannot beat them, join them. The big Internet companies are good at churning out concepts and quickly taking the high ground, and you have to describe and discuss things in their semantics.

On the other hand, it can also be seen that the abstraction of some concepts of Internet enterprises gives traditional industries a clear thinking framework and methodology in the process of moving their business to the Internet. The existence of the concept of “China” the biggest value, is to act as “guidelines” to the traditional enterprise there are ways of using some technical architecture and some platform to establish a “middle tier”, formed from the Web 2.0 era of the Internet “store” at the front desk and even in the 1990 s to the beginning of this century the historical legacy of the smooth transition of the value of the link between the core system.

From the technical point of view, for enterprises in traditional industries, the process of transition from informatization to digitalization requires

  • Solve the problem of “connection between heterogeneous technology systems belonging to different generations and Internet portals”
  • Solve the problem of “information islands and chimneys formed in the information age”
  • Solve the problem of “operation management and exhibition industry online”.
How to solve these problems? Create new links and introduce the middle layer.


Get rid of the “Taiwan” — start with the middle tier

Renowned computer scientist David John Wheeler has the oft-cited saying “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection” – Any problem in computer science can be solved by adding a layer of indirection (the phrase was first quoted and popularized by Turing award winner Butler Lampson in his 1993 Turing Award speech).

In the computer world, the middle tier is like a barbecue – there’s nothing a layer can’t solve indirectly. If there are, there are two layers.

The middle stage, the middle layer and the middleware are effective methods and natural choices to solve some problems. Think about it. When you rely on a set of over the counter trading system of securities, the core banking system and the insurance issuing system more than ten years ago, and try to open the door to do business on the Internet. Would you “cloud” these stable systems based on closed technologies (e.g., non-x86 hosts, lack of technical and data interfaces)? One possible solution is to create a technology buffer zone, an intermediate layer, between your online “store” and these “steady-state” systems.



From the middle layer to the middle “platform” — so simple, natural, logical

By 2015 at the latest, the securities industry’s first practical zhongtai prototype has emerged.

In 2013, the first year of so-called Internet finance, securities firms also started online business exhibition of “e-commerce” and “mutual finance”. At this time, the centralized trading system faced the concurrency requirements, availability and security challenges on the Internet link for the first time. In the previous counter system, there was shutdown outside trading hours, and joint adjustment test with the exchange on weekends. Under the guidance of maintaining stability, the external access system could not be directly connected. But once brokers open Internet business, that is 24×7 open the door to do business:

  • High availability issues arise. Customers through Internet in the trading time can’t check your own position and billing counter, I saw your account at the weekend were temporary test data to get recognition and mistake system problems and so on, is completely possible and totally not acceptable, points minutes cause complaints, how to ensure customer service availability 24 x7?
  • High response and high concurrency problems occur. The e-commerce department began to sell popular financial products through the Internet, and promoted them in a second killing way, often resulting in sudden spikes in computing resource requests. The performance of traditional trading system is measured by the number of entrusting transactions and the execution of the number of concurrent transactions, but it is not suitable to respond to the frequent online interaction of massive users and the high concurrent requests of “session”. How to support good user experience, flexible response to massive user access, support high concurrency of user sessions?
  • Information security problems arise. Once you open a hole in the Internet, you will find a link, no matter how indirect, between your core business systems and the Internet. How to do information isolation and protection?
In 2013, we introduced a simple and natural technical layer in front of the core trading system to buffer, encapsulate, decoupled and isolate the trading counter, so that the requests coming from the Internet can be processed more in line with the Internet environment. Obviously, this technology layer must adopt the distributed architecture commonly used by Internet enterprises, which is characterized by Reactive — message-driven, elastic, Responsive and Resilient. This year, we created a middle tier of services, and our technical team has developed a Reactive Manifesto.


In 2014, we found that the technical layer above was becoming thicker and thicker, because the new business functions on the Internet were becoming richer and richer. In addition to carrying the traffic of the Internet, we also needed to realize these functions in a more standardized and controllable way. So we thought of microservices, service registry discovery and governance, fusing/flow control/isolation/delegation/proxy/link tracking, and so on. We established best practices and guidelines for technology development (e.g. Heroku’s 12 Factors) out of a naive desire to organize increasingly complex, interdependent, and even cyclical services. In this year, the specification and tool chain of the middle layer services were initially formed.

In 2015, the highly agile demands of the increasingly rich Internet business and the stability orientation of the traditional backend system have come into conflict. Simple and natural, we consider DevOps (eight years after the birth of the concept) out of concern for the operation and maintenance and monitoring of the increasingly complex middle layer. Using the accumulated knowledge of containerization technology that has been studied for two years, we implemented PaaS based on container and Container Choreography technology (K8S, Rancher) in this year. Now the middle layer is no longer just a bunch of services without standards and specifications. It is a platformized middle layer that supports Immutable Infrastructure, container orchestration, digital metrics monitoring, service governance, and advanced tool chains.

