E-Chauffeur, China's largest transportation services company, offers affordable, safe, and convenient chauffeur services in 20 Chinese cities. As a mobile browser based service, e-Chauffeur is growing rapidly and currently has over 5 million registered users and more than 20,000 chauffeurs. It plans to launch chauffeur services in more than 100 cities within the next couple of years.

As a rapidly growing B2C transportation company, the challenge for e-Chauffeur was handling such rapid growth. They needed increased load during peak hours and a scalable backend cloud infrastructure to handle peak load with zero downtime.

The Pay-As-You-Go model and built-in elasticity in all its services also enables e-Chauffeur to save tens of thousands of RMB in IT costs each year. With the innovative “Time Fragment Service” operating system powered on the highly reliable and available Alibaba Cloud network, e-Chauffeur has grown rapidly with zero downtime. As e-Chauffeur transportation services are cyclical, e-Chaffeur programmatically scheduled the activation and release time of ECS to handle traffic according to the daily peak periods from 7pm to midnight. e-Chauffeur is also able to monitor the current situation with real-time updates via cloud monitoring alerts via CloudMonitor. The Pay-As-You-Go model and built-in elasticity in all its services also enables e-Chauffeur to save tens of thousands of RMB in IT costs each year. “Since our inception three years ago we have been able to run our infrastructure at a nominal cost and save tens of thousands of RMB in IT expenditure each year! We have restored the entire service within two minutes, without end users even being aware of a problem during fault simulation drills. We feel lucky to be able to grow alongside such a big company like Alibaba Cloud,” adds e-Chauffeur’s CTO.

Products used: ECS, ApsaraDB for RDS, CloudMonitor, OSS, CDN, Server Load Balancer e-Chauffeur uses ECS and Server Load Balancer for load distribution and fault-tolerance. The company has designed a cache layer using two high-memory ECS and ApsaraDB for Redis for rapid data access. In addition, the company uses two ApsaraDB for RDS servers to store and process data, and to create backups of all orders, relevant driver information and logs. e-Chauffeur also uses Object Storage Service (OSS) to store and take backups of files, headshots, and other unstructured data. The built-in security of Alibaba Cloud at each layer of the network and resources makes deployment secure. CloudMonitor also sends alerts and notifications about security breaches and performance issues, and provides insights into resource utilization. This has helped the company to enhance performance and save on operational costs. The company uses ApsaraDB for RDS and cache server to enhance system performance. Server Load Balancer and OSS are utilized to make deployment both redundant and fault-tolerant. As a result, e-Chauffeur is able to offer its customers across cities a consistent and seamless experience by leveraging Alibaba Cloud BGP multi-line network connectivity between the north and south of China. In addition, the company's uses ApsaraDB for RDS and a cache layer to ensure consistent and high performance. In fault simulation drills, e-Chauffeur is able to restore the entire service within 2 minutes, without end users being aware of a problem.