Improving Delivery Efficiency with Serverless Architecture: A Case Study of Ant Group Funds Technology

Introduction

The funds technology team at Ant Group shares their experience of moving from a platform‑centric model to a scenario‑driven, Serverless architecture to improve delivery efficiency and developer happiness.

Problems Encountered

Rapid scenario innovation caused the SOFA‑based monolithic application to become a "giant stone" with high operational complexity, long build times, and costly coordination among many teams.

Background

Over two years, the team explored Serverless concepts, eventually adopting a BaaS+FaaS model to decouple business logic from the underlying platform.

Architecture Selection

Traditional microservice architectures were deemed too heavyweight for fast iteration. The team chose a container‑like, Serverless approach that treats each scenario as an independent image, enabling standard build, ship, and run pipelines.

Key Design Principles

Separate the application into a shared base (BaaS) and lightweight business modules (FaaS).

Leverage SOFAArk for modular JVM isolation and hot deployment.

Use shared runtime containers to achieve isolation without heavy ops overhead.

Owner Responsibilities

With the new model, the traditional system owner role splits into a "base owner" responsible for providing reusable services and a "module owner" focused on business features. The base owner acts as an efficiency officer, technical evangelist, architecture guide, and governance partner.

Efficiency Gains

Deployments dropped from >10 minutes per change to ~30 seconds, and monthly deployment counts rose to over 2,000 while overall delivery time decreased by more than 95 %.

Future Outlook

The team plans to further abstract the base into a BaaS marketplace, enable fully managed lightweight operations, and promote the Serverless model across other Ant Group domains.