On January 31, 2022, JD Technology and SphereEx signed a strategic cooperation agreement to take their partnership in the database service industry to the next level. SphereEx and JD Technology stated that "by drawing on each others' strengths, we'll jointly develop new product solutions and explore applications for online transactions, online monitoring, elastic scale-out, single or multi-site high availability (HA), and disaster recovery (DR)."
Why did SphereEx and JD Technology Establish a Cooperation?
Facing strong competition to strengthen its positioning in the market, while being part of China's largest retailer and world's third-largest Internet company, JD Technology continuously seeks opportunities for business growth.
The increased digital technologies adoption rate has inspired large Internet companies to leverage their powerful data infrastructure to empower enterprises' digital transformation.
In 2017, JD Technology shared its intentions to "serve technological transformation", and quickly acted on them by going on a hiring spree and recruiting the best database talent around.
Zhang Liang and Trista Pan, the SphereEx Founder & CEO and Co-Founder & CTO were at the time employed at JD Technology as Head of Database Development and Senior Database Administrator respectively.
They acted as the minds behind ShardingSphere's integration into JD Technology's infrastructure. The successful integration earned ShardingSphere the support of JD Technology to enter the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as an Incubator project in 2019, and eventually successfully graduate as an Apache Top-Level project in April, 2020.
Currently, Apache ShardingSphere is integrated into the infrastructure of various JD.com business units, thanks to its plugin oriented architecture design. This type of architecture allows the flexible integration of features such as data sharding, read/write splitting, data encryption, and elastic scale-out - useful for building extensible database clusters, and ultimately linking data & services simply.
The ShardingSphere community, proudly supported by SphereEx, took the chance to extend its heartfelt gratitude to the JD Technology team for providing great use case scenarios.
The success of the 11.11 Shopping Festival aka "Singles Day" and the 6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival for JD.com meant significant surges in data traffic. These surges allowed Apache ShardingSphere to develop into the data governance tool able to handle trillion-level data traffic that it is today.
SphereEx was founded by Apache ShardingSphere's core developer team, and is therefore closely linked to JD Technology.
With JD Technology's increasingly diversified application scenarios, increasingly professional and efficient services have become to be expected. This offers SphereEx the opportunity to test and develop products in close partnership with JD and its customers.
Partnering on technology development will allow for better future database services.
Core Objective: Build a Better Data Ecosystem
To achieve their common goal of building a better data ecosystem, SphereEx and JD Technology will cooperate to build next-gen data application and governance solutions.
We will utilize our intelligent data governance platform to provide data processing, data asset management, data service management, and additional core services.
SphereEx will aso cooperate with JD Technology to jointly create products and solution for online transactions, online monitoring, elastic scale-out, single or multi-site high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).
In the future, SphereEx and JD.com will seek better collaboration models for database product delivery and DevOps in the finance, Internet-related and manufacturing scenarios.
By establishing a commercial cooperation, innovation iteration speed and efficiency for the Internet-related verticals will be improved with significant innovations coming to the database field.