Open Source Core Infrastructure: Ant Group’s Strategy and Key Projects

He Zhengyu, chair of Ant Group’s Infrastructure Technology Committee, delivered a keynote titled “Open Self‑Developed Core Infrastructure Technology: Jointly Exploring Technical High Ground” at the 2022 Open Atom Global Open Source Summit, presenting Ant’s open‑source philosophy of releasing its most critical self‑developed technologies to foster community and industry breakthroughs.

The speech emphasized that open source is the lifeblood of a healthy technology ecosystem, citing the classic book *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* to contrast the traditional “cathedral” model with the vibrant, collaborative “bazaar” model, and likening a closed fish tank to a fragile ecosystem.

Ant Group has accumulated nearly 900 open‑source repositories and about a hundred leading community projects, covering core areas such as databases, operating systems, privacy computing, and cloud‑native technologies, ranking among the top three Chinese enterprises in active projects and influence according to the 2022 China Open‑Source Development Blue Book.

In the database domain, Ant’s flagship open‑source project is OceanBase, a distributed native database that has tackled “bottleneck” challenges for over a decade and was open‑sourced in June to invite broader developer participation.

For cloud‑native infrastructure, Ant open‑sourced SOFA Mesh, including its self‑developed MOSN gateway, and contributed the Kata Containers security container project, which earned the Open Infra Foundation’s SuperUser Award.

Ant also released key privacy‑computing and trusted execution technologies such as the Occlum operating system, which can quickly port workloads like TensorFlow Lite into SGX‑like environments, and the upcoming HyperEnclave project that enables a controllable root of trust.

On the application side, Ant unveiled the “YinYu” (隐语) framework, a comprehensive privacy‑computing solution that integrates major industry techniques to address data security and isolation challenges.

In the security domain, Ant introduced BabaSSL, the first domestically open‑source cryptographic library built on OpenSSL with national‑standard algorithms, later rebranded as “TongSuo” (铜锁) to serve as a core encryption component for the industry.

Looking ahead, Ant plans to open‑source its large‑scale graph database TuGraph, a project stemming from the GeaGraph system that has been recognized as a world‑leading internet technology achievement.

The keynote concluded with a call for collective action to overcome open‑source challenges, noting global developer growth on GitHub, the rising adoption of enterprise open‑source software, and Ant’s commitment to the principles of openness, equality, collaboration, and sharing to drive high‑quality economic and social development.