In February 2018, the Spring Festival travel rush began.

In the largest migration in human history, 382 million people were packed into 310,000 trains to various destinations. If you had a camera pointed at China from above, you would see thousands of trains crossing mountains and waters on the same day, their frequency finely calculated to strike the best balance between safety and capacity.

Students, tourists and migrant workers gather at the station at the end of the year under the identity of “returnees”. A growing number of ticket-buying machines are being replaced by the more convenient “swipe into”, where people tap on their phone screens and the QR code hangs over the gate for a second or two, doors open and people pour in.

“12306”, the official ticketing App of the Ministry of Railways, has been under huge traffic pressure almost every moment since the Spring Festival Travel rush opened. Buying tickets, choosing seats and locking down seats, the deluge of requests from each terminal feeds into a flood of data that washes over core servers deployed across the country.

No one knows how much effort 12306 has made to meet this moment, and no one knows that at the bottom of this seemingly immutable App, there has been a new framework to support its high-speed operation.

Ant Group mPaaS steps to the front of the train as it nears the end.

Urban reconstructionist

On April 27, 1900, William Thomson, the famous physicist “Lord of Kelvin”, proudly declared his victory in a speech at the Royal Society:

“The building of physics has been built, and all that remains is some tinkering.”

In 2016, qi Xiaolong, who just took over as the technical director of mPaaS, faced a similar situation: the hot mobile Internet “big infrastructure era” has passed, looked up and saw high-rise buildings, bowed his head and had no place to settle. Everyone told Qi xiaolong: What you want to do has no future at all, it is impossible — all the apps have been finished, how will you push this out?

Later, history went in different directions: Lord Kelvin got ahead of himself, and two dark clouds over the edifice, the Michelson-Morley experiment and black-body radiation, finally announced the collapse of the “edifice of physics” of the 20th century.

In Qi’s world, buildings are still brand new, but he sees the importance of “tinkering” with tall buildings: seemingly perfect apps on the market are in the throes of transformation, and some are in urgent need of restructuring as they fail to keep up with The Times. With a keen sense of smell unique to Internet people, he puts on his newly manufactured mPaaS and cleaves into the middle of a crack like a sharp knife.

The opportunity is fleeting, and mPaaS don’t have much time to prepare.

“This is a timing (time window) that we suddenly discovered.” Four years later, Qi Xiaolong can still recall his adventurous mood. “A very short timing.”

Humans are used to being cautious about new things.

This is especially true in the financial industry, where the requirements for system stability and security are so high that when we want to describe the highest level of security, we often refer to it as “financial.” Ant Group cut into a dangerous race track, as long as one careless move, the whole game is lost.

What are mPaaS? In other words, what are mPaaS good for?

It was born in the stormy year of 2013.

It was a good year: Alipay’s business exploded, transforming from a simple payment tool into a super-app with all kinds of features and applications.

It was also a challenging year: Alipay’s development team grew larger as users soared at an almost exponential rate, inevitably accompanied by complex business modules and a decline in development efficiency.

To solve, and to solve all these: from 2013 to 2015, in view of the framework of pay treasure to spread out. Business applications are modular and development tools are componentalized. Alipay is transformed into a platform-based App, based on which each application can be independently developed by a team, and the whole App is managed by a common underlying platform framework.

** If Alipay were a tall building, it might be similar to the “modular building” envisioned by the industry. ** Each room can be used as a module unit, prefabricated in the factory, transported to the site through splicing, welding and other connections, assembled into a complete building body.

Putting it together, assembling it, out of the box, sounds as simple as stacking wood.

This pluggable technical framework formed the precursor of mPaaS. PaaS is a concept in cloud computing technology. It stands for platform-as-A-Service. MPaaS directly precedes PaaS with an M, which stands for mobile.

Technical nerd naming method, simple and rough to the extreme.

In cloud architecture, PaaS are located in the middle layer between IaaS (facility as a service) and SaaS (software as a service), and belong to application infrastructure services in the cloud environment. The corresponding relationship among the three is similar to the underlying hardware – operating system – application, and mPaaS plays the role of a “research and development platform” bearing applications.

All right, here we go. Let’s try it out. If Alipay is a sports car that changes its engine at high speed, mPaaS will undoubtedly face a more difficult task next.

It will “cut the bones and wash the marrow” of the city’s high-rise buildings.

The flame

In October 2015, version 1.0 of mPaaS was released.

After another three or five years, the latecomers in this market will lament the poisonous taste of predecessors: who says “the building has been completed”? Those seemingly bright high-rise buildings, under the bustling has revealed dilapidated and bloated.

The storm of the mobile Internet has fundamentally changed everything, and retail, which once accounted for a tiny share of revenues, has become a magnet for financial institutions. Some institutions turn around at high speed and enter c-end business with an agile gait; Some institutions are merely covering up “mobile banking” with a core that simply can’t support the demand and traffic of long and mid-tail customers.

