Cloud native enabling digital transformation
According to the latest White Paper on the Development of China’s Digital Economy, the scale of China’s digital economy will expand to 39.2 trillion yuan in 2020, and it has become an important driving force for the national economy. All walks of life are vigorously promoting “digital transformation”, which has become a key word in the financial industry.
Digital transformation cannot be separated from the support of technology. More and more financial institutions have realized digital product innovation quickly with the help of financial technology. Digital finance will break down more barriers to build digital operations, digital trust and digital risk control. Digital economy era of cloud computing has jumped out of the scope of technology, and business are inseparable, and become a number of financial option, the financial industry is becoming more and more in-depth application of cloud native, represented by the container’s cloud native technology in improving the efficiency of resources, reduce the cost, quick delivery, high availability of business, etc., has received the widespread attention and spread rapidly in many industries.
Needless to say, on the enterprise cloud is the trend of The Times, in order to meet the business online, on-demand demand expansion and scale, financial institutions will be the evolution of business and technology to the cloud native, but the container as the basis of cloud native architecture core, based on the container of cloud platform with an extreme flexibility, fault self-healing, replicable high-quality ability, such as fu can increase remarkable achievements. As a result, financial institutions are becoming more and more inclined to containerize application development.
** Container Technology ‘Offshore’ Difficulties in Financial Digital Transformation **
At this stage, the financial industry is still in great IT infrastructure changes and pressing digital transformation period, the digital transformation present a new trend, service will be upgraded to a cloud + ecological + + end scene based operations, not only need comprehensive digitization, also need to have flexible infrastructure to cope with rapid innovation of front-end business. Container technology, due to its natural advantages in lightweight, self-contained, agile and stateless applications, has a better support effect for DevOps, cloud native, micro-services, orchestration and other application deployments. The in-depth application of container technology in the financial industry has risen to the height of policy guidance.
The adoption of container technology was clearly proposed in the Guidance on the Development Plan of Information Technology in China’s Banking Industry during the 13th Five-Year Plan (Draft for Comments) released by the China Banking Regulatory Commission in 2016. Insurance, banking, trust and payment companies in the four financial sub-industries have been constantly trying containerized applications.
However, in the actual application of the container, it is faced with many difficulties. On the one hand, financial business users lack long-term research and development and operation experience in the field of containers. On the other hand, security considerations of new technologies are more obvious. Many financial institutions usually can only “watch the fire from the sidelines” of popular containers. Under the high standards of data security in the financial industry, in addition to supporting the core business and realizing the efficient and flexible scheduling of database resources, the financial industry also faces many pain points in the process of transformation.
Most of the current solutions given to financial institutions are holistic, lack focus and do not well capture the specific needs of each institution. Sometimes technical upgrades are too specific, often incompatible with the overall business architecture, and financial institutions have to incur too many additional costs. In addition, some financial institutions already in the process of transformation also have worries about uncontrollable technology, business security and low stability. The operation and maintenance after the technology upgrade mainly rely on manpower. Once the flow peak is encountered, the expansion capacity is difficult and the cycle is long. Due to the difference between production environment and testing environment, it is easy to make mistakes in the delivery link from launch to delivery. In the distributed scenario, it is difficult to dynamically identify the state and configuration information of the cloud, which causes some difficulty in fault diagnosis. Not to mention, if some organizations want to change partners, they will incur extremely high migration costs and difficulties due to a series of problems such as unstandardized applications, binding by cloud service providers and low portability.
In response to the above problems, XieCloud has built a financial container cloud solution based on the original cloud technologies such as container, DevOps, and cloud-based monitoring. It provides a financial hybrid cloud solution that integrates heterogeneous IT resources, PaaS application management, micro-services, DevOps and distributed core middleware, and combines the advantages of the scenario of head financial customer cooperation. In addition to providing the financial industry with sensitive business support on the Internet, it also provides effective means for the security disaster recovery and supervision requirements brought by the open business and mixed architecture. It is a set of container cloud solutions customized for the actual needs of the financial industry, which can be called the container cloud with the best understanding of finance in the industry.
HarmonyCloud Financial Level Container Cloud Solution *01 Financial Level Multiple Activity Disaster Recovery Solution *
Financial business to the reliability of the software system is critical, PaaS as a management platform for business applications, its reliability is very important also, on the basis of the financial industry regulatory requirements, the need to provide three center deployment architecture based on two containers cloud base, harmonic cloud according to the request of the parties, designed and developed the financial level in both container base, three center Ensuring the overall continuity of the business and platform through three layers.