At the beginning, the middle layer did not focus on the operation and control of specialized personnel, which were more technical services “connecting the past and the future”. But because of the Internet, various business scenarios, naturally we need set up the business parameters, combined with the CMS (content management system) to release such as marketing, need to monitor the content of the analysis of user behavior, need through the integral mechanism to measure the transaction and the staff rewards and punishments, electricity/gold each department personnel gradually take on the functions of these jobs, Became the main manager of this platformized middle layer. Through a BOSS Operation Support System (BOSS-Business Operation Support System) that is constantly improving, the e-commerce Department arranges and empowers brokers internally, promotes marketing to the market externally, and even extends to empowers external partners (such as banks). At the same time, IT puts forward a series of functional requirements and design schemes for digital operation. In 2016, a platform with both technical and business capabilities took initial shape.

So, looking back at the simple, natural, logical process, it goes like this:

  • We’re going to open our business on the Internet. But our technology systems are heterogeneous (as opposed to the distributed architecture of the Internet), a product of the Web 1.0 era or even the Client/Server era. How to do? Introduce a layer of indirection, encapsulate, redirect, and connect to the Internet
  • With more and more businesses on the Internet, especially the emergence of the mobile Internet and the advent of the digital era, the indirect layer has become more and more complicated and become a large lump. How to do? Specifications need to be established and service governance needs to be established. At this time, the technology of micro-service and container came into being, which is just right for use
  • However, microservices and containerization alone are not enough. These are the underlying technologies. How does it solve the demands of agility brought by digital business, and how to solve the problem of information islands to achieve horizontal connectivity? At this point, we need a true technology platform that can integrate development, testing, delivery, and rollout to have any hope of becoming “agile.” There is also a need to establish API management mechanisms and data standards so that new services built on the platform do not become islands of information. The conversation to the
  • With the technology platform, it is becoming clear that it is more than just a technology connectivity solution, and that it needs to involve business people, not just technical people. At the beginning, it was to let non-technical personnel set business parameters on the platform, and then it was to let business positions set Internet business rules on the platform — this was already carrying out some operational nature of work, and then to develop to allow managers to view data online in real time and adjust operational strategies… More and more operation tools travel on the platform for business departments to use, at this time, the technology platform has become a technology carrier, on the basis of which bears the cooperation of various roles

Everything grows naturally, not magically pulling a rabbit out of a hat.


What is “Taiwan”?

The word “platform” has to be one of the most overused words of the past two decades, both in technology and business. IT people have a tendency to call everything a platform, to show its importance, core, can carry a lot of things…

What is a platform? Platform is you set up the stage, let others sing, and then attract the audience to watch the play. You can either charge the troupe for stage rental or a share of the ticket sales, or you can charge the audience for admission, or you can charge both.

Technology platform, but also conforms to the basic characteristics of the act in an opera in “plays” : platform for technical interface fully open, logic abstraction, define the plug-in mechanism, and then let the developers plugin, forming a very rich ecological even plugin market, finally let the user to choose suitable for use as required.

Elegant technology platform, “Design by contract”, “loose coupling” principle is applied to the extreme, not only separated from the stable core of the platform and plug-in surrounding ecology, even the kernel itself into the platform’s first plug-in. The platform itself is just a bunch of contracts, protocols, interfaces and frameworks. It seems to have no actual business value and operation capability. It is “empty”. However, the platform abstracts and abstracts the commonness and essence of various business functions, and it is “there”. Buddha said: platform, is not platform, is a platform. “There is no two”!

The characteristics of the technology platform are:

  • I don’t call you. You Call me – As a platform, I don’t call your interface. Instead, I provide hooks, callbacks, event subscriptions for you to call as a third party. The platform of financial institutions is self-consistent business logic and clear boundary, while IT is a platform provider rather than a system integrator. IT should formulate interfaces on the basis of business abstraction to achieve “plugins” (who implements IT is another issue, and does not necessarily need the cooperation of some so-called powerful developer software vendors). However, the traditional system integration thinking lacks the understanding of platformization
  • Plug-in, ecological – wechat and its small program, iPhone and its app store, is a typical platform and plug-in relationship, as well as a large number of plug-ins formed by the development ecology, business ecology. This kind of plug-in, ecological thinking can also be applied to enterprise software systems, depending on how well your technical architecture is designed
  • Participation of multiple roles: platform designer and maintainer, plug-in provider, application developer, user
The features of the business platform are:


  • Based on technology platform (platform-based business did not rely on system in the past, platform-based business model without technical support has always existed, but now it is increasingly difficult to imagine a business platform without technical platform support)
  • Connecting multilateral, facilitating interactions and transactions, such as Uber, where drivers and passengers are both sides of the platform’s interest. Through clever and reasonable strategies, the platform promotes the “snowball” of the platform through same-side network effect and cross-side network effect.
“Stage”, obviously should support a lot of actors (” actors “) performance.


