How Eastern Securities Built a Multi-Language gRPC-Nebula Service Governance Platform

Introduction

In recent years, the rapid growth of securities market customers and business volume, combined with the rise of internet finance and fintech, has driven securities firms to pursue digital transformation. Traditional monolithic systems are being split into independent microservices to achieve high cohesion and low coupling, enabling more agile service delivery.

Microservice Architecture

Monolithic Architecture

Traditional information systems often adopt a monolithic architecture where all functions are packaged into a single unit (e.g., a Java WAR file). While simple to develop and deploy initially, monoliths suffer from decreasing development efficiency, deployment bottlenecks, reliability issues, limited scalability, and technology lock‑in as business scales.

Development efficiency continuously declines due to large code bases and complex coupling.

Continuous iteration is hindered because any change requires redeploying the whole project.

Reliability degrades; a failure in one interface can affect the entire system.

Scalability is limited because all modules share the same instance.

Technology stacks become rigid, making upgrades difficult.

Microservice Architecture

Microservices decompose a large application into independent, single‑purpose services that communicate via standardized protocols. This solves many monolith problems: smaller, cohesive services are easier to develop and maintain; independent deployment accelerates iteration; failures are isolated; resources can be scaled horizontally or vertically per service; and teams can choose languages and stacks freely.

However, heterogeneous legacy systems in securities firms pose challenges for microservice adoption.

Eastern Securities Service Governance Platform

The platform provides a unified service governance solution built on gRPC, supporting multi‑language, multi‑protocol, visualized, and flexible configuration management. It enables unified management of internal and external services, service topology visualization, quality optimization, and full lifecycle management.

Core Modules

Registry Center : Distributed, high‑availability configuration system for service registration and discovery.

Service Consumer (Client) : Retrieves service info from the registry and sends call data to the processing engine.

Service Provider (Server) : Publishes service info, handles consumer calls, and manages quality, security, and configuration.

Information Collector : Collects call logs, response times, exceptions, etc., and forwards them to the data processing engine.

Data Processing Engine : Performs real‑time analysis, performance statistics, dependency analysis, alerts, and stores results in a performance database.

Service Governance Portal : Provides a unified UI for querying instances, interfaces, status, dependencies, metrics, and supports black‑white lists, traffic control, weight configuration, and health monitoring.

gRPC‑Nebula Service Governance Framework

Technical Solution

After evaluating popular open‑source frameworks (Dubbo, Thrift, gRPC, Spring Cloud), Eastern Securities chose gRPC for its multi‑language support, active community, Protobuf‑based interface definition, and HTTP/2 transport.

Key Features

Comprehensive multi‑language support (C, C++, Java, Python, Go, etc.).

ZooKeeper‑based registry providing high availability, data consistency, push‑based service change notifications, and health checks.

Service routing with connection and request load‑balancing, supporting random, round‑robin, weight‑based, and consistent‑hash algorithms.

Black‑white list control for IP‑level access.

Weight configuration for traffic distribution.

Dynamic grouping for intra‑datacenter routing and business isolation.

Cluster fault tolerance with fail‑fast and fail‑over strategies.

Traffic control limiting request and connection counts.

Access protection for graceful online/offline operations.

Multi‑registry support for segmented networks.

Master‑slave service mode.

Visibility control for internal vs. external services.

gRPC Optimizations

Added exponential back‑off with configurable maximum reconnection time, and configurable keepalive heartbeats for both client and server to avoid firewall‑induced disconnections.

Starry Service Governance Platform

Goals

Provide a unified governance layer compatible with gRPC, Spring Cloud, and Dubbo; prevent architecture erosion; enable rapid fault localization; support fine‑grained control (rate limiting, routing, configuration); and manage service lifecycle (approval, online/offline, auto‑scaling).

Functional Modules

Service Governance

Service Map (topology visualization)

Link Tracing (based on Google Dapper)

Documentation Center (ProtoBuf interface parsing)

Statistics & Analysis

Alarm Center

Unified framework integration

Transformation Practice

Digital Transformation

Eastern Securities launched a digital transformation strategy in 2018, establishing a middle‑platform architecture and an architecture committee to guide the shift from monoliths to microservices.

Architecture Standards

Since May 2019, all internal systems must use gRPC for inter‑service calls, while allowing gRPC, Dubbo, or Spring Cloud for internal implementation, ensuring a unified, service‑oriented architecture.

Open‑Source Sharing

The gRPC‑Nebula framework was open‑sourced on GitHub in June 2019, forming a community committee and receiving industry awards.

Results

By September 2020, the framework had released 14 Java and 8 C++ versions, integrated 46 applications, 99 projects, 369 services, and handled tens of millions of daily requests. It now powers core systems such as Eastern Winners App, private banking App, and various trading platforms.

Conclusion

The article explores key enterprise architecture technologies and presents Eastern Securities' service governance project achievements and lessons. The gRPC‑Nebula framework and Starry Service Governance Platform have become core infrastructure for the company's middle‑platform strategy, supporting multiple microservice frameworks, enhancing development flexibility, and driving further digital innovation.