Yunnan Hongta Bank Upgrades Its Core Systems to Meet Business Needs for the Next Decade

Yunnan Hongta Bank officially launched its core systems into operation on May 29, 2022, powered by a next-generation distributed database.

OceanBase Database, a distributed database independently developed by Chinese companies Ant Group and Alibaba Group, helped with the transformation of the core system of Yunnan Hongta Bank into a cloud-native distributed system. OceanBase Database has saved millions of CNY for Yunnan Hongta Bank in O&M costs, reduced the recovery time objective (RTO) to less than 30 seconds, reduced system risks, and significantly improved the business innovation efficiency of the bank. As a result, the business continuity of the system has increased to up to 99.99% and is able to meet the business growth requirements of the bank in the next eight years.

Following its "Industry + Technology" development strategy, Hongta Bank has drafted its digital transformation blueprint early with the expectation of providing customers with personalized, intelligent, and innovative financial services. In 2020, Hongta Bank was named the "Omni Experience Innovator" in the IDC Digital Transformation Awards and won the IDC Financial Industry Application Scenario Innovation Award.

Hongta Bank launched the project of building a next-generation core system in March 2021, and decided on the technical framework that integrates cloud computing, microservices, and distributed OceanBase database for its core system based on a comprehensive study on its business characteristics, infrastructure capacity, and development needs.

The core system hosted in the native distributed OceanBase Database consists of two clusters. The primary cluster, which has five replicas, is deployed across three IDCs in two regions, while the standby cluster has only one replica and asynchronously synchronizes data from the primary cluster. Two IDCs, hosting two replicas each, are deployed in the "primary region". The other IDC, which is designed for geo-disaster recovery, hosts the standby cluster and one replica of the primary cluster. Each replica is configured with two x86 servers, and the leader replica of the primary cluster is distributed to eight servers of the two IDCs in the primary region. In other words, the data tables and table partitions of the core system are equally distributed across the eight fully equivalent server nodes. This distributed database is scalable and allows the bank to add server nodes for the replicas online. In case of a systemic failure of one IDC in the primary region, the distributed database automatically switches the services from the two replicas of the faulty IDC to those of the other IDC in the same region over the Paxos protocol, and recovers the database services within 30 seconds while ensuring a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero.

OceanBase Database not only enables distributed transaction processing, its dual-active architecture also well handles hundreds of millions of transactions per day to support the bank's hundreds of millions of customers. This means that, on average, the system processes about 500,000 online transactions per minute, achieving a response performance of less than 300 milliseconds per transaction. Moreover, the new core system gives full play of the multi-tenancy capability of OceanBase Database, allowing the bank to create multiple tenants (logical instances) in two clusters for the management of its core businesses, general ledger, over-the-counter services, audio, and video services, and other modules. This not only makes full use of the physical resources of the database clusters by resource isolation but also greatly streamlines the database O&M process for the purpose of efficiency improvement and cost reduction.

Facing the trend where the Internet-based financial service and mobile payment involves an increasing number of users, the core system of a bank must be highly available and scalable and deliver high performance with lower costs in response to the challenges of 24/7 services, massive transaction volume, and big promotional events. Such challenges are overwhelming for a conventional centralized architecture, but can be well handled by OceanBase Database, a home-grown distributed database system. In addition to guaranteed high availability, dynamic load balancing, and flexible horizontal scalability, OceanBase Database also incorporated the bank's specific technical and business needs into the new core system, and has taken over various business systems from the legacy platform in the shortest time possible by working closely with the bank and third-party application vendors.

In this project, Hongta Bank is rewarded with more than a next-generation core system. It has proved that the traditional core system of a bank can run on a cutting-edge distributed architecture, and has earned valuable experience for the comprehensive upgrade of its database technologies in the years to come.