Author: Dai Xin

The customer profile

Vision Is a big data financial information service provider that focuses on serving the primary market, corporate credit, industrial planning and investment attraction, and multi-level capital market. Deeply understand the data needs of users such as large banks/financial institutions/governments/enterprise groups, present professionally processed data to customers, and provide a complete set of solutions for enterprise/industrial/financial data integration, data processing, data center, system development and big data model analysis and consulting services.

Business pain points

Data is a core asset, and its security, stability and efficiency are key to serving large customers. The testing environment of the Visual Field department could not obtain the full amount of real data of customers, and many cases could not be covered. We had to wait for the online version to be issued and tested frequently in the grayscale environment (equivalent to pre-release), and many problems were exposed in the process:

  • Slow development iteration efficiency: single chimney architecture, high code coupling, slow development efficiency.

  • Complicated online process and high cost: SVN code management + manual deployment, lack of standardized DevOps process, 20 ~ 30 data verification in gray environment before each online, frequent release test, poor happiness in development and operation and maintenance.

  • High cost of containerization: ECS + Docker scheme has been tried, but Docker Daemon upgrade, mirror Registry management, configuration management, scheduling and disassembly all need self-maintenance/research and development.

  • Capacity estimation cannot be automated: Every time there is a marketing activity or important event (such as xinhua Finance ranking, etc.) on the customer side, it is necessary to inform the ECS of the capacity of several departments of Vision one week in advance, which leads to inaccurate capacity risk and idle waste.

The solution

In order to solve these problems, The Vision Data Department completed two upgrades with the help of Ali Cloud Serverless application engine (SAE) :

1) Build a cloud native DevOps system of Git + Jenkins + SAE from 0 to 1.

2) Upgrade from ECS monomer architecture to microservice + K8s + Serverless architecture with zero threshold, and step into cloud native architecture.

Customer value

In the process of practicing SAE, The Data Department of Vision adopted the strategy of independent business + user gray scale to gradually enlarge the flow and put part of the business online one after another. Next, it plans to fully migrate the overall architecture to SAE and fully enjoy the dividend of cloud native technology.

  • Standardize deployment process and reduce operation and maintenance cost: with SAE, develop CI/CD to improve release efficiency. Operations personnel are completely liberated from the repetitive complexity of vertical business rollout

  • Low-threshold microservice architecture transformation: After the business is disassembled into microservices, there is no need to care about the surrounding supporting facilities and stability and disaster recovery of microservices. SAE provides a full set of microservice governance capabilities that have stood the test of Double 11 out of the box.

  • No capacity planning, second capacity expansion: With SAE’s flexible and diverse flexibility strategies, the vision department no longer needs to prepare capacity in advance, automatic capacity expansion in seconds during peak marketing activities, and resource recovery and cost reduction during peaks and valleys.

  • Embrace K8s for easier log viewing: Manage applications in the same way as they were deployed with SAE zero-threshold containerization. There is no need to care about bastion machine permission, machine account password, etc., directly through SAE + SLS convenient to view the log.

Customer testimony

Vision Data Department will work with Ali Cloud to create rich industrial solutions with excellent scientific and technological capabilities, data mining capabilities, to promote industrial development, help the 14th Five-Year plan economic development industry, and fully realize digital upgrading.

— Liu Yumeng, CEO of Visual Field

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