The market is waiting for a spoiler, and newcomers are waiting for a chance to prove themselves.

But, as I said before, finance is a very cautious and conservative industry. How easy is it to impress them with mPaaS when there are almost “zero cases”?

What was the reaction in the market, I asked Zhang liang? The mPaaS product head pondered for a while, then finally described the situation with great restraint:

“There are certainly different voices out there.”

Mr Qi recalls it more bluntly: “It was easy to go from 10 to 100 customers, but it was hard to go from zero to 10, very, very hard.”

On a difficult journey, change can occur suddenly. No one would have guessed, for example, that mPaaS’s first customer would not be a financial institution, but 12306 — yes, the familiar 12306.

The restriction of transportation mode can determine the direction of history, and the change of transportation mode will ring the bell of The Times. In 2017, as high-speed rail networks cut through China like capillaries, an increasing number of travelers found that they too needed a reliable set of network tools — fast and sophisticated enough to navigate the digital tide.

Infrastructure and “digital infrastructure” go hand in hand, 12306 is constantly speeding up the pace of technological innovation.

In August 2017, THE mPaaS team entered the office site of 12306. The cooperation was then in charge of financial cloud business ant Group vice president Liu Weiguang attaches great importance to, he issued orders to the front soldiers: in any case, to support good 12306 project as the first priority.

It is not only a hard-won opportunity, but also a challenge that cannot be missed. No one dares to take it lightly in the face of such a massive App with a development cycle of more than one year. The entire team is on standby to take the first demand from customers: to support the travel peak during the National Day holiday.

It was a collision between the development processes of Internet companies and traditional software companies, and the team started work in a completely unfamiliar environment. The staff of China Academy of Railway Sciences worked overtime with the mPaaS team of more than 10 people, and finally completed the optimization of 12306 basic functions in one month. National Day golden Week is coming, tourists travel to bring ticket peak smooth through.

The team breathed a sigh of relief: good, worthy of the mission.

Customer square TSK appreciation: good ah, that you also support the Spring Festival.

I don’t know what kind of expression Yang Wei, senior wireless development engineer of Ant Group stationed at 12306, was looking at when she heard this demand. However, in short, in order to deal with the extreme situation that may occur during the Spring Festival travel rush, ant Financial cloud team has made every effort: R&D, deployment, gateway, disaster recovery… Technicians work overtime until two or three in the morning. Before the Spring Festival travel rush, 12306 finally reformed under the joint efforts of both sides of the people “completely changed” : the appearance looks as usual, its core has become a new App.

“The UI [user interface] looks exactly the same, and the user’s behavior is the same.” “But the content has changed, the client framework and the whole front page have been completely rewritten.”

The surface of the lake was calm and the bottom was bubbling. In December, the new 12306 began methodical external grayscale testing. As a popular App with its own, social media has received mixed reviews: Has everyone upgraded to 12306? The new version of the experience is better!

Commenters swarmed: “Yes!” “Sympathy!

Clockwise to 2018, we witnessed the opening scene of the article. During the 2018 Spring Festival Travel rush, a total of 2.98 billion trips were made and 382 million passengers were transported. Returning homebound travelers clicked on screens, invisible vouchers were transferred through data channels, tens of millions of people returned home to hug their loved ones, trains broke through the rain and engines roared in the morning wind.

There is joy and sorrow behind the code, and their journey is smooth and safe.

That year, the flame from the silent place, will shine through the night.

At the top of the mountains

Successful in their first battle, the mPaaS headed for even steeper mountains.

Or rather, more mountains chose it. Since 12306, a number of financial institutions offered olive branches to mPaaS. In March 2018, Yang wei, who just withdrew from the 12306 project, moved to Guangfa Bank, a veteran stock bank established for more than 30 years, and the first financial industry client of mPaaS service.

As a behemoth with total assets of 2.6 trillion yuan, GUANGDONG Development Bank faces a far more complex problem than 12306: its business is not only buying tickets and selling tickets, but also lending, repayment, financial management, shopping mall, many business modules intertwined. The mPaaS team had to take things apart as they went along, turning a tangle of businesses into pluggable components on top of the framework.

Deployment, testing and commissioning, ant group employees came and went in guangdong Development Bank, clearing obstacles for the construction of the new framework. In August, Guangfa Bank’s credit card App “Discover Wonderful” was first launched, and the mobile banking App directly inherited some of its functions, with the development progress following closely behind.

“This is also the advantage of mPaaS. Functions developed using mPaaS can be reused directly. After teaching the GDB technology team to use mPaaS, Yang finally took a break. She only looked at the mobile banking App before it was launched, and everything worked as usual.

“The Grandmaster” about martial arts: such as climbing, step by step heavy day.

