Author | Xi Yang, CAI Jinhui
Review & proofreading: Xiyang, Haizhu, Ye Zai
Editing & Typesetting: Wen Yan
Abstract: Catering is becoming the largest testing ground in the application of digital intelligence transformation in the real economy, promoting the evolution of SaaS as the new infrastructure of catering industry. As one of the earliest enterprises involved in catering SaaS in China, Catering is helping catering enterprises to further solve the needs of cost control and efficiency improvement in a cloud-native way. By migrating the business platform to Alibaba Cloud container service ACK, the utilization rate of server resources is increased by more than 30%, capacity expansion efficiency is improved by nearly 80%, version release cycle is shortened by nearly 40%, and the zero cluster failure provides sufficient guarantee for business continuity.
“Food is the most important thing for the people” is an old saying etched in the DNA of every Chinese. The food and beverage industry is never short of fierce competition. Consumption upgrading and changes in payment habits, rising human and operating costs, uncertainties brought by the epidemic and other trends continue to spread, so that catering enterprises for cost control, efficiency improvement, refined operations and other needs are more and more urgent.
New trends in All-cloud development and the evolution of SaaS
“2020 China enterprise SaaS Industry Research Report” shows that by 2022, the scale of China’s enterprise SaaS market is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan. At the same time, catering SaaS and other deep vertical enterprise services have entered the stage of large-scale application.
As one of the earliest pioneers of catering SaaS in China, Li Zhenhong, the founder of Catering Road, believes that the trend of traditional catering to the Internet is an inevitable choice to comply with The Times. This also drives the catering SaaS to gradually become an important choice for catering enterprises to enhance management level and optimize cost structure. Today, even a street food stall is using the Internet to settle accounts; Catering stores in major business circles are almost all using the SaaS payment system. Technically speaking, catering SaaS has been able to run from the initial purchase to customer payment, customer maintenance, takeaway orders, rider delivery, human management, supply chain, data center and other links.
Cloud computing is the foundation of SaaS development. Where will the next generation of SaaS evolve under the new trend of all-cloud development brought about by cloud native? This paper will share how kubernetes-based cloud native architecture helps catering SaaS to achieve more stable and reliable services, and further help enterprises optimize resources and labor costs through the practical case of Catering based on Alibaba Cloud container service ACK.
Food path to create ACK based fusion innovation cloud base
The restaurant will position itself as the “connector” of the new catering retail industry. As of October 2021, its services have covered more than 400 cities in China, with more than 80,000 stores and over 3.5 million orders per day. From the perspective of catering industry, future catering enterprises will definitely take the integration and innovation of “data servitization”, “all-channel servitization” and “new business development agility” as the development direction.
In order to help merchants establish one-stop management mode of full-link business, realize cost reduction and efficiency increase, restaurant has built integrated data intelligent application based on SaaS architecture, which can connect with takeaway platform, self-built system of merchants, cashier system, member system, distribution supplier, kitchen, ERP system, online payment system, etc.
Eatway attaches great importance to customer’s experience of service, and regards system stability, iteration efficiency of business functions, rapid positioning and solution of problems as the cornerstone of building core competitiveness. The business flow of the catering industry has obvious peaks and troughs, and it often attracts customers by means of promotional activities. If the unreasonable allocation of resources leads to the overflow of orders and insufficient capacity during peak periods, it will greatly affect the experience of customers and businesses. In addition, the restaurant provides many vertical business functions such as order management system, CDBI, small program, converged delivery, DMS, and agent operation. Under the rapid change of market demand, product function innovation and iteration efficiency are also a big challenge to the technical architecture.
These solutions are in line with the core capabilities that cloud native architectures bring. Restaurant will be the main business applications, including front-end Web container, gateway, back-end microservices through Kubernetes cluster deployment, in the cloud native way to help business rapid iteration, flexible response to business needs.
Under the cloud native trend, Kubernetes has become the infrastructure of the next generation cloud IT architecture for enterprises. However, in the enterprise deployment and operation of the Kubernetes cluster, the complexity is still high. For SaaS service providers, if they choose to build their own Kunernetes, then as long as there are virtual machines, they can create Kubernetes clusters and run the entire application system on the cluster, no matter these virtual machines are from local IDC or cloud platform. If it is to meet the needs of customers who have private deployment requirements, it is convenient to use the self-built method to invoke the required computing resources.
However, when you reach a certain size, the self-built Kunernetes have many problems, such as instability caused by DNS resolution. In addition, in business activities and other traffic peak scenarios, you need to purchase servers to expand capacity, and perform a series of tedious tasks such as initial installation and cluster configuration. Adding a server takes at least 15 minutes, resulting in high resources, time, and maintenance costs.
