Clouds serve as a technology platform that connects the real and virtual worlds. As the technical direction of digital economy, cloud-native technologies become a key part that accelerates the development of enterprises at an unprecedented speed. This topic describes how Serverless App Engine (SAE) helps Allchips implement cloud-native transformation.
Background information
Allchips is an enterprise that provides an industrial Internet platform for the electronics industry. Allchips provides one-stop bill of materials (BOM)-based delivery that consists of hardware design selection, chip supply, manufacturing, marketing, and services for 100,000 enterprises from multiple industries and fields such as new energy vehicles, industrial controls, healthcare, and IoT. After Allchips designs a hardware facility, Allchips can provide the full lifecycle delivery of a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) project. During the delivery process, Allchips must shorten the required period of two to three months required for the product design process and production process to two weeks. To improve efficiency, Allchips must handle the following items that are related to the data and technologies:
- Allchips has built product databases, commodity databases, and knowledge bases for the corresponding chips in the industry. This effectively helps Allchips shorten the one-month period that is previously required for manual processing by 90% when Allchips process a solution design. Only a few seconds for manual processing plus 10 minutes for manual review is required for the production design process.
- During the production process, Allchips must digitize the production techniques, production quality, and after-sales service of the factory. Then, Allchips can provide the most basic infrastructure of products, production, and services for 100,000 hardware companies.
Challenges
The following table describes the challenges faced by Allchips when Allchips used its traditional technical architecture to handle the items that are related to the data and technologies. The table also describes the benefits of the technical architecture that uses SAE.
| Challenge | Benefit |
| Uneven server resource usage: During peak hours or off-peak hours, unbalanced loads that increase the pressure on specific servers and cause slow response may occur. This reduces resource utilization. | To resolve these issues, SAE provides a high-availability solution that integrates fine-grained capacity control, elastic scalability, and throttling and bandwidth degradation. SAE helps you efficiently handle peak traffic based on the solution. |
| High O&M costs: Allchips must write a shell script each time Allchips upgrades a version because the traditional technical architecture is built based on Elastic Compute Service (ECS). The version can be released only if the number of customers is relatively small. The version release efficiency is low and the version rollback process is complex. If errors occur, the troubleshooting efficiency of the architecture is low and the architecture does not support application-level monitoring. | After you create an application, you can upgrade the application by using the canary release method or phased release method. If an issue occurs on the new version, you can roll back the application to an earlier version with a few clicks to ensure the security and stability of the application. SAE is seamlessly integrated with Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to monitor and diagnose applications in a visualized manner. You can efficiently identify slow SQL statements, slow methods, and method-call stacks. You can also analyze, troubleshoot, and resolve online issues and configure alerts. |
| Complex permission management: Developers and O&M engineers must periodically log on to the system and maintain the system. In this case, the corresponding permissions are difficult to manage and risks are high. | SAE provides an enterprise-level permission management system. You can use the SAE permission management system to isolate applications, resources, and data, and perform access control. This ensures the security of applications. |
Solution
Based on the original architecture, Allchips smoothly migrates business to SAE without the need to modify code. After applications are hosted to SAE, developers can use Apsara Devops to build pipelines to automatically release the applications in a simple and efficient manner. SAE provides multiple auto scaling policies. Allchips do not need to retain servers for a long period of time during off-peak hours. This improves scaling efficiency and reduces resource costs. SAE also provides the permission assistant feature to help Allchips grant finer-grained permissions to R&D engineers and O&M engineers. This improves business security.
Effect
Before Allchips used SAE, Allchip must release versions during off-peak hours, such as the midnight. After a version is released, some unknown issues that affect the actual business may occur. After Allchips used the cloud-native service SAE, Allchips can release versions without affecting its business. This significantly shortens the release time of the versions. SAE allows Allchips to configure canary release settings.
After Allchips used SAE, the development efficiency of Allchips is improved by 50%, the O&M efficiency is improved by 70%, the technical application investment is reduced by 40%, and the troubleshooting efficiency is improved by 100%.
- High scalability: Powerful computing and data capabilities are required for implementing Design for Manufacturing (DFM) or Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA), and the simulated production of link design and complete PCBA. However, the resource requirements are different during runtime. For example, the resource usage during peak hours can be 10 to 50 times greater than the resource usage during off-peak hours. After Allchips used SAE, the system provides higher scalability and can automatically allocate resources with high efficiency.
- Simple O&M: SAE helps Allchips improve O&M efficiency, and allows the O&M engineers of Allchips to focus on its business.
- Lower costs: The cloud-native architecture that uses SAE allows Allchips to perform O&M operations, allocate resources, and manage resources with a few clicks. This significantly reduces costs.
- Improved monitoring capabilities: SAE provides the built-in monitoring solution and is seamlessly integrated with ARMS. This helps the error troubleshooting process in the system become more visualized and convenient.