First, platform-level guarantee. By designing and synchronizing multiple instances of the platform database, the high availability guarantee of platform management data level is completed.
Second: Kubernetes base layer guarantee, the introduction of ETCD synchronization mechanism, through the study of synchronization efficiency and performance, improve the base level of high availability;
Third, business-level guarantee, in cooperation with the business system data design and Otter synchronization components, can realize the guarantee of high availability of data for the underlying business.
*02 no perceptual second level fault isolation mechanism *
The failure of the business system always pays attention to MTTR, PRO and RTO, and these numbers are KPI red lines for most operation and maintenance departments. Therefore, once the failure of the business system occurs, the first thing to think of is to restore the business. Harmonic Cloud Technology proposes a solution based on the container cloud business scenario in view of this universal demand.
HarmonyCloud technology based on self-developed NPD components, to achieve second-level business fault isolation, fault system can automatically isolate, automatically pull up new business instances and gracefully switch traffic at second-level; While maintaining the fault site, priority should be given to solving the problem of online business recovery. At the same time, according to the actual experience of the project, various fault features are designed to help NPD components quickly understand and isolate instances through features.
*03 Observable ability of business operation on cloud *
Operations support teams can solve problems, but that doesn’t mean they want to have problems. Through the ages, the best solution is to “make”, but before that, we need to have a cloud environment all link monitoring system, through the most lightweight bypass Angle, in the form of class type dressing equipment, help business daily monitoring of system implementation, and reduce the system “cardiovascular and other important disease probability.
Most financial business has long call link, a trade request across different fields across the cluster data center is quite common, in order to solve “the number is” financial time problem of distributed system observable harmonic cloud technology put forward the solution for the important K8S era – based on EBPF bypass type all link business monitor (after referred to as the “cloud monitoring”).
Harmonic cloud through many years of accumulation of the Linux kernel technology research, the research “cloud monitoring solutions, through the bypass cost very low power consumption, grab the cloud of east-west, north-south traffic, combined with the automatic drawing of topology, quick show business health, let the user to the business” blood fat of blood pressure blood glucose sensing; For all kinds of cloud service failures reported by operation and maintenance, we can locate the fault level based on link analysis and complete the “outpatient pre-check” of the business system. At the same time, “Cloud Monitoring” is equipped with the probe of APM products accumulated by Harmony Cloud over years of research and development. As for the conclusion that the “Gate Precheck” is determined to be a code fault, the APM Agent can be automatically loaded to perform code-level “coronary angiography” on the business without restarting the business, and finally locate the fault points.
*04 Integration of DevOps R&D, Operations and Maintenance *
DevOps has been fully developed in various industries, but the practice is often slow and ineffective, the fundamental reason is that DevOps practice itself is a systematic project. In the process of DevOps construction, only by combining the current situation of the enterprise and designing DevOps practice content and evolution route in line with the current situation and characteristics of the enterprise, can the enterprise promote the land more quickly, better and more effectively, and avoid the lack of tool chain or chimney tool construction. Fully enjoy the business and IT value enhancement brought by DevOps integrated practice of R&D, operation and maintenance.
Xiyun has a lot of practical experience in DevOps for financial clients and is familiar with the characteristics of financial business and IT organization. Through the “DevOps Coach Empowerment” and “Tool Chain Design and Construction”, IT covers the construction of tool platform, process system, standard system, personnel ability and other aspects. Through the process of improving cognition and then practice, pilot verification and then comprehensive promotion, the enterprise’s R & D, operation and maintenance ability is improved step by step — standardization technology stack, standardization promotion, DevOps practice expansion, automation framework construction, self-service ability construction, and a spiraling process is constructed, which is continuously promoted and improved. And then for the financial business development into continuous vitality.
In the acceleration of the digitalization process of the whole industry, containers have played a great role in the cloud. As the industry sector with the most cutting-edge adoption of new technologies, the digital transformation of the financial industry has also brought benefits due to the arrival of cloud and containers. HarmonyCloud’s financial container cloud solution is the integrator of financial industry solutions in the cloud native era. More active disaster recovery to ensure the safety and reliability of financial business, second level fault isolation to ensure the continuity of financial business, cloud monitoring to achieve the daily monitoring of the business system, all-round protection of financial industry business sustainable and stable development, do a strong backing!
In the future, HarmonyCloud will continue to improve the post-K8S era, continue to plow cloud native full-stack solutions, continue to commit to technological innovation, grow together with customers in the financial industry, accelerate digital transformation, and create new industry values.