openEuler and the Finance Industry

An Intelligent Foundation

The operating system (OS) serves as the bedrock of business. Every organization across the planet depends on OSes for its at-scale services. For the most part, companies rely on Linux for services such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, containers, and so much more.

Consider Kubernetes, a technology that has enabled organizations to scale farther and faster than any other. Without Linux, that is not possible. Think about the expanding adoption of AI: The infrastructure necessary to run LLMs and integrate AI into systems everywhere is made possible by open source technology. And what about Wall Street and its use of Linux to process massive datasets? Without Linux, these things would not be as possible or widespread.

Within the financial industry, the OS is of particular importance due to a higher demand in areas such as reliability, security, and performance. After all, when other people’s money is at stake, the idea of security becomes tantamount to success.

Financial markets around the globe lean heavily on Linux to power high-speed trading systems, major stock exchanges, and financial data infrastructure.

Within the enterprise Linux landscape, several major distributions serve organizations across industries and regions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu Server, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and openEuler. These distributions have established strong user bases and ecosystems across different markets and use cases. As openEuler continues to expand its global adoption and ecosystem, the enterprise Linux landscape is becoming increasingly diverse and open to new possibilities.

openEuler’s rise resulted from a perfect storm of events:

• The hole left by Red Hat’s decision to change CentOS to CentOS Stream (which made it unusable for enterprise businesses)
• China’s ongoing drive toward homegrown digital transformation
• The need for heterogeneous computing environments that support x86, Arm (Kunpeng), RISC-V, and LoongArch

As for how openEuler fits into the financial sector, consider that the Bank of Tianjin, the Bank of Changsha, and China ZheShang Bank have all migrated core banking, e-banking, and blockchain service platforms to commercial editions of openEuler. Add to that, giants in the financial technology (fintech) industry, such as Hundsun Technologies, have further customized openEuler to build highly secure, proprietary financial trading systems, and it becomes clear that openEuler is on the rise.

“The number of new installed capacity in the whole year of 2025 is expected to reach 4.48 million servers,” according to Frost & Sullivan. The white paper continues, “of which the share of the openEuler system has exceeded 57.3 percent, forming an absolute leading position in key infrastructure fields such as finance, telecommunications, and government affairs.”

The white paper concludes that, “This growth is primarily driven by national policies promoting technological self-reliance, rapid advances in AI, and increasingly stringent security and compliance requirements.”

The Vision

The OS serves as the foundation of any service, and openEuler happens to be one of the OSes that runs and supports everything from core banking systems to emerging fintech applications, replacing legacy platforms that are no longer considered secure or even viable options.

In today’s world, an OS must be capable of taking on modern workloads, which include AI and machine learning (ML). These two technologies allow for smarter and faster decision-making for trading algorithms, fraud detection, and even personalized banking.

Of course, an OS cannot be considered an intelligent foundation simply by the addition of AI and ML. To elevate an OS, it needs to support cloud-native architecture (such as containers and Kubernetes) to meet the needs of modernizing core banking and services. Typically, banks use containers for things like auto-scaling, microservices, hybrid clouds, and compliance.

openEuler’s oeDeploy makes deploying Kubernetes a one-click solution, so admins and developers can quickly and efficiently set up various software environments, supporting both single-node and distributed scenarios. Instead of having to spend time on deployments, admins can focus on building, scaling, and managing services.

Thanks to openEuler’s open nature, once those services are deployed, it can help facilitate innovation and integration with cutting-edge technology.

The Imperative for Change in Finance

For years, the finance industry has been dependent on legacy systems due to proven reliability, high replacement risk, and budgetary issues. The problem is that the longer those legacy systems remain in place, the higher the innovation tax an organization will have to pay. At the same time, those legacy systems become harder and harder to maintain as specialists continue to retire.

Legacy systems also struggle to integrate with modern technology, such as AI, containers, microservices, and the cloud. Without those modern technologies in place, finance organizations will fail to keep pace with the competition.

Finally, those legacy systems cannot keep pace with the ever-growing security needs in sectors such as finance.

To mitigate this, openness and collaboration are necessary, and openEuler is an ideal platform on which to create a foundation. Due to its open source nature, openEuler makes it possible to innovate faster and more easily, especially given its ever-growing community of users and developers. Because openEuler is open source, it’s far more easily audited and adapted than a proprietary OS.

That openness allows other organizations to invest their time and efforts to help expand and improve the platform as a whole. There are several global organizations that contribute to the growth and improvement of openEuler. You can check out the list of major donors, which is comprised of some impressive companies.

Why openEuler?

The reasons for adopting openEuler are many, and they start with the philosophy of one OS for all scenarios. Unlike some other platforms, openEuler is an outstanding foundation for servers, edge gateways, IoT devices, native container platforms, carrier networks, and embedded systems. openEuler also delivers a unified kernel, build system, and SDKs to enable developers to write native applications across each type.

