Insights from Ant Financial’s Self‑Developed Database Technology and Architecture

This article is based on Professor Feng Ke’s speech at the 9th China Database Technology Conference (May 10, 2018) and shares Ant Financial’s (Alipay) experience in developing self‑owned technology, especially databases and distributed middleware.

It begins with a brief history: the author started in a university lab focusing on databases in 1995, spent eight years on engineering database research, and joined Ant Financial in 2014, where the early self‑developed database team struggled to find a mature commercial use case.

The narrative explains why many enterprises now pursue self‑development: commercial and open‑source solutions hit their limits, and core business integration demands autonomous, controllable technology.

Three critical questions for any self‑development effort are highlighted: where the technology’s "main arena" is, what its core value is, and how the technology becomes a product. The answers stress market control, industry‑driven innovation, and a product‑mindset.

OceanBase’s evolution is described in detail: originating in 2010 at Taobao, gaining a foothold in Ant Financial by handling 10% of transaction traffic, then scaling to 100% of transactions, payments, accounting, and other core services by 2016, and finally replacing all commercial databases by 2017.

The article discusses the limitations of the traditional "two‑site three‑center" architecture (same‑city active‑active with a disaster‑recovery site) regarding scalability, cost, and disaster recovery, and how Ant Financial moved to a "three‑site five‑center" model to achieve true cross‑city multi‑active capability.

It introduces the "unit" architecture (SOFA), which isolates functionality into self‑contained, loosely coupled, fault‑independent, and disaster‑resilient units, simplifying scaling, fault isolation, and cross‑city failover.

At the data layer, OceanBase’s core is a Paxos‑based majority‑vote distributed election protocol, guaranteeing zero‑data‑loss disaster recovery (RPO=0) and sub‑30‑second failover across three or more cities.

Finally, the article reflects on Ant Financial’s mature ecosystem, its commitment to open‑source and self‑development, and calls for broader community participation in the next decade of self‑developed core technologies.