The greatest value of the “middle stage” concept is as a methodology

Technologists who join non-Internet enterprises from Internet enterprises for the first time may be surprised to find that some conventional and standard things in the Internet industry, such as “distributed architecture”, are still new things in traditional industries, but they cannot be completely attributed to the advanced and backward issues. It is the business environment and the way of serving customers that technical systems faced before and after the Internet. Once the traditional offline business is “involved” online, we are constantly building and optimizing the indirect or intermediate layer in the process of exploring how to connect the historical legacy system to the Internet in a more effective, reasonable and secure way.

“Middle” this concept, to promote the ecological was not familiar with the Internet technology in some industries and institutions to actively adopt distributed and cloud native, platform solution implementation indirect layer, middle layer, or quite valuable, as the guiding ideology, methodology and reference case, can play a positive enlightenment role. Although the middle stage should come into being naturally, it is not a case of cutting back and following the rules, nor is it a case of building a framework with the concept as a steed, but the consciousness of “platformization of the middle layer” is also praiseworthy.


Zhongtai, which means not Zhongtai, is called Zhongtai

(Buddha: I didn’t say that, but I meant it…)

As a technical self-reflection, we often pursue a technology or technical methodology and forget its purpose, just as the monk shows us the position of the moon and we only cling to the finger pointing at the moon…

Just like the “Big data Rinpoche” of the early years, there are now many “Big Middle Taiwan Rinpoche”, to borrow a term “_____” (fill in the blank: big data, ARTIFICIAL intelligence, Middle Taiwan, cloud computing, blockchain…). As if he could solve everything by magic…

Technology Center, business center, data Center, AI Center… – These are just clouds. Platforms are just a bunch of specifications, standards, frameworks, rules, best practices that don’t do the most concrete things themselves; But it is the abstraction and refinement of the business, the matching of resources, the matching of transactions, the ecological connection, and it promotes everything.

When the technical architecture of Cloud Native becomes the standard of enterprises, when the enterprise itself becomes the digital enterprise of cloud native, for example, your future “pure seed”, the core transaction system of cloud native realizes full cloud connection with your customers and partners through a series of indirect layers and middleware, It’s where your employees do their daily business and operations, and the “middle stage” is no longer worth highlighting and writing about independently — the front, middle and back stage may not be the definition it is today.



“Stay True to our Original Aspiration and Keep our Mission firmly in mind”

In fact, focusing too much on the Central platform, initiating projects to build the central platform and talking about the success or failure of the central platform sounds strange. This is the fixation with the finger pointing to the moon as the moon itself.



Cloud mountain fog cover, under China’s “beginner’s mind”, but is with a layer of indirection to solve some of the different historical period of heterogeneous technologies connection problems, and then in the layer of indirection when more and more complex, more and more thick, more and more important, how to through the framework, standard, management means and tool chain to manage them, and under the reversed transmission of Internet, It must evolve to support cloud computing and agile because it is the nexus between heterogeneous systems in a “steady state” world and a “sensitive” world.

Non-agile, non-cloud native solutions are not true mid-stage.

China also is not only a pile of no intervention middleware technology, it has gradually become an automated half automation, human intervention, collaborative environment, more and more business staff and external customers find themselves through all kinds of tools in daily work in the stage, so China is no longer just about technical solutions, it carries the new positions and personnel, There is even an operating department. It became the hub of enterprise digitisation — but before that it first demanded a transformation of organisational structure and management.

At present stage, the middle stage has already passed the technical person to speak from oneself, in order to build the technical system to guide the period. For the latecomers, zhongtai as a methodology, the first is to do a good job in business architecture design.


What is “business architecture”? “A series of processes involving more than one organization with a common goal, achieved through the exchange of information, each of which has a clear purpose and continues over a period of time”. Take a look at a few key words:

  • Organization: People or organizations involved in a business. Each business should be completed by multiple people and roles
  • Goals: The purpose and value of doing a business, in other words, why the business is being done and what is the goal of doing it well.
  • Process: A process is a business process, and a business consists of multiple processes
Identify the stakeholders (who are the beneficiaries of the business and why it is being done) and sort out the business processes (which are relatively fixed over time and each process is further broken down into sub-processes).

In the middle stage, we first abstracted the business architecture properly, and then designed the platform technology architecture in accordance with best practices (such as adopting cloud native stack, reactive framework) that evolved with adoption.

Under the new concept, there are some old methods that should have been strictly implemented.