More importantly, openEuler is optimized for high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale deployments that are required by financial institutions everywhere. openEuler also includes optimizations specific to AI. In fact, starting with release 24.03, openEuler is now considered an AI-native OS, which includes a full-stack AI toolkit, intelligent auto-tuning, and AI for OS operations.

Another key factor is governance. openEuler is transparently governed by the OpenAtom Foundation, which ensures that companies will never be trapped by vendor lock-in.

If you compare openEuler against other enterprise Linux distributions, you can see why so many organizations are adopting the OS.

Proof of Adoption

According to this report regarding the Asian finance industry from Accenture, “Over the past five years, openEuler is believed to have achieved a total of 10 million deployments, half of which are estimated to have taken place in 2024 alone. It is currently the leading OS in the China, with a 50 percent share of new deployments. Notably, many of China’s largest banks, including four of the world’s largest, are among those that have adopted the software.”

That same report goes on to say, “As the leading system for cloud computing, Linux facilitates workload migration and supports the agility and efficiency that come with the move. By freeing banks from the constraints of their proprietary systems, it gives them the ability to easily customize their architecture to meet evolving needs, and to scale their operations as and when required. Innovation, which is stifled by legacy systems, flourishes on an open system. There are other benefits too.”

This adoption makes it clear that the Chinese financial landscape has not only placed its full trust in open platforms, but in openEuler as well.

It’s not just small deployments. “Large-scale application in various industries: Over 1.7 million openEuler-based OSes have been installed in various industries, including the public sector, carriers, finance, energy, transportation, and the Internet. In 2022, there are expected to be more than 3 million installations,” claims this World Internet Conference (WIC) report from 2022. openEuler deployments have grown steadily since.

Key Success Stories & Use Cases

Several major companies have used openEuler for specific migrations and/or changes:

• Bank of Tianjin modernized its next-generation core banking system and upgraded its core IT infrastructure during a massive digital transformation phase. This upgrade was done with cloud-native applications running on openEuler.
• Ping An Bank migrated a massive, thousands-node offline big data platform away from CentOS and Red Hat to openEuler, thus lowering costs while maintaining performance for at-scale data batch processing and archiving.
• Bank of Hangzhou overhauled its entire IT framework using openEuler and achieved enhanced system agility and security. This move dramatically cut operation and maintenance costs.
• China Construction Bank implemented a distributed system for its credit card core service that was powered by openEuler and Kunpeng, which led the industry across four core metrics, including customer volume and credit scale.

Key factors in these migrations included cost reduction, improved performance, enhanced security, faster innovation cycles, ease of migration from legacy systems, and less risk when migrating, all of which have been made possible by openEuler.

Challenges and the Path Forward

Any time an organization makes a major change or migration, complications will arise. This is especially so when mission-critical applications and services are at stake. Such migrations must be taken slowly and carefully.

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is migrating legacy systems, which requires considerable planning and development. Oftentimes, those legacy systems have been written in languages that are no longer used and are not compatible with other, more modern languages. As a result, those legacy apps and services might need to be completely rewritten with the new OS in mind. If those legacy apps are migrating from another Linux distribution to openEuler, the migration may be less complex, but it can still present several compatibility and adaptation challenges.

For example, these systems might have been written with a specific Linux kernel in mind. Given how quickly the Linux kernel evolves, those legacy apps and services might depend on kernel modules that are no longer present in modern kernels.

At the same time, those migrations have to pay attention to performance and security. The good news on this front is that a lot of older languages (such as COBOL) are considerably slower than a modern language like C. As for security, openEuler employs a strategy of ongoing security and compliance audits to ensure that the OS meets the rigorous demands of modern computing in the financial sector.

Another important factor when migrating is that openEuler is a key software pillar in L4 modernization, which is the transition toward Level 4 autonomous networks, leading companies from manual operations to highly autonomous, AI-driven operations within the realm of network management. Thanks to openEuler’s deep AI integration, that transition is made considerably easier.

Going forward, openEuler is heading down a path of even deeper AI integration, as well as continuing to lead the finance industry to a cloud-native, AI-first landscape.

Conclusion

With a nearly 60 percent share and continued growth in new installations, openEuler is on target to become the leading OS in the Chinese financial sector. Several major banks have come to depend on openEuler for large-scale deployments. Their success is a testament not only to the power of the OS, but also to the dominance of open source technology for mission-critical infrastructure. As this sector continues to rely on openEuler, proving its strength and viability, other industries will take notice and adopt it, especially when it comes to the case of AI/ML adoption.

The further adoption of openEuler will continue paving the way for greater efficiency, innovation, and security in the financial sector, representing a crucial step in the digital transformation of finance and beyond.

This article was made possible by support from openEuler by OpenAtom Foundation through Linux New Media’s Topic Subsidy Program.