Peanut Diary is known for its intelligent shopping guide app. As a social media e-commerce platform, it already had 60 million registered users as of July 2019, with an overall transaction volume of CNY 42 billion.

The traffic surged during Double 11 last year. Due to lack of experience, the system experienced multiple failures. For example, commodities could not be shared, and the search feature became unavailable. Teams and employees of Peanut Diary had to avoid doing searches in the background during business peaks.
The utilization of IT resources needs to be further increased to reduce costs. Peanut Diary tried containerization for the first time in 2018, expecting to use container technology to improve the overall reliability, stability, elasticity, and fault tolerance of the system.

On the day of Double 11, the peak queries per second (QPS), that is, the peak API Gateway QPS collected by Application High Availability Service (AHAS), of Peanut Diary exceeded 40,000, the gross merchandise value (GMV) exceeded 4.2 billion, and the daily active users (DAUs) reached tens of millions. This is their third Double 11, and the traffic has been tripled compared with that of last year.

During the peak hours at Double 11, AHAS provided traffic control features such as circuit breaking, throttling, and downgrading. Facing the traffic surge from 8,000 QPS to more than 40,000 QPS, business operations remained stable. The revenues in the first 1 hour, 27 minutes, and 35 seconds exceeded the total daily revenues of November 11 last year.

During Double 11 last year, due to lack of experience, the system experienced multiple failures. For example, commodities could not be shared, and the search feature became unavailable. The staff had to avoid doing searches in the background during business peaks. Therefore, in 2018, they were very much looking forward to containerization and microservice-based implementation. Alibaba Cloud helped rapidly evolve the architecture to a cloud-native microservice system architecture that is based on ECS Bare Metal Instance and Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). Backed by Aliware and Alibaba Cloud application services such as ARMS, AHAS, and Log Service, the system is greatly improved in terms of the overall reliability, stability, elasticity, and fault tolerance. The IT resource utilization is also increased. The transformed system helped Peanut Diary cope with the business peaks (with a maximum peak of 40,000 QPS) which are six times the normal traffic volume.

A cloud-native microservice system architecture that is based on ECS Bare Metal Instance and ACK is used in conjunction with Aliware and Alibaba Cloud application services such as ARMS, AHAS, and Log Service. The SpringCloud-based microservice architecture is adopted with many optimizations. The overall microservice architecture is deployed on ECS bare metal instances by using ACK, while the elastic resources are deployed by using the sixth-generation ECS. It is worth mentioning that Peanut Diary has discovered and rectified potential issues through multiple rounds of stress testing by using ARMS, and accurately predicted the traffic volume (in QPS) by using AHAS.

Peanut Diary tried containerization for the first time in 2018, expecting to use the container technology to improve the overall reliability, stability, elasticity, and fault tolerance of the system. The team hopes to achieve more with container technology in the near future.