Enterprise Business Middle Platform Architecture and Implementation at Dongfang Securities

Background

Rapid development of mobile internet, big data, and AI has created new challenges for securities firms, including siloed systems, monolithic architectures, heterogeneous technology stacks, and slow delivery, necessitating a more responsive and integrated IT capability.

Middle Platform Definition

Inspired by Alibaba's middle‑platform strategy, Dongfang Securities defined a corporate middle platform to consolidate core capabilities, enable API‑driven modular services, and bridge the gap between fast‑moving front‑ends and stable back‑ends.

Construction Principles

The platform follows business‑lead, domain‑driven, unified‑view, and capability‑reuse principles, ensuring that services are designed around actual business needs, divided by domain, shared across channels, and reusable.

User Business Journey

A typical user journey through the securities APP is outlined, covering login, account opening, fund transfer, product purchase, trading, asset view, and marketplace interactions.

Overall Architecture

The middle platform is split into multiple capability centers (account, product, wealth, asset, market, information, trading, authentication, payment, membership, rights, research) forming a "thin application, thick middle platform, stable back‑end" landscape.

DDD Modeling

Domain‑driven design is applied to decompose each capability center into bounded contexts and microservices, producing clear API contracts and layered code structures (application, interface, domain, infrastructure).

Technical Architecture

A cloud‑native stack based on gRPC‑Nebula, ZooKeeper, Kafka, Redis, and other open‑source middleware provides cross‑language communication, service discovery, load balancing, and high‑availability across three data‑center deployments.

Service Governance Framework

The gRPC‑Nebula framework adds service governance features such as black‑white lists, dynamic grouping, fault tolerance, and traffic control, unified under a governance portal.

PaaS Platform

Standardized PaaS offers managed middleware (Kafka, Redis, Zookeeper, Nginx, Elasticsearch) with version baselines, lifecycle management, and multi‑active deployment to support high‑throughput, low‑latency applications.

Application Multi‑Active

By deploying middleware and the service framework across multiple data centers, applications achieve near‑zero RTO, seamless traffic switching, and resource‑efficient operation.

R&D Management

A disciplined development process includes GitFlow branching, version‑train releases, automated pipelines, and data governance integrated into interface reviews, ensuring quality and rapid delivery.

Data Governance

Standardized business terminology, data dictionaries, and public codes are enforced throughout the development lifecycle, improving data consistency and reuse.

Practice Results

By August 2022, the platform delivered 195 services, 1,822 interfaces, handling over 46 million daily requests, supporting 450+ business needs, and achieving a 90 % coverage of business requirements, significantly boosting development efficiency and reducing costs.

Conclusion and Outlook

The "thin‑app, thick‑middle, stable back‑end" strategy has enabled Dongfang Securities to rapidly respond to market changes, enhance fintech competitiveness, and will continue to drive digital transformation through further cloud‑native innovations.