Chanjet, a member of yonyou, is a cloud service and software provider for micro and small enterprises in China. It provides intelligent cloud management services to more than four million micro and small enterprises through a "Cloud + Edge" strategy built on the Chanjet T+ platform. This strategy extends traditional management software with cloud applications, including collaborative office services, finance and tax knowledge services, online marketing services, online store management, and mobile applications. By 2020, more than 70,000 enterprises had paid for Chanjet's enterprise management cloud services.
Challenge
To cope with rapidly growing business, Chanjet's IT team undertook a microservices transformation of the original IT system. The goal: enable fast, frequent releases for large-scale internet applications.
Chanjet's enterprise management cloud services operate on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, serving a large user base with complex business logic, intricate API call traces, and deep integrations with third-party systems. This complexity made the microservices transformation difficult:
Complex call traces spanning multiple services made failures hard to diagnose.
Deep third-party integrations increased the blast radius of any single change.
Uncontrolled releases risked cascading failures -- updating one application could bring down the entire system.
The IT team needed stronger microservices governance and monitoring to maintain system stability and robustness during frequent iterations.
Solution
Migrating to EDAS
After consulting with Alibaba Cloud technical experts, Chanjet's IT team progressively migrated their entire microservices architecture to Enterprise Distributed Application Service (EDAS).
The migration required no code modifications because Chanjet's applications already used the Spring Cloud framework. The transition was transparent to end users.
EDAS provided Spring Cloud tools to enhance governance capabilities that directly addressed Chanjet's stability concerns:
Application lifecycle management -- centralized control over deployment, scaling, and shutdown operations.
Graceful shutdown -- safe decommissioning of application instances without dropping in-flight requests.
Canary releases -- incremental rollout of new versions to a subset of traffic before full deployment, reducing the risk of system-wide failures.
End-to-end traffic adjustment -- fine-grained control over how traffic flows between services during releases and rollbacks.
Monitoring with ARMS
Chanjet also integrated Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) into its microservices system.
Before ARMS, the business traces of Chanjet's SaaS products were complex and deeply nested. When users reported bugs or performance issues, the IT team spent considerable time locating the root cause and identifying performance bottlenecks.
With ARMS, the IT team gained:
End-to-end troubleshooting -- trace a request across all services from entry point to response.
Application real-time diagnostics -- identify performance bottlenecks as they occur, rather than after user complaints.
These capabilities cut the work spent on failure diagnosis and performance analysis by more than 50%.
Expanding the cloud-native stack
As Chanjet's business lines continued to iterate, the IT team adopted additional Alibaba Cloud services to complement their architecture:
| Service | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Simple Message Queue (SMQ, formerly MNS) | Asynchronous messaging between services |
| Application High Availability Service (AHAS) | Fault tolerance and flow control |
| Performance Testing (PTS) | Load testing before releases |
Results
Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native services improved the stability, robustness, and elasticity of Chanjet's system architecture, enabling the IT team to handle complex and frequent business iterations with confidence.
Release stability -- canary releases and graceful shutdown reduced the potential risks of system-wide outages during deployments.
Faster incident resolution -- ARMS saved more than 50% of the work in locating system failures and identifying performance bottlenecks.
Governance maturity -- Chanjet's IT team developed a microservices governance framework tailored to their business needs. They now pursue advanced governance practices, such as end-to-end traffic adjustment, to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This reflects the advancement of Chanjet's R&D management in the cloud service sector.
"The cloud-native services and solutions provided by Alibaba Cloud have greatly improved the R&D efficiency of Chanjet." -- Chanjet