Container service ACK helps Zhenkunxing improve emergency supply chain management

Background

Zhenkunxing Industrial Supermarket (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhenkunxing") was established in 1996 as a one-stop industrial supplies service platform serving the industrial field and manufacturing industry. Zhenkunxing operates 32 product lines and more than 5 million kinds of auxiliary materials and consumables (MRO) used in factories. Through industrial network collaboration, intelligent supply chain covering the whole country and digital procurement platform, the online platform of Zhenkunxing Industrial Supermarket has more than 8000 suppliers and well-known partners at home and abroad, as well as more than 20000 advanced manufacturing enterprises.

Customer pain points

During the epidemic, there was a difficult situation in all parts of the country, which also exposed the problem of supply chain coordination. However, an industrial product service platform called Zhenkunxing Industrial Supermarket launched the "Co-shock Plan" to help small and medium-sized enterprises speed up the recovery of safe production by taking measures such as digital procurement support, matching of supply and demand of emergency materials for enterprises, and customizing the special area for enterprise resumption of work materials on the official website.

With the continuous and rapid development of business, the company urgently needs to improve its digital competitiveness and extend its value chain. Build a new business process R&D system on the cloud, optimize and transform the cloud native through container technology, and solve the problems encountered in the deployment of business applications, such as instability, too much online human intervention, and unstable upgrade.

ASM Products

As the first fully hosted Istio-compatible service grid product in the industry, ASM has been consistent with the community and industry trends from the beginning. The components of the control plane are hosted on the AliCloud side, independent of the user cluster on the data side. ASM products are customized and implemented based on Istio, which is open source in the community, and provide component capabilities to support refined traffic management and security management on the control side of the hosting. Through the hosting mode, the life cycle management of Istio components and the managed K8s cluster is decoupled, which makes the architecture more flexible and improves the scalability of the system.

Managed service grid ASM provides unified traffic management capability, unified service security capability, unified service observability capability, and unified agent scalability capability based on WebAssembly in order to build enterprise-level capabilities in becoming the infrastructure for unified management of various types of computing services. You can use https://www.aliyun.com/product/servicemesh See the specific content introduction.

The summary is as follows: as a basic core technology used to manage application service communication, service grid brings secure, reliable, fast, and application-insensitive traffic routing, security, and observability for the call between application services.

It can be seen that the cloud native application infrastructure supported by the service grid has brought important advantages, which can be summarized in the following six aspects.

One of the advantages: unified governance of heterogeneous services



• Multi-language and multi-framework interoperability and governance, and dual-mode architecture integrated with traditional micro-service system

• Refined multi-protocol flow control, unified management of east-west and north-south flows

• Automated service discovery of unified heterogeneous computing infrastructure

Advantage 2: end-to-end observability

• Integrated intelligent operation and maintenance integrating logging, monitoring and tracking

• Intuitive and easy-to-use visual grid topology, color-based health recognition system

• Built-in best practices, self-service grid diagnosis

Advantage 3: Zero trust security

• End-to-end mTLS encryption, attribute-based access control (ABAC)

• OPA declarative policy engine, globally unique workload identity

• Complete audit history and insight analysis with dashboard

Advantage 4: combination of soft and hard performance optimization

• The first service grid platform based on Intel Multi-Buffer technology to improve TLS encryption and decryption

• NFD automatically detects hardware features and adaptively supports features such as AVX instruction set and QAT acceleration

• The first batch of advanced certification through trusted cloud service grid platform and performance evaluation

Advantage 5: SLO-driven application flexibility

• Service Level Objective (SLO) strategy

• Automatic elastic scaling of application services based on observable data

• Automatic switchover and fault tolerance under multi-cluster traffic burst

Advantage 6: out-of-the-box expansion&ecological compatibility

• Out-of-the-box EnvoyFilter plug-in market, WebAssembly plug-in lifecycle management

• Unified integration with Proxyless mode, supporting SDK and kernel eBPF mode

• Compatible with Istio ecosystem, supporting Serverless/Knative, AI Serving/KServe



Scheme advantages

1. Managed service grid control plane instances: highly available, free of operation and maintenance, and built-in security best practices; Developers can focus more on business applications rather than infrastructure operation and maintenance. You can create a service grid instance in the service grid product with one click, without complicated configuration.

2. Security and high availability: The system ensures the security and high availability of services. Users only need to focus on their own business needs. Easily enable SDS, provide HTTPS security support and certificate dynamic loading for the service gateway, thus improving the security of the service gateway. It supports the gradual realization of mTLS authentication and provides simple and easy-to-use RBAC functions.

3. Powerful fine-grained application traffic management strategy and grayscale release capability: provide fine-grained traffic routing strategy, and support DevOps scenarios such as grayscale release, fuse, fault injection, etc. Create portal gateways with one click and easily customize multiple portal gateway services.



Customer feedback

1. Separate the service grid component from the cluster. Upgrading the service grid component will not affect the cluster. Decouple the life cycle management of the grid instance and Kubernetes cluster;

2. Through the service grid multi-entry gateway, it is easy to customize the implementation, and one CRD can be completed, and the K8S cluster utilization can be improved;

3. Make the service operation more stable, and the service grid saves maintenance resources;

4. Alibaba Cloud ASM products are more stable than open source ones, which makes us feel more comfortable to use;

5. For our legacy system, we support the extreme scenario of our old system: the ultra-long header request is about 40-60K, and the ultra-long body request is about 2-10M;