Fenrir Inc. (headquartered in Osaka and Tokyo, hereinafter referred to as Fenrir) is a company that develops web applications and provides various Internet information services. Fenrir gathered a group of professionals whose greatest strengths are design and technology. The company's mission is to deliver happiness to our users through products and services born from teamwork that transcends expertise.

Fenrir is the developer of the web browser – Sleipnir, and other freeware, software, smartphone apps, and other kinds of web services. Since founded in 2005, Fenrir has been dedicated to bringing products and services that combine both design and functionality. Starting with the web browser – Sleipnir for Windows, Sleipnir is now available on multiple platforms. Each version is designed to best suit each different device. By using Sleipnir and their cloud service – Fenrir Pass, users can easily sync all their Sleipnir Browser’s bookmarks for free.

Fenrir encountered the following two challenges when operating the internal E-commerce platform:

・ When the traffic of the platform suddenly increases (such as when a promotional event starts), the company's server will encounter the situation that it cannot process all the information in time, resulting in the loss of orders and business opportunities.

・ The original server system was built by assuming a traffic peak, so the system was expensive to maintain such high peak traffic number.

In addition, even those SaaS-type e-Commerce websites that are served by third parties cannot fully cope with large-scale traffic, resulting in the loss of opportunities to receive orders

Fenrir believes that Alibaba Cloud, as a leading cloud computing provider, provides excellent cloud services in terms of scalability, security and reliability.

High scalability: Alibaba Cloud's cloud services have excellent scalability. In order to respond flexibly and quickly to rapidly increasing traffic, an auto-scaling function that automatically increases or decreases the number of cloud servers is used. Therefore, Fenrir can effectively manage the processing load on the server due to increased traffic such as the start of a promotional campaign, and minimize the loss of order opportunities.

Secure and Reliable: Alibaba Cloud provides secure and reliable cloud services. Therefore Fenrir can implement high security measures to protect data and reduce security risks. This makes it possible to build a highly reliable E-commerce platform while ensuring the safety of customer information and transaction data.

In order to solve these challenges encountered by Fenrir, it decided to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud to develop a new platform that combines Alibaba Cloud‘s cloud technology and EC-CUBE. The platform will enable scalability while ensuring rapid response to fast-growing traffic such as during promotional events.

Fenrir leveraged a highly scalability architecture for network and computing to ensure service stability and low latency. Fenrir used Elastic Compute Service (ECS), PolarDB, ApsaraDB for Redis, Extreme NAS on International Site (Pay-as-you-go), NAT Gateway, Application Load Balancer.

ECS instances serve as the foundation for e-commerce platform, providing stable, reliable, and scalable resources to support website performance and user engagement during high-traffic situations such as promotions, anniversary events, and new product launches. It ensures an outstanding customer experience.

ALB product helps in handling high volume of user traffic. Through load balancing and request distribution, ALB evenly distributes user requests across multiple servers, increasing the processing power and throughput of the e-commerce platform.

The use of NAS simplifies the maintenance and management of e-commerce platform. File storage is centralized on the NAS, allowing administrators to manage and maintain files in one place, improving operational efficiency.

Alibaba Cloud's Auto Scaling plays an important role, especially when launching new products or limited-time events. It can automatically adjust the number of servers to accommodate spikes in customer traffic based on preset criteria. Once sales activity begins, elastic scaling automatically increases the number of servers based on load conditions to meet peak user access requests. When a sales activity ends, elastic scaling automatically reduces the number of servers, saving the money. This allows e-commerce platform to flexibly respond to different customer traffic volumes and provide stable services.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

Renewal of “ Yostar OFFCIAL SHOP” (https://shop.yostar.co.jp/ ) operated by Yostar Inc. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO Li Hengda, hereinafter referred to as Yostar).

Yostar Group is a company that traditionally uses SaaS services provided by Japanese companies to operate its own EC website. Its EC website sells online games and anime-related characters developed in Japan.

Due to the particularity of selling anime character-related merchandise, whenever a new product is released or related promotion events start, the traffic to the company's website will surge. However, its original system could no longer cope with the surge in traffic, and it was difficult to optimize and strengthen the specific system of the website in the later stage, resulting in the loss of many order opportunities.

Considering that online sales of game and anime-related character merchandise will continue to grow in the future, the company needs to find a solution that can overcome the challenges and reduce costs.

Based on the trust in Alibaba Cloud's scalable and highly reliable cloud solutions, and Fenrir's practical experience in introducing the supports of EC-CUBE, Yostar decided to renew the contract to optimize their system.

During the development of Yostar project, with the help of Alibaba Cloud‘s engineers, Fenrir's developer team quickly solved the technical issues related to the integration of Alibaba Cloud and EC-CUBE. In addition, Fenrir responded flexibly and designed the customization requires of the EC sales operation from client in Japan. Thanks to the support from Alibaba Cloud team, Fenrir successfully renewed its cooperation with Yostar, and the new products sold in the future have significantly overcome the challenge of order loss.

*EC-CUBE is a trademark of EC-CUBE Co., Ltd.

In order to improve the usability and efficiency of the e-commerce platform, we will jointly develop new functions and tools. We will also share solutions that utilize Alibaba Cloud's latest cloud technology and Generative AI technology to meet customer needs. We want to work on expanding and improving the product portfolio functionality.

We aim to further grow and strengthen our competitiveness through collaboration with Alibaba Cloud.