How Serverless and BFF Transform Frontend Development at Ant Group

With the rise of intelligent and Serverless technologies, the future of front‑end development—especially in high‑traffic financial services—requires new approaches to ensure safe production. This talk first outlines Ant Group's front‑end R&D system and the efficiency and risk‑control challenges faced by engineers, then presents a Serverless‑based lightweight development model as a solution.

Ant Group Business Front‑End R&D System

Ant Group's front‑end development spans PC web, H5, mini‑programs, native apps, and large‑screen solutions; the Yu’ebao product mainly uses H5, BFF, and mini‑programs.

The preferred front‑end low‑code platform is followed by a front‑end application framework. A portion of the architecture runs on internal servers, with BFF (Backend For Frontend) playing a key role.

BFF aggregates requests and trims data, allowing the front‑end team to shape data for optimal interaction.

Development Process and Pain Points

The workflow includes “system analysis” (系分) and “test analysis” (测分). System analysis covers requirement research, functional design, extensibility, maintainability, and critical code implementation. Documentation such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and API specs are produced, but frequent requirement changes often leave these documents out‑of‑date.

Enterprise‑grade applications have complex codebases and many dependencies, leading to slow packaging and deployment.

During release, the massive user base and stringent safety requirements demand fallback code, monitoring, caching, retries, and degradation strategies, extending release cycles from a few days to a week.

In summary, the introduction of BFF and high safety demands increase front‑end development complexity.

How to Address These Challenges?

We focus on three core ideas: “Documentation as Code”, “Function‑Level Development Deployment”, and “Integrated Development Environment Plugin Capability”.

Function‑Level Development Deployment

By leveraging Faas, multiple front‑end + BFF applications are transformed into function‑level deployments, offering out‑of‑the‑box usage, no environment dependencies, and independent deployment.

This approach applies to BFF interfaces and integrated cards, allowing each to be deployed independently without local dependency installations.

Integrated cards combine UI and data into a cohesive unit, as illustrated below.

The evolution of front‑end development moved from traditional monolithic pages (PHP, JSP) to front‑end/back‑end separation via Ajax, then to BFF for request aggregation, and finally to a unified UI‑plus‑data delivery model that eliminates the need for separate interfaces.

Documentation as Code

All artifacts—requirements, designs, visual mockups, system and test analyses, code—are centrally managed, enabling automatic generation of code, flowcharts, and sequence diagrams from documentation, keeping them synchronized.

Through intelligent automation, non‑structured and structured documents can produce the necessary code, improving efficiency and quality.

For example, D2C (Design‑to‑Code) can convert visual designs into code, automatically generate monitoring and emergency‑response configurations, and more.

Integrated Environment Plugin Capability

The lightweight platform offers plugin capabilities at each stage, allowing teams to customize workflows or integrate third‑party tools, such as the D2C capability from the insurance team.

Three Core Ideas of the Light Development Platform

Documentation as Code : Centralize structured and unstructured documents and generate code automatically.

Function‑Level Development Deployment : Independent, environment‑free deployment for BFF interfaces and integrated cards.

Integrated Environment Plugin Capability : Reuse third‑party capabilities and customize workflows.

Future Front‑End Directions

Ant Group continues to explore how to further simplify front‑end development while meeting the safety and scalability demands of massive financial services.