Background information
Ai-mobile is a rapidly growing high-tech enterprise that provides standardized management. Ai-mobile provides enterprise-level informatization-related consulting services, innovative software products, and e-commerce operation services. Ai-mobile is at an important stage to transform the original business and obtain a break-through in the Internet market. Ai-mobile wants to improve the efficiency of development and delivery and reduce trial and error costs by focusing on business innovation. Ai-mobile must select an easy-to-use O&M platform that supports continuous delivery and rapid deployment.
Challenges
The following table describes the challenges faced by Ai-mobile. The table also describes the benefits of SAE.
Challenge | Benefit |
The management of organization and personnel permissions is complex. The permission management system named Jenkins is independent of other systems, which results in high maintenance costs. | SAE uses the comprehensive permission management mechanism provided by Alibaba Cloud to allocate permissions on demand and helps enterprises minimize security risks. |
Engineering practices and workflow specifications are not easy to reuse, and code quality cannot be guaranteed. | SAE uses a serverless architecture and hides the underlying details of IaaS O&M and Kubernetes clusters. Compared with FaaS, SAE eliminates the need to modify any programming model or code. |
The efficiency of manual application release over FTP is low, and a large number of scripts need to be written in Jenkins. | SAE supports multiple application deployment methods. You can use SAE to migrate microservices applications and applications in multiple programming languages to the cloud. SAE provides out-of-the-box application monitoring capabilities to improve delivery efficiency. You do not need to build a self-managed monitoring system. |
Lack of dedicated O&M engineers and practical experience in microservices transformation results in low R&D and O&M efficiency. | SAE provides multiple features and capabilities, including application release, application management, service governance, auto scaling, one-click application start and stop, and application monitoring. SAE is highly integrated with other Alibaba Cloud services. |
A large number of idle computing resources exist in the test, development, and production environments. | SAE provides multiple types of auto scaling policies, such as scheduled auto scaling policies and auto scaling policies that are triggered based on metrics, such as CPU utilization and memory usage. You can configure auto scaling policies based on your business requirements to handle traffic spikes and reduce the costs of idle resources. |
Solution
The following figure shows the solution that is used by Ai-mobile.
At the first layer, Ai-mobile changed its code management platform that was built in a Git repository to Apsara DevOps Codeup that provides the code quality management capability. At the second layer, Ai-mobile migrated its automated pipeline platform to Apsara DevOps Flow that provides the visualization capability. At the third layer, Ai-mobile migrated its self-managed microservices model to SAE for application management. SAE provides one-stop and fully-managed management UI and out-of-the-box features such as application lifecycle management and observability. This helps Ai-mobile reduce costs and increase efficiency. At the fourth layer, Ai-mobile no longer needs to maintain the underlying resources such as the IaaS layer and Kubernetes clusters. SAE allows Ai-mobile to focus on core business by using namespaces to isolate different environments, such as test environment, staging environment, and production environment.
Effect
Lower costs
Zero-cost investment to improve quality management and continuous delivery capabilities
Apsara DevOps Codeup provides free code repositories, which helps Ai-mobile save the costs of maintaining the self-managed Git repository. The integrated code review and security review modules of Apsara DevOps Codeup helps Ai-mobile save the costs of quality management. Apsara DevOps Flow provides free pipelines, which helps Ai-mobile save the environment costs of Jenkins. In addition to the preceding tangible cost savings, the platform integration helps Ai-mobile effectively reduce more costs.
Low costs and high quality to use a microservices model
Ai-mobile no longer needs to retain ECS resources to create a self-managed microservices model. This helps reduce costs. SAE supports auto scaling within seconds. This way, Ai-mobile does not need to retain fixed resources for a long period of time. SAE can scale applications based on the actual business volume to improve resource utilization. Per-minute billing is used. After Ai-mobile uses SAE, the hardware costs are reduced by 50%.
Higher efficiency
Efficient experience (SAE)
SAE provides out-of-the-box application hosting and application monitoring features to help Ai-mobile focus on business development instead of the O&M of underlying resources. This helps reduce a large amount of labor costs. Ai-mobile has launched the following core business systems: commodity center, user center, sales center, purchasing center, and inventory center.
Serverless technologies without modification (SAE)
SAE supports seamless migration of microservices applications. Ai-mobile can deploy applications by using WAR or JAR packages without the need to modify the underlying containers. This is an important advantage of SAE over other serverless services. SAE allows enterprises to smoothly migrate online applications to the cloud.
Accelerated code review (Apsara DevOps Codeup)
In Apsara DevOps Codeup, a code review is automatically performed each time code is submitted. Compared with the original code review method that requires specific periods of time and manual operations, the automatic code review feature of Apsara DevOps Codeup helps Ai-mobile prevent potential misoperations performed by reviewers.
Easy to use and high integration (Apsara DevOps Flow)
Apsara DevOps Flow supports visualized pipeline configuration. Ai-mobile no longer needs to write complex scripts. Apsara DevOps Flow is highly integrated with other Alibaba Cloud services to provide the required SAE environments for enterprises.
Improved quality and fewer failures
Before Ai-mobile used SAE, Ai-mobile must estimate traffic spikes in advance and retain a specific amount of ECS resources based on the estimated peak values. The resource capacity estimation was sometimes inaccurate, which caused resource waste or insufficient resources. The service level agreement (SLA) of the system could not be ensured. SAE provides the auto scaling capability that allows Ai-mobile to handle traffic spikes with ease and automatically scale in applications during off-peak hours.
Before Ai-mobile used Apsara DevOps Codeup, Ai-mobile must assign a specific code reviewer to review code each time code is merged, and then handle the issues in the generated review reports during a specific period of time. Now, after Ai-mobile uses Apsara DevOps Codeup, a code review is automatically performed each time code is submitted. This helps reduce the labor costs and time consumption of the code review, and significantly improve efficiency. Ai-mobile can review code immediately after it submits code and can detect and fix potential issues before code is merged. This ensures that fewer issues occur in subsequent processes.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Container Compute Service (ACS)
