Chanjet, a member of yonyou, is an important cloud service and software provider that serves micro and small enterprises in China. Chanjet provides intelligent cloud management services to more than four million micro and small enterprises. Chanjet proposed the "Cloud + Edge" strategy that uses Chanjet T+ as its platform. This strategy adds a variety of cloud applications to traditional management software so that micro and small enterprises can better use cloud services to empower their businesses. These cloud applications include collaborative office services, finance and tax knowledge services, online marketing services, online store management, and mobile applications. By 2020, more than 70,000 enterprises have paid to use the enterprise management cloud services provided by Chanjet.
Customer requirements
To cope with rapidly growing business, the IT team of Chanjet performed microservices transformation on the original IT system. This helps meet the demand for quickly and frequently releasing and iterating large Internet applications. The enterprise management cloud services provided by Chanjet based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model serve a large number of users, involve complex businesses and traces of API calls, and are deeply integrated with third-party application systems. This makes microservitization extremely difficult. Especially if the releases of new versions are not seamless and controllable, the update of a single application may cause the entire system to crash. Therefore, the IT team of Chanjet must enhance the microservices governance and monitoring capabilities and ensure system stability and robustness during frequent iterations.
Solutions
After exchanging knowledge and experience with Alibaba Cloud technical experts, the IT team of Chanjet decided to progressively migrate the entire microservices architecture to Alibaba Cloud Enterprise Distributed Application Service (EDAS). Microservices applications that use the Spring Cloud framework can be migrated to EDAS without code modifications. The migration is extremely smooth and transparent to Chanjet users. EDAS provides Spring Cloud tools to enhance microservices governance, such as application lifecycle management, graceful shutdown, and end-to-end traffic adjustment. EDAS allows users to seamlessly release or shut down applications and use canary releases to roll out new versions, which greatly improve the stability of a system during new releases and reduce the potential risks.
The microservices system of Chanjet is also interfaced with Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to use monitoring capabilities. Before ARMS is used, the business traces of the SaaS products of Chanjet are extremely complex. After users report system bugs or performance issues, the IT team usually needs to spend large amounts of time to locate the cause and find the performance bottleneck. After ARMS is used, the IT team can use tools such as end-to-end troubleshooting and application real-time diagnostics to locate the cause of system failures and identify the performance bottleneck. This saves more than 50% of the work and greatly improves the efficiency of the IT team.
As the business lines of Chanjet continuously iterate, cloud-native services, such as Simple Message Queue (SMQ, formerly MNS), Application High Availability Service (AHAS), and Performance Testing (PTS), are introduced to the microservices architecture to help the IT team focus on user needs.
Benefits
Empowered by sophisticated and stable cloud-native service solutions provided by Alibaba Cloud, the stability, robustness, and elasticity of the system architecture of Chanjet have been greatly improved to handle complex and frequent business iterations. The IT team of Chanjet has also developed a microservices governance mechanism that best suits their businesses based on the methodologies behind these solutions. The IT team starts to conduct microservices governance in a new direction, such as end-to-end traffic adjustment, in order to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This reflects the advancement of R&D management of Chanjet in the cloud service sector.
Customer feedback
The cloud-native services and solutions provided by Alibaba Cloud have greatly improved the R&D efficiency of Chanjet.