At 3.30 a.m. on August 8, there was good news about the successful launching of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's new generation core banking system came from the control room, marking the first application of “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database" in China's banking industry.
With great courage to be a pioneer, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank replaced its core
Speaking of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's initiative, we have to mention Kunshan county’s courage to "be a pioneer" that allowed it to be the top 100 counties in the country. The bank with local business outlets and widest service coverage in the county has also followed Kunshan’s spirit in empowering it transformation and development with technological innovation.
An important step in the transformation and development is “core” replacement and it is a big “operation”. Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank has been very cautious about in choosing the new core.
At about that time, Sunline's new distributed "microservices + unitized” V8 core system was put into production for Bank of Dongguan with outstanding performance. Its industry-leading distributed architecture set off a boom in the field of banking core systems, arousing widespread curiosity in the industry.
In terms of technological advancement and implementation experience guarantee, Sunline's new-generation core system has become the number one choice for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank. After multiple communications, technical exchanges and on-site simulation demonstrations, the collaboration commenced.
Achieving efficiency and efficacy with the right route
In July 2020, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's new core project officially launched a demand gap analysis.
"The service experience of nearly a hundred core systems tells us that if we want to avoid detours as much as possible so we must plan the right route from the early stage," said Zhang Gong, the project manager from Sunline who was in charge of the project at that time.
In the early stage of the project development, Sunline project team paid great attention to the direction of core system construction, spending a lot of time and energy with related business and IT departments of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank for in-depth communication and understanding of the bank's situation and needs. After repeated and rigorous analysis and evaluation, both parties reached a consensus that the use of domestic distributed databases to realize the core would be the best route. This is more suitable for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's demand for a sharp increase in business volume due to changes in business scenarios and it is also more in line with the finance development trend.
Demand analysis conduction
"Our V8 core banking system has an advanced technology platform with mature and leading business model as well as good compatibility and adaptability across multiple databases. It can control multiple architecture models and adapt to multiple databases." Zhang is confident in this project although this is the industry’s first “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database" implementation.
Kicking off emergency plans when unexpected situations are inevitable
In August 2020, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank fully launched the system design and development work, pushing the project into the development stage.
With clear direction, the project development was carried out in full swing:
On 2020, October 12, the project completed data migration development and self-test as well as the commencement of data migration test work.
From 2020, November to 2021, June, multiple rounds of SIT testing and UAT testing were performed.
On 2021, June 18, the whole bank started production drills and entered the state of "combat".
Everything was going well and the system launched was getting closer.
Unfortunately, the Nanjing epidemic broke out suddenly during this time. The original support staff from Sunline Nanjing R&D Center was unable to work on site due to the epidemic. The sudden accident brought great resistance and uncertainty to the project launch.
Project Manager Zhang urgently reported the situation to the headquarters. With Sunline's 20 years of project experience, the mechanism of pre-risk assessment and establishment of risk plans for rapid response has kicked in. The headquarters immediately activated the emergency plan and urgently deployed personnel from the Shenzhen R&D center to support the project. The response plan was drafted out in 12 hours.
Successful launch and achieved seamless connection with domestic distributed databases
After more than 300 days and nights, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's new core system project was finally ushered to the online testing stage on August 6. In order to ensure high-quality completion of the expected goal of production and launch, Sunline project team and more than 400 employees across the bank have undergone repeated preparations and drills, background data migration verification, counter green light verification, internal trial operation, external trial operation, etc.
Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank's new-generation core system was successfully launched at 3:03 a.m. on August 8! The new generation transaction-level general ledger system and the new management accounting system by Sunline were also deployed simultaneously with the new core system.
After the core replacement, the bank achieved daily transaction volume of 100 million, number of concurrent transactions greater than 2000, transaction processing volume greater than 4000 transactions per second and the end-of-day batch reduced to 15 minutes. The performance far exceeds the original core system and it is in the lead among the same type of banks in the country!
Sunline project team group photo during the launching
What makes this new core unique is that it adopts the industry's first “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database" to completely achieve seamless connection with domestic distributed databases, incorporate advanced technology concepts in the industry such as microservices, read-write separation and multi-source synchronization as well as split large systems into small microservices to reduce system complexity, eliminate coupling and effectively, solving the bottleneck issues of traditional centralized core, improving the high availability and dynamic expansion capabilities of the core system, greatly reducing the risk and cost of system construction, upgrade, operation and maintenance as well as achieving safety and control.
The new core provides strong driving force for digital transformation of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank from two aspects:
1. System architecture that introduces digital technology to bring forth open microservices distributed architecture
- The product has strong scalability, elasticity as well as supports massive data and high concurrency
- Multi-center deployment and multi-active architecture to improve disaster tolerance
- The separation of historical query database from reading and writing through database multi-source synchronization, improving real-time transaction performance of the system
- Distributed database technology provides transaction consistency guarantee to ensure data integrity
2. Operation and maintenance capabilities with DevOps capabilities such as continuous construction, continuous release and deployment
-Automated continuous integration to improve delivery speed
-Test-driven development to improve agility
-Gray release capability which can realize smooth version upgrade
-The system supports graphical operation monitoring, automatic operation completion as well as maintenance management and control capabilities
The successful launch of the new generation core banking systems is a starting point for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank driven by the Kunshan spirit. We await the excitement Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank will create on their road to digital transformation.
