Low-quality platforms play an important role in the digital transformation of enterprises, helping to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Especially for the financial industry, which is large and complex, there is a need for low-cost platforms to enhance performance at all levels of branches, business lines and technology departments.
For leadershipIn order to achieve the comprehensive promotion of digital transformation in front-line branches, we cannot only stay at the technology level of the head office. For branch offices or business personnelIt is unrealistic to rely on the technology department of the head office to solve the daily small scenarios or special needs. They want to have easy-to-use tools that free them from tedious and repetitive tasks, such as eliminating errands, manual reporting, and more. WhileFor the scientific and technological personnel of the head officeThey urgently needed a low-cost platform to improve development efficiency, and they wanted the platform to integrate well with the existing architecture and technology stack without adding new architectural and operational complexities.
From this point of view, the branch business line and the technology department both have a demand for low **, and there are also differences in users and scenarios. So should we build different low-level platforms?Or is there a platform that can meet the needs of both?This article will discuss the above issues together.
For the different users and usage scenarios mentioned earlier, we have made further analysis, and these scenarios can be roughly summarized into three types of business scenarios: "light application", "light business system" and "professional system".
Light Apps:It is usually similar to small scenarios such as information collection, data processing, and process approval, and is suitable for business personnel to adopt a zero-key construction method
"Light business system":Compared with light applications, the process or business processing is slightly more complex, including some integration capabilities related to pages, services, and data, and it is easy for business personnel or branch technical personnel to get started after training
Professional System":Corresponding to the bank's large-scale and complex business system, there is usually a proprietary data model, complex computing logic and distributed architecture system, this kind of business system needs to be implemented mainly by developers in the science and technology department, which can be implemented in the form of low ** and code integration, with higher efficiency and quality, and more suitable solutions to promote the construction of complex business systems. In the process of designing and building a low-quality platform, we fully consider the construction needs of the above three types of application scenarios, and provide corresponding suitable tools and capability solutions for different users and scenarios. Let the users of the platform experience the more efficient productivity brought by the "zero**, low**" platform.
In the construction scenario of a financial-grade "complex business system", the low-level development model needs to have more complete support capabilities, including but not limited to: data model, quality, and integration scenariosForms, views, charts, reports, large screens, etcCross-system integration capabilities corresponding to service transaction portfolio orchestration;Flexible management and control capabilities for end-to-end business process scenariosOne-stop systematic application delivery and management and control operation capabilities, etc. In many complex scenarios, programmers and developers are still required to code to implement functional logic, and the integration of high and low standards is used to achieve efficient and reliable implementation of complex business systems.
Next, we will explain the six characteristic capabilities summarized in the platform capacity building for the implementation of the above-mentioned complex business systems.
1.Architectural patterns for technology convergence
In recent years, most financial companies are planning to build low-level platforms to improve efficiency. Some of the pioneers have already built low-level platforms. After communicating with some banks and enterprises, we found that we often fall into some misunderstandings in the construction process, many of which are mainly to solve local problems and lack overall planning. The frequently asked questions are as follows:
The introduced low-quality platform cannot be integrated into the existing architecture system, such as: it does not conform to the microservice architecture, multiple applications share process computing resources, and faults between applications are not isolated
The introduced low-level platform technology stack is quite different from the existing technical system of the bank, and it is difficult to precipitate, reuse and integrate
The introduced low-level platform system is closed, complex scenarios cannot be realized, expansion is difficult, operation and maintenance control methods are specific, and it cannot adapt to the existing process specifications of banks.
In response to the above problems, we believe that the construction of a low-quality platform,The architecture should adopt the mainstream microservice architecture systemIt is best to integrate into the existing technical architecture;Technically, the mainstream technology stack with front-end and back-end separation should be adoptedSimilar to VUE, Spring Cloud, etc., at the same time, Xinchuang is also a key point that must be considered at present;In the process of developing applications based on low-level platforms, the integration of low-level configuration development and high-quality code development methods should be supported, and low-level development processes should be able to reuse high-level components and servicesApplications developed based on low-level platforms should be independent and should not affect each other, regardless of high-quality, low-level or high-level integration, should not bring changes in the deployment and operation and maintenance of applications, and should be able to integrate into the existing operation and maintenance management standard system.
In a nutshell, it is necessary to achieve a high-level true integration model based on the three consistent architectures, technologies, and operation and maintenance management.
2.Data-driven development
In order to reduce the complexity of development, many low-quality products on the market adopt a page-driven development model. The advantage of this model is that it is easier for non-technical people to get started and the development experience is better. The disadvantage is that the data store is stored in a private format, and the saved data is unreadable from its platform. This drawback creates data silos that are unacceptable in financial firms.
Based on the business characteristics of financial enterprises, we believe that the data-driven model is a better solution for the construction of complex business scenarios. Each of the bank's major business areas has its own business model in its own professional field, and these models are usually complex business models that have been accumulated and precipitated, with industry knowledge thresholds, and are almost never built from scratch.
On the other hand, based on the data model, we can connect with the bank's future data standards, so that the data table fields, types, interface messages, data verification, page controls, etc. can be standardized, which can achieve high-quality data landing and lay a solid foundation for subsequent data entry into the lake and analysis and statistics. Of course, the business personnel in the process of modeling have a certain learning cost, in this case, the low-level platform can simplify or automate the modeling process through technical means, and the platform automatically generates models and data tables, thereby reducing the difficulty of learning and use, and making it easier for business personnel to get started.
