Greendify is a leading e-commerce company that buy and sell pre-owned consumer electronics. Greendify purchase used smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Greendify then inspect, certify and sell these items to consumers looking for a cost-effective way to stay connected.

The Greendify platform aims to offer optimal cost savings to customers, and offers extra discounts to students, low-income families, etc. Customers can thereby afford to buy almost brand new smart devices with a limited budget, including domestic helpers who work overseas and who want to connect with their family at attractive prices.

We'd been using AWS for other project for more than 5 years, however, considering Greendify is launching our first phase in Hong Kong and the China market, an ICP license was therefore a must for our business needs, and we needed a provider that could provide us with full stack technology and business solutions rather than just a technology driven solution.

Greendify chose Alibaba Cloud, a leading platform in greater Asia, based on their rich and full stack technology and business solution. Also, we did receive recommendations from various well-known startups in Hong Kong as well about Alibaba Cloud. We heard from numerous startups that Alibaba Cloud is easy to use, offers the best support for obtaining an ICP license, and comes with great scalability and elasticity to manage peak traffic and support business growth. Greendify also reviewed case studies of businesses running their e-commerce platform on Alibaba Cloud, and then we researched a range of services Alibaba Cloud offers.

We are now running our e-commerce service and associated system with Alibaba Cloud in Hong Kong, China, and Singapore regions. We use both Container Services and IaaS services to run our platform.

Products Used: Dockers Swarm, ECS, Auto Scaling, Server Load Balancer, Object Storage Service, CDN, VPC, ApsaraDB for RDS, Redis, E-MapReduce, Analytic DB, Anti-DDoS, and WAF.

We use Server Load Balancer to distribute incoming application across multiple Elastic Compute Services (ECS) nodes in different locations. Static images such as photos and settings are retained in Object Storage Service (OSS). The Greendify e-commerce database uses MySQL ApsaraDB for RDS, with a subset of data moved to ApsaraDB for Redis caching engine to increase the database capacity and improve application performance. Analytic DB then offers us the ability to gain insights with OLAP data analytics to monitor our real-time online transactions through E-MapReduce.

During the development stage, there were a lot of steps involved in deploying the app from our Codebase to the production site, which resulted in high overhead costs.

Alibaba Cloud Container Service supports Docker Container and we implemented a CI/CD pipeline, which significantly cuts down cost as well as reduces time-to-market. This helped Greendify to accelerate application development, automate deployment (ROS), and deliver a more stable platform.

We use a Docker repository for Alibaba Cloud Container Registry Service, and associate the source control management systems to Alibaba Cloud Code and GitHub. Once our code is committed, Container Registry Service is triggered and the Docker image is built automatically. After creating an image, we call back the Open API of the Container Service to update the container application. For node expansion, Auto Scaling is called on to meet high usage during major online events.

While Greendify runs our core online business in the cloud, Alibaba Cloud services are PCI DSS compliant and the ability to deploy Anti-DDoS mitigation technologies provide Greendify with the security features we need. Greendify also uses Web Application Firewall (WAF) to ensure our online platform is highly secured.

Notice: ApsaraDB for Redis and Tair have been merged and renamed to Tair (Redis® OSS-compatible) since September 2024.

Greendify now has the scalability to support growth and elasticity to manage demand peaks that can increase traffic by up to 100 percent. With our service running on Alibaba Cloud, it is secure and suitably powerful to minimize the risk of DDoS attacks that compromise performance. Our platform has recorded 99.99% run time so far on Alibaba Cloud.

We are very satisfied with Alibaba Cloud services. They have helped us to reduce our operating costs, development costs, and adopt the latest technology in cloud computing. This enables us to provide a better platform and services to our customers.