Interview with Lu Zhi on SOFA5, Service Mesh, Seata and Open‑Source Practices at Ant Financial

At the beginning of February, the author visited Ant Financial's middleware team and interviewed Lu Zhi, the technical lead of the SOFA open‑source project. The conversation covered Lu's background, his role in driving SOFA's open‑source efforts, and the team's responsibilities.

Lu explained that SOFA has progressed from SOFA4, which focused on cleaning up and optimizing the codebase for open‑source release, to SOFA5, which aims to provide cloud‑native capabilities such as Serverless. He emphasized that the future of cloud computing lies in abstracting infrastructure so developers can focus solely on business logic.

The interview highlighted Service Mesh as a core feature of SOFA5. Lu described Service Mesh as an infrastructure layer that handles inter‑service communication transparently, allowing business code to ignore underlying network complexities. He noted that Ant Financial has already deployed Service Mesh in production and plans to expand its usage.

Regarding distributed transactions, Lu recounted the evolution from Ant Financial's XTS middleware (based on the TCC model) to the open‑source Seata project, which now supports AT, TCC, and future XA modes. He stressed that Seata aims to make distributed transactions as simple and efficient as local transactions.

The discussion also covered Ant Financial's open‑source strategy. Lu outlined the process of preparing code, providing examples and contributor guides, and deciding which components to open based on their relevance to core business. He mentioned the intention to adopt Apache‑style governance and collaborate with foundations such as Apache and CNCF.

Finally, Lu expressed confidence that Ant Financial will continue to open more technologies, including AI, and encouraged the community to engage with their projects.