Episode Details

Some highlights of the show include

• The challenges of operating digital commerce at scale, including the need for resource pooling and resiliency — and how this caused Ant Financial to re-think their infrastructure. 
• Ant Financial’s former approach to scaling, which was mostly manual, and highly resource-intensive. 
• How Kubernetes is expediting cloud development for Ant Financial.
• Haojie’s thoughts on the global engineering skills gap, and China’s growing cloud computing market including driving factors and barriers. 
• Why Ant Financial’s migration has largely been a success — and why achieving operational security is now a top priority for the company.  
• How Ant Financial is managing disconnect between its engineers and business leaders. 
• The company’s ongoing mission to migrate its systems and applications away from legacy architectures.

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haojiehang/
• https://www.investopedia.com/tech/worlds-top-10-fintech-companies-baba/

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: So, I always start the same way. Can you introduce yourself?

Haojie: Hey, my name is Haojie Hang. I'm a product manager in the CTO office at Ant Financial. I work on the product and strategy side for, basically, the CTO and the other executive leaders, as well as leading a small product teams within the org to look at the frontier technology in the cloud and other infrastructure businesses.

Emily: And can you tell me a little bit more about what Ant Financial does? And then, also, what do you do on a day to day basis? What do you do when you get into the office?

Haojie: Yeah, I'll do a quick introduction about the Ant Financial business. It's not just one business or two business, it's a group of businesses that we innovate and we do, mostly in China, but we're also expanding very rapidly all over the world. So, Ant Financial is basically a group of businesses including credit for both consumers and the enterprise, as well as loan businesses, both consumer and enterprise businesses. We say that the parent organization is basically, we call it Alipay, it’s the earliest business we do since 2004 when the business was basically born from Taobao, which is our parent company. So, in short, the Ant Financial Business has a lot of presence in the business of payments business, remittance, credit card, loans, securities, and many other businesses like intelligent technology, blockchain, pretty much everything you can imagine in the FinTech and financial services, we’re in there.

Emily: Tell me a little bit more about the cloud-native journey for Ant Financial. When did it start? Why did it start? What was some of the motivations behind moving to cloud-native?

Haojie: Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. I joined Ant Financial in 2008, but actually, the entire company started to look at cloud-native technology quite early, in 2012. So, back then, people were just looking at these technologies around the world, mostly from the US, they look at this open-source community, look at what other companies are doing, how to use the cloud-native technology to help with their business in the peak time, so during event. There’s online promotion event we're doing every year, called Double 11—Shuāng shíyī in Chinese. Every year, so we have a large amount of promotional events happening online, trying to help merchants and the customer is trying to sell