Established in 2017, perfect diary is the first cosmetics brand under Guangzhou Yasen e-commerce Co., Ltd., a Licorne startup in Guangzhou. Perfect diary is committed to developing high-quality, well-designed and easy-to-use cosmetics and skin care products for women, and strives to become an international household brand in the future.
In 2019, less than two years after tmall went online, perfect diary has become the domestic brand with the largest sales volume among tmall’s “double 11” cosmetics brands in recent 11 years. The annual sales volume of perfect diary in 2019 also ranked first among tmall. In April, 2020, perfect diary became the first domestic cosmetics brand with record sales volume on tmall super brand day.
In addition, perfect diary has opened dozens of retail stores in China and plans to open more than 600 stores by the end of 2022.
Challenge
The perfect diary has the following three technical pain points:
1. the system is updated too quickly. This will lead to the accumulation of online problems, which will take a long time to solve.
2. frequent large-scale sales and promotional activities bring great pressure to the stability of the system. In this case, third-party interfaces and slow SQL queries may lead to critical online failures.
3. frequent pressure test operation and system capacity evaluation need the support of daily maintenance. In large sales and promotion activities, the system capacity must be increased or decreased frequently due to the need for a large number of resources.
The perfect diary summarizes the four benefits of Alibaba cloud services:
Cost reduction:
In non peak hours, the number of nodes used to support daily business is relatively small. During large sales and promotions, more resources are needed to rapidly expand system capacity and handle peak traffic. Once the promotion ends, redundant resources will be released immediately to minimize costs. In addition, Alibaba cloud container service ack (cloud container service for kubernetes) has the characteristics of high reliability, self-healing and automatic scaling, which reduces the workload of operation and maintenance.
High availability:
Application high availability service (AHAs) provides a variety of features, which can throttle traffic, reduce unnecessary business in case of traffic surge, and protect key system resources. AHAS can also ensure that the resource usage of the whole system does not exceed the threshold. This ensures the stability of the system and improves the user experience during major promotions.
Competency assessment:
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 the perfect diary plan resources and estimate costs before a big promotion.
Large sales and promotion guarantee mechanism:
Architecture
Perfect diary adopts the solutions of ACK, Alibaba cloud, PTS, AHAS and tracking analysis to support the rapid development of business.
– the system adopts containerized deployment mode. The automatic zoom function provided by ack enables the perfect diary to quickly increase computing resources during the big promotion period.
– the system has been connected to tracking analysis. This enables perfect diary to track complex service calls and locate exception services in a distributed environment. In this way, the perfect diary can quickly identify and solve problems during testing and production.
– PTS is used for pressure testing. The tool can increase traffic in seconds and simulate real traffic in real geographical locations based on real Internet traffic.
-Through the collection of stress test data, the strength dependence and key bottlenecks of the system are analyzed. In addition, the traffic throttling feature can protect critical business interfaces, third-party calls, slow database calls, and the overall system load.
– before large-scale promotional activities, the system will expand capacity based on Alibaba cloud’s ECS (Elastic Compute service), apsaradb RDS, security services and other businesses. Sort the service access links, warm up the cache and connection pool, create a monitoring dashboard, and prepare the back-end resources. Through cooperation with Alibaba cloud, perfect diary can successfully carry out large-scale promotional activities on these preparations.
