How ZTO Express Built ZMS: A Scalable Cloud‑Native Message Middleware Platform

ZTO Express processes tens of millions of parcels daily, relying on numerous business systems that are tightly coupled through message middleware to handle decoupling, peak‑shaving, asynchronous communication, data synchronization, and redundancy.

Since 2015, ZTO adopted message middleware at scale and, as the data volume and cluster count grew, created the ZMS (ZTO Message Service) platform. ZMS integrates RocketMQ and Kafka, offering automated deployment, topic/consumer approval workflows, a unified SDK, a management console, monitoring, alerting, and seamless scaling.

ZMS currently manages 17 clusters (7 Kafka, 10 RocketMQ), nearly 2,000 topics, over 3,000 consumer groups, more than 140 TB of stored messages, and processes billions of messages per day.

Automated Operations and Deployment

The platform provides a wizard‑style initialization that installs zms‑agent, Supervisor, and other base components on target hosts with a single script, eliminating the need for the portal to store host credentials.

Unified Client SDK

ZMS abstracts the underlying middleware, exposing a single API that hides differences between Kafka and RocketMQ, provides standard instrumentation for monitoring, and treats topics and consumer groups as cloud resources that can be requested without knowing the physical cluster.

Monitoring Data Collection Service

ZMSCollector periodically pulls metrics from Kafka and RocketMQ, persists them to InfluxDB, and aggregates SDK‑generated metrics, enabling persistent, visualized monitoring of message traffic.

Multi‑Data‑Center Solution

ZMS supports cold‑standby data‑center deployment. Each data‑center is treated as an environment; ZMSBackupCluster synchronizes ZooKeeper metadata between primary and backup sites, allowing seamless failover without application changes.

Open‑Source Release

On May 26, 2020, ZMS was open‑sourced on GitHub (https://github.com/ZTO-Express/zms), including usage guides, architecture documentation, and a community channel, inviting contributors to help build an integrated intelligent message‑operations platform.