An article to understand the Ant BizStack cloud native development and governance platform

On May 26, 2022, the Ant BizStack cloud native development and governance platform held a new product launch on the "Alibaba Cloud-Yunqi" online.
In the context of digital transformation, how can enterprises solve the problems of agile business delivery and continuous technology governance? At this new product launch conference, Geng Liu, a product expert from Ant Group, brought the practice and thinking based on Ant Technology, and shared the product capabilities and solutions of Ant BizStack. The shorthand collects the core content of the new product launch conference of the BizStack cloud native development and governance platform, and is full of dry goods.

Pain points and challenges in the industry

The People's Bank of China issued the "Fintech Development Plan (2022-2025)" document, which pointed out that financial institutions should accelerate digital transformation and strengthen the strategic policy of prudent supervision of financial technology as the main line. At the same time, in the key tasks, the document emphasizes the improvement of the financial technology governance system, the creation of new digital infrastructure, the activation of new drivers of digital operations, and the consolidation of the foundation for sustainable development and other regulatory trends and industry requirements.

In the process of landing, how to improve the synergy efficiency of industry and technology, accelerate business innovation and continuous structure optimization are common problems faced by the industry, which are embodied in two levels:

Tier 1: Technology lacks continuous governance and operational optimization capabilities

• Architectural specifications rely on documentation, design and final implementation do not match
• Asset analysis relies on manual labor
• The dependencies are intricate, and the investigation depends on the research and development of code

The second layer: business, architecture, and technology are difficult to form a joint force

• In one sentence, there is a gap between business and technical communication
• There are many chimneys and shafts in the system, and it is difficult to repeat the construction of wheels.
• The level of personnel is uneven, and the quality and efficiency of the project are not guaranteed

In response to the above pain points and challenges in the industry, the second chapter will discuss the practice and thinking of ant architecture governance and cloud native application development.

Practice and thinking of ants

Asset-centric Architecture Governance BASE Methodology

BASE (Baseline, Advice, Spread, Empower), the ant architecture governance system, is used to maintain organizational architecture standards and spread the mechanism and methodology of architecture culture. It also has the meaning of ant architecture chassis.

What is Baseline? An architecture baseline is a set of architecture specifications, architecture standards, and architecture metadata precipitated by software engineering theories, design principles, and superdomain architecture experience.

How to maintain an architectural baseline? There are mainly two aspects of soft and hard:

• At the rigid (Advice) level, an architecture measurement mechanism is established through technical means to identify the bad smell of architecture.
• At the soft (Spread) level, through the cultural promotion and operation mechanism, establish a special structure optimization project, and cultivate the architect culture.

How to realize the empowerment of the scene? For front-line R&D personnel, refactoring suggestions and refactoring assistance are given; for architects, architecture decision-making and architecture evolution suggestions are provided; for the organizational level, it is supported to shut down and transfer the system and improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Domain-focused requirements analysis and architecture design methodology

1. In the requirements analysis stage, the business-led domain modeling is guided by business requirements and goals, and process modeling and business rule refinement are carried out.
2. In the architecture design phase, the domain-driven microservice architecture uses events, commands, aggregations, etc., to sort out the bounded context and define the microservice boundary.
3. In the code implementation stage, contract-oriented technical implementation, through the construction of technical models, automatically generates high-quality code frameworks, forms reusable architectural assets, and assists automated testing.

BizStack Solutions

What is BizStack?

• Horizontally, for the full life cycle of cloud-native applications, it provides product capabilities in three stages of demand, design, and R&D, and provides one-stop development and governance solutions. Integrate ant business and technology best practices.
• From a vertical point of view, it connects the distributed architecture infrastructure downward, supports the middle platform and business applications upward, and integrates the best practices of Ant's business and technology.
• Product capabilities include business modeling, architecture asset structuring, architecture inspection and governance, low-code development, and middle-end scalability.
• Solve the problems of business modeling analysis, architecture planning and governance, R&D efficiency improvement and expansion in the process of customer cloud native transformation.

Next, I will introduce the 4 major product modules and 5 major core capabilities of BizStack in detail.

The 4 major product modules include:

1. When needed, a business analysis platform for business analysts
2. When designing, an architecture governance platform for architects
3. Application development platform for R&D personnel during R&D
4. Provide an asset market with continuous precipitation of components and management and analysis capabilities.

The 5 core competencies include:

Core competency 1: Open and cover the entire application process, and establish a cloud-native integrated implementation process <br>Realize the entire process coverage from demand, design, R&D, and operation, and the entire chain from business model, domain model, technical model to code implementation open the road

Core competency 2: Integrated architecture management and governance platform, making architecture visible, manageable and controllable Architecture optimization continues to evolve.

Core competency 3: Componentized development, process-based arrangement, asset reuse, and improved R&D efficiency <br>Through the componentization, standardization, and standardization of the R&D system, the amount of code can be reduced by 30%, and the R&D efficiency can be effectively improved. Through the reusable and extensible service process, 80% of common process problems can be solved and rapid business iteration can be supported.

Core competency 4: mid-stage development and continuous operation capability based on the extension point framework <br>Under the platform architecture, with the expansion and complexity of the business, it faces the problems of business and platform coupling, business and business conflict. In order to solve these two types of problems, under the guidance of the business middle-end methodology, BizStack provides a set of middle-end development and continuous operation capabilities based on the extension point framework.

At the technical level, the middle-end application opens up customization capabilities through the extension point framework, and the business application realizes differentiated requirements based on the open extension point. At the operational level, visualize business capabilities and expansion points, and support structured analysis of requirements and business access processes.

Core capability 5: Back-end low-code capability based on visual service orchestration <br>On the basis of activating architecture assets, through low-code drag-and-drop, different service node types can be quickly combined, while supporting Turing-complete logical expression and The automatic parameter mapping capability between nodes provides complete transaction consistency and stability guarantees, as well as test capability verification support, and improves back-end R&D efficiency through traditional development and low-code integration.

Big Picture of BizStack Core Values

For different roles of business and technology, BizStack builds an integrated, visualized, standardized, and reusable enterprise-level cloud-native architecture system through core product capabilities such as business analysis platform, architecture governance platform, application development platform, and asset market to help financial The institution continued to improve business delivery efficiency and technology governance capabilities.

Video review to watch:
https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/detail/28555

More intentions to quickly learn about Ant BizStack, welcome to scan the code to submit the questionnaire!