E-commerce
Asia Pacific
SME/Startup
"We used ACK to quickly set up a test environment, PTS to check the system resource usage based on instant stress testing of highly concurrent traffic, ARMS to diagnose performance bottlenecks during the stress testing process, and AHAS to throttle traffic and degrade nonessential services in real-time in scenarios. These services ensure system stability and availability for all of our big sales and promotions, and thanks to the auto scaling feature of ACK, we reduced server costs by more than 50%."
Technical Manager of Middle-End,
Perfect Diary
About Perfect Diary
Established in 2017, Perfect Diary is the first cosmetics brand of Guangzhou Yatsen E-Commerce Co. Ltd., a unicorn startup company in Guangzhou. Perfect Diary is dedicated to developing makeup and skincare products with high quality, delicate designs, and easy-to-use features for women, aiming to become an international household brand in the future.
In 2019, less than two years since its debut on Tmall, Perfect Diary became the best seller and the first domestic brand that ranked first in the Tmall Double 11 cosmetics brands in the past 11 years. The annual sales of Perfect Diary in 2019 also ranked first on Tmall. In April 2020, Perfect Diary became the first domestic cosmetics brand on Tmall Super Brand Day with a record-breaking sales volume.
In addition, Perfect Diary has opened dozens of retail stores in China, and is planning to open more than 600 stores by the end of 2022.
Challenge
Perfect Diary has the following three technical pain points:
1. The system gets updated too quickly. This results in an accumulation of online issues that take a long time to resolve. 2. Frequent big sales and promotions put great pressure on system stability. In this case, third-party interfaces and slow SQL queries may cause critical online failures. 3. Frequent stress testing operations and system capacity evaluations require support from routine maintenance. The system capacity must be frequently scaled up or down as a large number of resources are required during big sales and promotions.
Why Alibaba Cloud
Perfect Diary has summed up the following four benefits of Alibaba Cloud services:
Lower costs: During off-peak hours, a relatively smaller number of nodes are used to support the daily business. During big sales and promotions, more resources are needed to quickly scale up the system capacity and to process peak traffic. Once the promotions end, redundant resources are immediately released to minimize costs. In addition, O&M workload is reduced due to the features of Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) such as high reliability, self-healing, and auto scaling.
High availability: Application High Availability Service(AHAS) provides multiple features that throttle traffic, degrade nonessential services in the case of traffic surge, and protect critical system resources. AHAS also guarantees that the resource usage of the whole system does not exceed the threshold. This ensures system stability and improves user experience during big sales promotions.
Capacity evaluation: Performance Testing Service (PTS) and Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) can evaluate the capacity of a single server and the entire system. This helps Perfect Diary plan resources and estimate costs before big sales promotions.
Safeguard mechanism for big sales and promotions: By collaborating with Alibaba Cloud, Perfect Diary has developed a general process and an emergency response mechanism to normalize big sales promotions.
Architecture
To support its rapid business development, Perfect Diary employs a solution that combines ACK, Spring Cloud Alibaba, PTS, AHAS, and Tracing Analysis.
- The system is deployed in a containerized manner. Auto scaling provided by ACK allows Perfect Diary to quickly increase computing resources during big sales promotions.
- The system is connected to Tracing Analysis. This allows Perfect Diary to track complex service calls and locate abnormal services in a distributed environment. This way, Perfect Diary can quickly identify and resolve issues during testing and production.
- PTS is used to perform stress testing. This tool can increase traffic within seconds and simulate the actual traffic of real geographic locations based on real Internet traffic.
- The data of stress testing can be collected to analyze the strong and weak dependencies and key bottlenecks of the system. In addition, key business interfaces, third-party calls, slow database calls, and overall system load can be protected by the traffic throttling feature.
- Before big sales promotions, the system capacity is scaled up based on Alibaba Cloud services such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), ApsaraDB RDS, and security services. In addition, service access links are sorted, cache and connection pools are preheated, monitoring dashboards are created, and backend resources are prepared. By collaborating with Alibaba Cloud on these preparations, Perfect Diary can make big sales promotions a success.
Looking Forward
According to a Technical Manager of Middle-End from Perfect Diary, they have been using several Alibaba Cloud products to bla. This includes using Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) to quickly set up a test environment, Performance Testing Service (PTS) to check the system resource usage based on instant stress testing of highly concurrent traffic, Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to diagnose performance bottlenecks during the stress testing process, and Application High Availability Service (AHAS) to throttle traffic and degrade nonessential services in real time in scenarios where burst traffic or other unexpected conditions occur. These Alibaba Cloud services ensure system stability and availability for all of Perfect Diary's big sales and promotions. Furthermore, thanks to the auto scaling feature of ACK, Perfect Diary reduced server costs by more than 50%.
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Snapshot
Perfect Diary employs a solution that combines ACK, Spring Cloud Alibaba, PTS, AHAS, and Tracing Analysis.
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