Tencent updates web and mobile payment infrastructure for better scalability and agility

As with many financial technology companies, Tencent FiT needs a robust, reliable, and scalable infrastructure to keep customers happy and accommodate rapid growth. Senior Software Engineer Hanson Hu and Senior Software Architect Shanyou Zhang in the FiT division at Tencent spoke with Microsoft about how they implemented .NET Core and ASP.NET Core to help the company achieve its technology goals.

Please tell us a little about Tencent and your FiT division.

ZHANG: Tencent is a familiar name to internet users in China and around the world—hundreds of millions of people use our services every day. The FiT division provides online and mobile financial transaction services to more than 600 million worldwide businesses and individuals through our WeChat Wallet and other systems backed by the Tenpay online payment service.

Can you describe some of the infrastructure challenges facing Tenpay?

HU: Tencent FiT has a back-end infrastructure that serves our current business needs. However, as the volume of the business has rapidly expanded, we’ve added a large number of services, each of which separately manages its own load balancing, authorization, and volume control. This results in duplicated APIs and code, so when we want to make code changes, we often have to make the same change in multiple places.

What has been your strategy for switching to a more efficient infrastructure?

ZHANG: We set out to create a unified Settlement API gateway that all upstream services can use. Previously, we had a many-to-many relationship between upstream and back-end services, but now all upstream services that need a particular function will call the same API that is part of the gateway. To make the system more elastic and scalable—and to make our development quicker and easier—we’ve also been looking into using a microservice architecture to refactor existing services over time.

What was it about .NET Core and ASP.NET Core that appealed to you?

HU: We have a mixed Windows Server and Linux environment, so the cross-platform capabilities of .NET Core were very important to us. Also, Microsoft designed .NET Core with a microservice architecture in mind, and that fits right in with our redesign plans. We can modularize our infrastructure design so that it is no longer a traditional, monolithic web service architecture, which makes it much easier to scale. We investigated the microservice framework in Java, but .NET Core was a better option for us. We also really appreciate that .NET Core is open source, because that gives us the chance to directly influence its direction by providing feedback through various channels.

What else makes this infrastructure migration important to Tencent FiT?

ZHANG: The financial services industry tends to be fairly conservative when it comes to technology, and this project positions Tencent FiT as a real IT visionary. We’re grateful to have a technology partner like Microsoft providing the tools we need to break new ground in online and mobile payments. Even though our customers don’t see these infrastructure changes in the products they use, the technology improvements lead to service enhancements—the new architecture makes our products more reliable, scalable, and efficient. We are happy that the new system can handle our initial goal of 20 million requests per day in production.

Finally, the open-source nature of .NET Core has inspired a strong and active developer community, so we can take advantage of each other’s work for business-critical projects. Being in the financial industry, we must be able to audit source code and all the dependencies for security and compliance reasons—and .NET Core as an open-source project helps us meet that requirement. Ease of development was also a key benefit. I was the sole developer on our API gateway project, and I completed it in just three months, thanks partly to the work of a developer in the United Kingdom whose innovations I could incorporate into my own project.