Data is the core asset of financial enterprises, and high-quality data landing is a necessary condition, so data models and modeling capabilities are indispensable.
3.Componentized low page engine
Low-level drag-and-drop WYSIWYG forms, view page design tools are already the standard configuration of all low-level platform products, and in terms of page development capabilities of low-level platforms, we should focus on the following aspects:
The page engine should support rich and diverse presentation forms, such as forms, views, charts, reports, dashboards, large screens, etc
The page engine should support PC and mobile page design and rendering
The page engine should provide rich front-end components, such as basic technical components, layout container components, advanced function components, and so on
The page engine should have a flexible extension mode, support custom extension page components, and support encapsulation and reuse of existing front-end components
The page engine must have the ability to generate, and the generated engine should meet the specifications and security requirements, and support controllable coding adjustment capabilities.
In the case of the convergence of the surface capabilities of low-level page engines, in addition to the beauty and rich presentation forms of the page, the flexible component expansion ability, the controllable adjustment ability of source code generation, and the ability to compile and render in real time based on secure source code should be the key features of platform construction or selection.
4.Enterprise-grade low** process engine
In terms of process engines, there are usually two types of processes in complex enterprise-level process scenarios. One is end-to-end business processes across systemsThe second is the operation process related to the approval of the internal process of the system. The focus of these two types of processes is different. End-to-end business processes, focusing on cross-system integration capabilities, such as data transmission, service invocation, message sending and receiving, sub-process invocation of external systems, and other scenariosThe approval process in the system pays more attention to scenarios such as the linkage between processes and forms, the authority scope rules of approval processors, the branch flow rules of processes, and the complex rules of task processing. In addition to the low-quality productization configuration capability, the high-performance and high-reliability cluster mode operation support of the process engine, the runtime adjustment configuration support of the business process, and the statistical analysis capability based on the process perspective are all indispensable key functions.
In addition, in the scenario of process banking, the process should be used as a guarantee for the compliance of banking business processing, and there should be consistent specifications and standards for the entire bank. The support capability of the unified process platform is also a key starting point for large financial enterprises to multi-complex business scenarios, build a unified process platform, provide process support for multiple business systems in various fields, and based on multi-tenant technical means, let each business system carry out one-stop design, development, operation and management of business processes in the shared cloud process services, so that the implementation of standard and standardized business and approval processes has a clear and feasible path and control. The basis for optimization can be analyzed, and finally a closed loop of continuous optimization of business processes can be formed.
5.High-performance and highly reliable trading engine
In the bank's "intermediary business" and "scenario finance", the significant business feature is that the relevant business will involve close connection with users, third-party enterprises, and other financial institutions, such as investment and wealth management, life services, wealth management, etc., with high business diversity and complexity, and more emphasis on personalized services and cooperation and collaboration. In such scenarios, the connection between different enterprises and institutions requires strong integration and service transaction orchestration capabilities. Through a high-performance and high-reliability transaction engine, which can quickly implement relevant business transactions in a low-performance mode, banks can gain competitive advantages in these areas and provide customers with a better financial service experience.
Service transaction orchestration is the core embodiment of the integration capability of the low-level platform, and in general scenarios, with the ability of service orchestration, the coverage rate of the business scenario of the low-level platform can be greatly increased to 80%-90%. For complex integration scenarios in the financial industry, a trading engine with more powerful integration capabilities is even more important. For financial enterprises, especially banks, the ability to orchestrate service transactions needs to support the integration of multiple protocolsAbility to parse and convert multiple packet formats;High-performance and high-reliability asynchronous and parallel computing capabilitiesand the ability to handle transaction errors and compensate for reversal in abnormal scenarios to ensure the correctness and consistency of data.
In addition, from the perspective of low-quality transaction development tools, low-quality process-based transaction orchestration tools are indispensable, and it is also necessary to support the first-class debugging in the development process to improve the overall development efficiencyTo support runtime source builds to ensure securityThe compilation and operation mode is used as much as possible to ensure the performance and stability of the operation period.
6.One-stop delivery and monitoring of operational capabilities
For "complex business systems", a distributed architecture is usually adopted, which has the characteristics of long implementation and delivery cycle, and complex operation and maintenance management. In response to this situation, as a low-level platform, in addition to providing development and operation support, it also needs to consider the implementation, delivery, monitoring and operation of applications and other scenarios to provide comprehensive support capabilities and tools.
In terms of application implementation process management, it is necessary to provide support capabilities for project management, such as requirements, tasks, testing, quality, documentation and other tools and management capabilities.
In terms of application delivery, it is necessary to provide automated deployment of applications, meet the requirements of the multi-environment delivery management process of financial enterprises, and support resource management and automated deployment and delivery of multiple types of environments such as development, testing, UAT, quasi-production, and production. Block out tedious manual repetitive work.
In terms of application monitoring, all applications built and run on the low-level platform should provide a one-stop unified application monitoring and governance platform, centralized management of application configurations, monitoring of running health status and resource usage, and centralized analysis and statistics of application logs and performance.
In terms of continuous operation of applications, the application continuously collects operational data from the construction to the operation of the low-quality platform, and gradually realizes the full-link operation analysis of application R&D efficiency, operation efficiency, business efficiency and enterprise efficiency.
Jin Hyundai Hussar's low-quality development platform supports three development modes, which can meet the development needs of financial enterprises in different scenarios, and has the ability to support complex business scenarios, and has been applied in many enterprises such as China Merchants Bank, Zhongtai, Guosheng, and Guoyuan.