With the popularity of containerized applications in production environments, the demand for managed Kubernetes continues to grow. In the latest CNCF Cloud Native survey in 2021, 26% of respondents said they were using hosted Kubernetes services, up from 23% a year earlier and fast approaching the percentage of local installations (31%).
In order to better ensure the stability of the business system and save the labor cost of operation and maintenance, restaurant chose to migrate its business applications deployed on the self-built Kubernetes cluster to Alibaba Cloud container service ACK to build its catering SaaS platform.
ACK uses aliyun’s reliable and stable IaaS platform as the base to encapsulate more than 30 types of cloud products, forming a new interface for the interaction between automatic operation and cloud platform, so as to improve the flexibility and automatic operation and maintenance capabilities of enterprise business systems. Internally, ACK supports 100% of the group’s applications and provides upgrade services for tens of thousands of enterprises on the cloud to realize modern application transformation and upgrading.
CAI Jinhui, who is in charge of catering technology architecture, said that in choosing ACK, we mainly value the following abilities:
First of all, the stability of the service, ACK is verified and optimized by ali Cloud large-scale scene practice, many pits do not need us to step on, we do not need to spend a lot of energy to do application optimization and adaptation. In addition to improving system stability, a lot of operation and maintenance labor costs are saved.
The second is the capacity expansion speed of ACK, which can expand multiple units at a time, and no matter how many units are expanded, it can be completed within 10 minutes, so that when we encounter some unexpected traffic, we can deal with it quickly.
In addition, ACK integrates various native capabilities of Aliyun cloud to help enterprises run cloud Kubernetes container applications efficiently. For example, Prometheus monitoring service integrated in ACK helps to quickly locate performance problems and better ensure business continuity.
For such as food road has built Kubernetes cluster in the enterprise own IDC or cloud enterprises, Ali cloud provides a complete migration solution, can support hundreds of services smooth migration to the cloud ACK. Relying on the self-developed tool library, it can achieve classic network and VPC network through, classic Kubernetes cluster POD /service and ACK POD /service through, for all kinds of database migration set whitelist and other capabilities, improve cloud migration efficiency, Minimize the impact on enterprise services during migration to ensure service reliability, stability, security, and flexibility.
ACK is also one of the first service platforms in the world to pass the Kubernetes consistency certification. Based on the standard Kubernetes, ACK has greatly enhanced the one-stop service capability of security protection, high availability guarantee and stable upgrade concerned by enterprises in the production environment. Therefore, after migration to ACK, the application publishing process built in the restaurant SaaS platform basically has no change, and the cluster is more stable, operation has not appeared a Kubernetes operation and maintenance problems, so that the enterprise itself can focus more energy on business innovation and rapid development.
At the same time, during the migration of the catering business platform to ACK, remarkable achievements have been made in four dimensions, including cost, stability, efficiency and enabling business:
- Resource utilization increased: server resource utilization increased by 30%+;
- Support for rapid service development: When problems occur, it can be quickly isolated. In the face of rapidly growing business volume, capacity expansion can be completed in a short time. It used to take 15 minutes to expand a node for self-built clusters, but now it only takes 3 minutes on average to expand a node for ACK clusters, improving capacity expansion efficiency by nearly 80%.
- Improved iteration efficiency: During version iteration, the update speed of the service has been significantly improved, and the release time of the version has been shortened by nearly 40%.
- 0 Cluster failure: The stability of the cluster also provides sufficient guarantee for the system. Up to now, the number of cluster failures on each service platform is 0.
It is expected that ACK’s containerized application lifecycle management capabilities will contribute to greater value for restaurants as business volumes increase.
Cloud native redefines catering SaaS market needs
It can be said that catering is becoming the largest testing ground in the application of digital intelligence transformation in the real economy. In the near future, SaaS will evolve into the infrastructure of the catering industry, bringing more development opportunities for catering enterprises by combining more advanced and efficient technology and operation methods with traditional catering categories.
At the same time, with the development of cloud native technology, architecture and services represented by Kubernetes, enterprises in the future can enjoy unified cloud operation and resource management and control ability wherever they need cloud, so that r&d, operation and maintenance personnel do not need to pay attention to system reliability, availability and stability, and focus on business innovation. Further release the cost of manpower and resources.
From the Internet to new retail, catering, finance, manufacturing and transportation, ACK is supporting a growing number of industries using cloud-native approaches to solve business problems and accelerate scene innovation. Alibaba Cloud container service ACK is also looking forward to working with more and more “food channels” to help more potential enterprises stimulate innovation vitality and grow together with the changers of The Times in all walks of life.
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