So is technology? When I climb the mountains, I dare not neglect every step.

Fortunately, mPaaS is not what it used to be: there have been three iterations of mPaaS since 2015. From mPaaS 1.0, which focused on core capabilities such as gateway and message push, to mPaaS 2.0, which added features such as publishing platform, hot fix and offline package, the tool library is improving day by day. Mr Zhang describes mPaaS as having the potential to “disrupt the traditional r&d model of financial institutions”.

At the end of 2017, mPaaS evolved to version 3.0. The technology accumulation in intelligence, from App research and development, release to analysis and operation of the whole life cycle management, makes it out of a simple development framework to become a solid “mobile platform”.

I asked Qi Xiaolong: compared with other competitive products in the market, what do you think is the most special and irreplaceable function of mPaaS today?

His answer: small programs.

“Applets are a very new concept for financial institution clients.” Qi xiaolong said that many financial institutions hope to make some open experiments and let more partners enter their apps to open up new traffic channels. These “external entries” used to be mostly H5 pages, which had poor user experience due to rigid presentation and long loading time.

Landlords are eager to rent out empty houses, but tenants are reluctant to enter. Miniprograms have come from behind to show these “landlords” and “renters” a new path.

“An important responsibility of mPaaS is to drive the business innovation of their customers with their own technological innovation.” Mr Zhang sees the problem more clearly: in the past few years, the industry has begun to come up with the concept of “open banking” in an attempt to make banks ubiquitous — in other words, to integrate more of a bank’s activities directly into the scene.

** This is a concept ahead of its time, and no one can tell where the future of “open banking” lies. Chinese financial institutions have focused on Alipay’s “mini-app ecosystem”, which stacks lightweight portals on top of flagship apps and sorts out a wide range of features and services so that users can ride the waves as if they were on a speedboat on a giant mothership.

MPaaS 3.0 takes advantage of this trend by splitting the applets capability into a purely technical solution that customers can call at will. Financial institutions use small programs as the carrier to promote their own business opening, and third parties can also enter the App through small programs to further enrich the business scene. “It’s a direction they’re willing to explore and try.” Qi xiaolong said.

Now, when you open 12306 again, the traditional static home page has been replaced by various entrances: hotel accommodations, lounge transfers, travel insurance, poverty alleviation mall… App itself constitutes a diversified transfer station. More and more related functions are gathered together, and different business scenarios are opened to reach more users.

Take the famous “long tail” theory, the silent, hitherto neglected “long tail” of users. Many financial institutions ploughed through it for years, only to realize that the huge number of silent people who had not said a word for so long could not be ignored.

The long tail hangs far down, pointing to empty space where no one has touched it.

That’s the Internet’s next big thing.

Listen to thunder in silence

No man’s land usually means barren wasteland.

But ants are used to digging through empty wilderness, hunting for treasure. In addition to winning orders from top customers, mPaaS are also trying to put the ability to re-engineer themselves into the hands of more “long tail” customers.

Let’s go back to the end of 2017. Perhaps you still remember that Yang Wei was stationed at 12306 at that time. She was busy with her ant colleagues and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Railway Sciences, contributing sleep time to the political task of “ensuring the Spring Festival travel rush”.

At the same time, Wang Xiaotao in Suqian, Jiangsu province, began to worry.

The affable man is the research and development manager of Jiangsu Minfeng Rural Commercial Bank, an rural commercial bank with assets of more than 40 billion yuan and roots in Suqian, Jiangsu province. Jiangsu Minfeng had to take the project back to its own hands due to the “strategic shift” of its online loan product developer named “Susue”.

For Wang xiaotao, this is a hot potato. “We are weak in mobile development. We can’t do it with just one person. If we have to deploy two people on each side, we don’t have enough people.”

Weak technical force, shortage of manpower, this is a widespread dilemma in small and medium-sized banks. ** Wang Xiaotao is under such pressure and mPaaS met, in retrospect, he rather with a little embarrassed smile: “in the early cooperation, mPaaS so much to bring us to change the code, find a problem, not like now occasionally asked on the line, before we almost every day, off the class also asked, to the weekend will ask…”

In the process of cooperation, Jiangsu Minfeng and mPaaS team gradually find the right rhythm. With business separation, framework optimization and code simplification, Minfeng’s flagship product “Susuo E” has been upgraded and more new products have been derived. It provides online loan business to customers with borrowing needs in its jurisdiction. In the past three years, it has served tens of thousands of customers and lent billions in total.

At the end of 2018, Jiangsu Minfeng completely reconstructed the App with the support of mPaaS, making the application operation more smooth and the flashback rate significantly reduced. In the second year, Wang Xiaotao also built a series of ecology with the popular “small program”, from payment code, scan code payment function, life payment, Tmall optimization and other new things, Jiangsu Minfeng mobile banking App, supported by a set of smooth and efficient underlying framework, extended branches to the new business space.

