Whilst I had built distributed software services before, this time was a different scenario altogether and, shall I say, much more interesting! This time was about building a payments processing service for two of the largest companies in the world to interact with one another, in a highly regulated environment. FTP was still involved, but at least the files were not in a fixed-width fields format! This time it was all about the CSV format, but that was not all: our Springboot application had to call existing Java remote services that were distributed across the globe. With that, came the first lesson: you can build vast distributed services on RPC technologies.
The main advantage of REST is its HTTP/web interoperability. Because of that, REST APIs have a lot more traction in the western world where an entrepreneurial lattice of companies large and small thrive. But its lack of performance compared to RPC makes REST a less appealing option to large companies building large in-house systems that need to be fast and scalable in order to support their services offerings.
Ant Financial uses its very own SOFA = Scalable Open Financial Architecture. SOFA allows for fast, low latency RPC calls at its core, also providing enterprise-ready capabilities such as fault tolerance, governance, observability and extensibility.
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