Shanghai SUNMI Technology Co., Ltd. is an innovative technology company that provides professional and cost-efficient intelligent commercial hardware for O2O platforms, software developers, and small and medium-sized vendors.

As its business grew, SUNMI needed to ensure that it could keep up with the growing customer demands while keeping costs low. In particular, SUNMI faces the following problems:

1. The expensive maintenance, update, iteration, and troubleshooting costs need to be addressed.
2. Core features such as gRPC service load balancing, Tracing Analysis, and unified traffic management need to be implemented.

Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) is the first fully managed service mesh product that is compatible with Istio in the industry. It can be deployed in multiple regions. In terms of architecture, ASM takes the lead in developer communities and the industry. Managed by Alibaba Cloud, the control-plane components are independent of the data-plane clusters. ASM provides fine-grained traffic management and security management components in the control plane, which is managed by Alibaba Cloud. The fully managed mode enables the decoupling between the Istio components and the managed Kubernetes clusters in lifecycle management. This makes the architecture more flexible and improves the scalability of the system.

SUNMI deployed ASM to construct an intelligent POS system solution with integrated software and hardware for digital business intelligence (BI). ASM does not require O&M investments, is easy to upgrade, and supports diverse products. It brings many benefits to the production and R&D teams.

ASM has shortened the technology implementation period by 75% from a month to a week, improved the update and iteration efficiency, reduced the troubleshooting costs, and reduced the costs of control-plane resources.

The following figure shows the overall system architecture of SUNMI.