Author: Liu Biqu
Our company is the first batch of high-tech enterprises specializing in the research and development, production and sales of home intelligent products, providing intelligent solutions based on intelligent central control, lighting control, access control and electrical control three entrance hardware. Its business scope covers many fields such as smart community (smart home), smart park (smart office), smart travel (smart hotel) and so on.
At first, our technical team was mainly engaged in hardware development and production, and all parts related to software were outsourced to outsourcing companies. However, the results were not satisfactory. As a result, either the outsourcing team was disbanded, or the code was not submitted and the later maintenance was not in place. With the expansion of the company’s business and the changeable nature of business scenarios, it is necessary to set up our own RESEARCH and development team, while strictly controlling the size and cost of the research and development team. Here’s how we chose and used LeanCloud.
Development friendly, cost and migration risk manageable
Pure cloud hosting services are definitely not an option for us, because we don’t want to develop all the basic functional modules ourselves or have the technical input to solve the performance problems. Before also looked at a big manufacturers such as sina and baidu platform for the engine, but they provide only for the service and the function of application deployment and management, business logic function without too much content, basic is also need a self-developed deployment validation, no other form a complete set of CDN acceleration and more support, so long are not suitable for the platform of the data. LeanCloud does just that.
LeanCloud is pay-as-you-go, which is one of my favorites. We estimate that using the LeanCloud platform in business scenarios with less than 1 million users will be cost-effective. LeanCloud is also more open than other platforms when it comes to data export and migration. As the cost of using the platform increases later, we need to consider changing solutions and migrating data, the implementation and operability of this feature becomes critical for us.
I used Qiniu’s storage service before, the overall development and performance are very simple, and the price is not high. I used their service in the early projects. Later, WHEN I learned that LeanCloud also uses Qiniu as the underlying file storage and CDN acceleration, I felt that great minds think the same.
The users of our products are diverse, this requests us to as many forms as possible to provide products and services, such as the primary user want quick access experience by WeChat or small programs, intermediate users hope can through mobile applications to provide more comprehensive, more powerful support, management demands through PC access, convenient for daily management and data entry. Based on my previous experience in developing native applications, I do not hope that the BaaS platform I choose will have many restrictions, especially the content of application interactive experience, because for those who focus on native ability development, there are too many restrictions, and it is relatively difficult to find and locate problems. LeanCloud’s rich SDK and REST apis are designed to be very flexible, with few restrictions on secondary development, making it easy to use.
Multiple applications share data
LeanCloud initially charged for the number of requests per app, so I basically split the different apps by business module. For example, account center, mall, trading center, equipment management, home furnaces platform, hotel platform, community platform, etc., are all planned according to independent applications. In this way, it is convenient to judge the push and implementation permissions according to different applications. A total of 15 applications were created in the early stage, and user accounts were connected through data binding to meet service requirements such as device data sharing.
At the beginning of 2017, LeanCloud adjusted its charging model. Since the resources available for the free development version could hardly meet the needs of our online products, we were faced with the challenge of upgrading the commercial version and increasing the costs. So far we haven’t had a lot of requests, so we ended up combining 15 applications into two. The commercial version costs a fee, but the benefit is that we can use some business-only features, such as LiveQuery and file storage with HTTPS domain names enabled.
Cloud caching reduced the number of requests by 90%
We pay attention to LeanCloud whenever it launches new services, such as cloud caching LeanCache. We used it the first time, and the results were significant, with requests for some applications dropping by more than 90%. In order to maintain the state of the panel in real time, we need to read data frequently. Therefore, we later stored all the state data on LeanCache, which not only improves the data read and write speed, but also greatly reduces the request volume and costs. Other services, such as international SMS, push services, analytics and statistics, are essential components of daily application development and maintenance.
Small program migration a week done
In 2016, micro program was launched on wechat. We also plan to gradually transfer the contents of the merchant side to the small program, so as to achieve faster version iteration. At the beginning of 2017, LeanCloud began to support the development and deployment of small programs, so we used its platform services to migrate the existing business. After getting familiar with the steps, basically a small program can be online in about a week. Of course, due to the limitations of the small program itself, some of the push business can not be realized, we finally solve the problem through the public account.
Open source work order system can be used
As our technical support team serves more and more partners and team performance appraisal becomes more and more standardized, we need to conduct statistics and management of team members and their service data. We are concerned about the work order system LeanTicket developed by LeanCloud and opened source. We also use this system to submit problems to LeanCloud at ordinary times. We have learned about its operation status and capability, and the analysis report it can provide basically meets our requirements, so we decide to adopt it. The test deployment was done quickly, but since LeanTicket was designed to run in the commercial version, it required a few minor modifications to run in the development version, which we were able to do on our own because it was open source.
Complete documentation, video tutorials are more powerful
Every developer learns about the use of a platform mainly through official documentation and examples. LeanCloud’s technical documentation is not only comprehensive and standardized, but also provides a comment function that allows readers to leave a comment on any paragraph and interact with other readers. LeanCloud also recently launched a number of video tutorials, which is great news for those who want to slack off.
The above is the content submitted by the developers of “Play LeanCloud”.