Background information
iQIYI Sports is a well-known platform for sports events in China. iQIYI Sports provides live streams, videos, news, and other high-quality content from La Liga, tennis, golf, and other sports events. As a syndicated content platform for online sports events, iQIYI Sports has obvious business characteristics, such as periodic traffic fluctuations, traffic surges, and frequent updates.
Challenges
The following table describes the challenges faced by iQIYI Sports as business grows. The table also describes the benefits of SAE.
Challenge | Benefit |
Low efficiency: iQIYI Sports is subjected to traffic spikes each week. Before traffic spikes occur, the O&M engineers of iQIYI Sports must perform the following time-consuming and repeated operations: estimating resource capacities, preparing environments, and deploying applications. | SAE provides a high-availability solution that integrates fine-grained capacity control, elastic scalability, and throttling and bandwidth degradation. This helps you flexibly start and stop applications and improve resource utilization. You can configure health check probes to prevent online business from being affected during application release and scale processes. |
Poor user experience: iQIYI Sports must temporarily deploy applications to handle sudden traffic spikes. The process is time-consuming and affects viewing experience. |
Low resource utilization: A large number of resources are required to handle traffic spikes. However, iQIYI Sports must timely release a specific number of resources during off-peak hours. |
Low development iteration efficiency: An integrated solution for system release and version iteration is required. Each time a new version is released, iQIYI Sports must configure complex settings to complete the canary release. | SAE allows you to schedule, deploy, monitor, and diagnose underlying resources. You can configure different types of release policies to verify the update on a small number of application instances. You can perform phased releases, canary releases, or rollbacks for applications. SAE integrates with multiple continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms or tools such as Apsara Devops and Jenkins. This allows you to automatically deploy applications after you submit code and helps you improve release efficiency. |
Insufficient monitoring capabilities: iQIYI Sports requires a monitoring solution that can help iQIYI Sports identify issues at the earliest opportunity and monitor the online microservices architecture. | SAE provides out-of-the-box application monitoring capabilities. You do not need to build a self-managed monitoring system. This helps you prevent time-consuming troubleshooting and significantly improves delivery efficiency. |
Solution
The following figure shows the solution that is used by iQIYI Sports.
SAE is an out-of-the-box service that supports microservices architecture upgrades. iQIYI Sports can smoothly migrate applications to SAE without the need to modify code and business logic. SAE provides the auto scaling feature. iQIYI Sports can configure simple auto scaling policies to easily handle periodic traffic spikes, increase resource utilization, and reduce costs. SAE provides the microservices lifecycle management feature. This helps iQIYI Sports simplify the deployment workflow and improve deployment efficiency. SAE seamlessly integrates with CloudMonitor and Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to provide the built-in monitoring capabilities. SAE provides an end-to-end microservices solution to help iQIYI Sports identify issues at the earliest opportunity. SAE provides an all-in-one O&M solution by integrating with Application High Availability Service (AHAS) to provide service degradation, circuit breaking, and traffic throttling features. SAE also integrates with Object Storage Service (OSS) to provide data storage.
Effect
Simple O&M: SAE provides multiple auto scaling policies to help iQIYI Sports easily handle periodic traffic spikes. iQIYI Sports no longer needs to manually estimate resource capacities or deploy applications. This helps iQIYI Sports reduce the workloads of the O&M team and improve overall efficiency by 40%.
Stable business: SAE provides the microservices lifecycle management feature to help iQIYI Sports shorten the application release cycle. This improves the overall issue handling speed by 30%.
Lower costs: SAE provides the auto scaling feature to help iQIYI Sports increase the overall resource utilization by 50%.
Strict monitoring: SAE provides a built-in monitoring solution and seamlessly integrates with ARMS to help iQIYI Sports quickly and accurately identify issues. This shortens the application release cycle by 40%.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Container Compute Service (ACS)
