Online education: SAE helps Sheng Xue Zai Xian handle traffic spikes

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Serverless App Engine (SAE) is an application-oriented serverless PaaS and provides an O&M-free IaaS. You can use pay-as-you-go SAE resources to meet your business requirements. SAE is an easy-to-use service that helps you migrate your applications developed in multiple programming languages to the cloud. SAE also provides high scalability to help you scale out resources during peak hours and allows you to focus on improving resource-related system performance. This topic describes how SAE helps Sheng Xue Zai Xian handle traffic spikes with ease.

Background information

Sheng Xue Zai Xian, developed by Wuhan Sheng Xue Zai Xian Technology Co., Ltd, is an educational platform that provides services for more than 6,000 contracted high schools and 1,200 partner universities. Sheng Xue Zai Xian provides higher education services for high schools, recruitment and employment services for colleges and universities, and guidance products for parents. Sheng Xue Zai Xian provides a higher education planning service system, a college enrollment service system, and an employment management system. The higher education planning service system contains modules such as on-campus lecture, off-campus research, platform evaluation, and manual reference. The college enrollment service system contains modules such as enrollment management, enrollment team training, and marketing (planning, packaging, printing, and advertising). The employment management system helps students in colleges and universities find jobs and helps enterprises perform on-campus recruitment activities.

Sheng Xue Zai Xian also provides higher education services in a WeChat mini program. During off-peak hours, tens of thousands of daily active users (DAUs) use the mini program. During graduation seasons, hundreds of thousands to millions of DAUs use the mini program. Sheng Xue Zai Xian often works together with well-known teachers from high schools and universities and educational authorities to hold live streaming activities. During these activities, Sheng Xue Zai Xian shares experiences in senior high school entrance and college entrance examinations, and answers questions for students and parents. The overall traffic of Sheng Xue Zai Xian is large and the platform is subject to obvious traffic fluctuations.

The technology stack of Sheng Xue Zai Xian is a PHP monolithic application that is deployed on an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance. During peak hours, the Sheng Xue Zai Xian application cannot be quickly scaled out. As a result, performance bottlenecks during peak hours affect user experience.

Challenges

The following table describes the challenges faced by the PHP monolithic application of Sheng Xue Zai Xian as business grows. The table also describes the benefits of SAE.

Challenge	Benefit

Challenge	Benefit
Sheng Xue Zai Xian deploys its business on a PHP monolithic application.	SAE allows you to deploy PHP applications by using images or ZIP packages.
The application cannot scale out to handle traffic spikes. This may cause performance bottlenecks.	SAE uses a serverless architecture and provides the second-level auto scaling capability based on optimization technologies such as image acceleration. SAE helps you quickly scale large applications during peak hours to ensure business stability.
Sheng Xue Zai Xian focuses on business and does not have professional O&M engineers.	SAE is an O&M-free service. SAE is integrated with Apsara Devops to automate release and deployment processes. SAE hides the underlying details of containers and ensures the service level agreement (SLA).
Idle computing resources exist.	You are billed by the minute based on the usage of CPU and memory resources. SAE provides high scalability to match function instances and traffic fluctuations to reduce costs.

Solution

The following figure shows the solution that is used by Sheng Xue Zai Xian.

dg_serverless_practice_for_shengxuezaixian

SAE is integrated with Apsara Devops. Sheng Xue Zai Xian needs to only submit code in PHP to trigger a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process. Then, a PHP application is automatically built as an image and deployed to SAE. After the application is hosted to SAE, Sheng Xue Zai Xian can configure auto scaling policies and does not need to retain servers for a long period of time during off-peak hours. This improves scaling efficiency and reduces resource costs.

Effect

After Sheng Xue Zai Xian migrated its system to SAE, Sheng Xue Zai Xian held a large-scale activity in which tens of thousands of teachers and hundreds of students participated and the page views (PVs) reached 10 million. SAE ensured the stable performance of the system during the activity.

Stability: Being developed based on a serverless architecture and Alibaba Cloud IaaS resources, SAE provides high scalability for the underlying system of large-scale applications with high efficiency based on technologies such as image acceleration and cold start latency optimization. SAE helps Sheng Xue Zai Xian handle large-scale traffic spikes with ease.
Reduced costs: Sheng Xue Zai Xian does not need to purchase or manage infrastructures such as servers based on the serverless architecture. This helps reduce O&M costs. You are charged for pay-as-you-go Function Compute resources by the second. SAE provides the auto scaling feature to help reduce costs.
Improved human efficiency: Sheng Xue Zai Xian needs to only focus on developing business logic without the need to handle O&M-related issues. For example, Sheng Xue Zai Xian needs to only submit business code, and the subsequent CI/CD process is automatically processed by Apsara Devops and SAE. SAE also supports monitoring on application nodes and application API calls to help Sheng Xue Zai Xian quickly troubleshoot issues.

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