In Wang’s words, “a very beautiful App”.

In addition, Wang was also amazed by the speed of mPaaS ‘response to national regulatory requirements: National secret, IPv6, privacy rights, the platform is almost synchronous update, and only a few modifications are needed to complete adaptation.

But that wasn’t all. The man’s ambitions didn’t stop there.

As a rare mPaaS public cloud customer in the banking industry, Wang Xiaotao is very eager to recommend this framework to Jiangsu Rural Credit Cooperatives Association to build a set of unified proprietary cloud in the province. He went several times to lobby the head of the provincial association in charge of mobile banking. His pitch was blunt: look, we’ve done so much with just so many people!

In Wang xiaotao’s vision, there will be a huge App of the level of an “aircraft carrier”, on which all subordinate rural credit cooperatives in Jiangsu can put their business in the form of small programs. Highly integrated and rapidly distributed, the technology landscape is as appealing to an engineer as it is to a military enthusiast who has landed on an aircraft carrier.

“They want to change [the structure] and we always want them to change.” “That’s my biggest goal in the short term,” laughs Wang.

** Sometimes important things are done in silence. ** In 2018, Yang wei finished the 12306 project and followed her team to guangzhou Development Bank. At this time, Wang Xiaotao is looking for problems through the night, reconstructing the code, trying to use the power of technology, so that a small rural business coruscated new life.

The money arrives, the train moves, the code flows silently on the base of the world.

Flames rose from the corners of the earth, and the silent began to speak.

Sustainable evolution

I asked Zhang Liang: What will be the “complete” form of mPaaS?

Zhang Liang replied: **mPaaS is not complete, it must be constantly developing and changing. ** On the one hand, new ways of interaction and development drive technological change; On the other hand, business needs from customers force product evolution.

In 2018, Zhang Liang accepted an interview as the head of mPaaS products. He details the capabilities that mPaaS offer developers and Outlines three product dimensions: “client capabilities” for efficient development, “mobile mid-stage” for full lifecycle management, and “backend connectivity” for extending the capabilities of the upper levels.

Looking back, Zhang liang’s speech may have had to be lengthened by many pages. MPaaS are increasingly focused on r&d efficiency, digital operations, and evolving audiovisual components in response to customers’ need to “telecommute” during the pandemic. Product forms are evolving all the way. If there is one thing that remains unchanged, it is the original intention of mPaaS to drive business innovation in the financial industry and even the whole industry based on the updating and iteration of technology.

“That’s our constant philosophy at the product level.” Zhang said.

There are constants and there are variations, and this may be the best strategy for the future. ** Everyone saw the wave called “Future” rushing toward them, but they could not trace its shape or estimate its power.

In the foreseeable future, a new wave will sweep across the land, sweeping over the buildings that were once bright and solid, and then perhaps all over again. I asked Zhang liang if he had any ideas for the future, based on the insights he’s gained over the years working on mobile development platforms.

Zhang Liang smiled and said that was an interesting question.

** “What exactly is mPaaS? MPaaS is a development framework dedicated to terminal device services.” ** The terminal device here can be a mobile phone, or it can be a new way of interaction, a new device — such as the hot IoT device; It could even be delivered entirely off the device via near-sci-fi scenarios like AR.

Interaction patterns will change, but the need to serve customers will never change. As long as there is such a need, there is room for mPaaS. In the longer future, the technical concept and implementation method of mPaaS may be quite different from that of today, and the future App will definitely take a completely different route from that of today’s App. Perhaps the most commonly used tools are no longer mobile phones, but smart wearable devices, voice receiving terminals, even brain-computer interfaces, holographic images…

We could not see what tomorrow would look like, but the silhouetted in the dim light was striking enough.

“In the future, we will serve C-side clients in a variety of forms, not only limited to mobile App, it may be VR, AR scenarios, all kinds of forms are possible.” Zhang Liang imagined.

Technology reserves in hand, Qi Xiaolong is also full of confidence: “Our customers can be Guangfa Bank, 12306, but our real users, in fact, is the same as me every developer. No one in the business knows our users better than we do.”

Shanghai Metro, Huaxia Bank, Suzhou Bank, Changshu Rural Commercial Bank… The ever-lengthening list of mPaaS clients is now all on the same page for the future. They are new skyscrapers, and they are the fires of ants in the wilderness.

Now the flames grow and the torches soar.

After the collapse of the edifice of physics in the 20th century, scholars were not too upset. They quickly gathered the bricks and tiles to build a tower on the ruins more stable than before.

Today, the coming wave comes with the storm, and the mPaaS stand on the tide and stare into the distance. No one knows where it will end, or the journey of technology has no end.

The harbinger of this era, on the top of tall buildings, beyond the sea and sky.

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END