In 282 days, Huifu "rushed to the sky"

Introduction to , the payment giant used 282 days to create an industry miracle of "cloud native" transformation.

following article is from Light Finance , author Li

What should a payment institution do when it suddenly receives traffic demand that is 10 times higher than usual?

This is exactly the situation facing the remittance payment world on the eve of Double Eleven in 2020. Unexpectedly, they completed the preparation and expansion of all resources in just one hour, and supported the e-commerce activity with high availability and stability.

A year ago, this was totally unimaginable.

The ability to do all of this is due to a bold proposal made at a meeting in mid-2017. At that time, Zhou Ye, chairman of Huifu Tianxia, proposed that the company should carry out digital transformation and become a technology-based enterprise that provides digital solutions for merchants.

It is not easy to complete such a transformation. What Huifu World needs to do is to first enable itself to have digital capabilities. It is against this background that Huifu World decided to replace the lowest-level technical infrastructure, gradually abandoning the traditional centralized architecture, and fully turning to cloud-native technology.

Starting from the end of 2019, Huifu World took 282 days to create an industry miracle and completed the largest cloud-native technology upgrade project in the company's history, "Raising the Sky".

On October 30, 2020, Huifu World specially held a celebration banquet of "Crossing into the Sky". Zhou Ye excitedly said to all the people involved in the project, "You did it", and announced that Huifu World has officially started a new digital journey.

1. In 282 days, the technological capability reached a new high

Although I still often think of the thrilling 282 days, Zhou Ye, the chairman of Huifu World, can finally relax.

Established in June 2006, Huifu Tianxia is a leading domestic technology company. At the beginning of its establishment, the company first seized the opportunity of digitization of aviation travel to cut into the merchant acquiring business, and then gradually expanded to merchant services. In 2019, the company's transaction volume reached 2.2 trillion yuan.

Since its establishment 15 years ago, Huifu has never stuck to traditional services, but is constantly innovating and exploring.

The turning point occurred in 2017. At that time, the payment industry was facing strict supervision of "disconnected direct connections", and competition for a single payment operation model became fierce. With the rapid development of new technologies, the demand for digital services from C-end customers for enterprises has soared, and many payment institutions have shifted their strategic focus. Digital services for B-end merchants.

It was also in this year that Huifu World began to brew digital transformation, and providing more digital services for merchants became one of the important directions. At the same time, Chairman Zhou Ye clearly realized that no matter how strategically transformed, the ability to have digital technology must be one of the company's core competitiveness.

In 2018 and 2019, Huifu World began to gradually try to transform a small number of business systems into the cloud, and saw good benefits. However, at that time more systems were still running on the traditional centralized architecture platform.

At the end of 2019, Huifu had a heated discussion on two schemes within the world: one is to treat the cloud environment as a new virtual resource, and to deploy the business system from the centralized architecture platform intact; the second scheme is to The technical architecture has undergone a thorough design and transformation, using cloud-native technology.

The picture shows Liang Xingyuan, chief architect of Huifu World

"At that time, the entire industry and the company were developing rapidly. I think it is necessary to set a core technology route as soon as possible to gain a technological competitive advantage for the company in the market." Huifu World Chief Architect Liang Xingyuan told Light Finance.

At the end of 2019, the world of remittance has ushered in a critical moment. At a meeting held by the Huifu World Data Technology Committee, despite different internal voices, Zhou Ye still made the final decision and decided to refactor the entire technical architecture into cloud native.

"To support digital business, it must be based on a high-availability, high-flexibility, and high-agility technical architecture. In the long run, the rapid development of cloud native becomes a more viable path." Liang Xingyuan told Qing Finance, although the risk of transformation is very high. Great, but the benefits are also great.

In the cloud-native era, the operation and maintenance of all computing resources, databases and other infrastructure is clearer and more intelligent than before. At the same time, the original CPU utilization rate in the traditional era may only reach 10%, and it can be increased to 60% or more in the cloud-native era. As the experience and the efficiency of computing resources increase, it will bring a significant drop in costs.

At the beginning of 2020, after several discussions with Alibaba Cloud to determine all the transformation plans and rhythms, Huifu World officially launched the entire "rush to the sky" project, starting an exciting 282 days.

November 16, 2019, the eve of the cloud: start a discussion on the deployment of cloud native technologies;

On January 6, 2020, the assault starting gun: the "rush to the sky" project was officially launched;

On February 13, 2020, complete the preparation of basic technology and resources, and start the transformation of cloud native technology;

On April 30, 2020, the first taste of victory. On the 116th day, the first batch of the 19th system transformation was successfully completed;

On July 23, 2020, the battle to move to the cloud: on the 200th day, complete the second batch of 18 system transformations;

October 14, 2020, successfully concluded: on the 282nd day, the transformation of 47 systems and 220 applications was successfully completed.

you must know that before remittance to the world, no payment company has completed such a feat. This is the largest technology upgrade project in the history of Huifu, which involves an unprecedented number of systems and staff.

2. Fully embrace cloud native: risks and benefits

Although it took only 282 days to complete the cloud native transformation, the "rush to the sky" project did not happen overnight. At that time, it faced a series of challenges.

First of all, this is the project with the largest number of participants and the most extensive aspects in the history of Huifu, which determines the high degree of complexity of the project; secondly, the cloud native technology stack is rich and technically difficult, and the business system is also facing transformation; finally, it is necessary to ensure Migrate without downtime, so that users feel indifferent.

"At that time, we had no reference cases in the industry." Liang Xingyuan said that at this time, it is very important to choose a partner for cloud computing.

After multi-dimensional technical tests such as stress testing, Huifu World finally decided to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud. In Liang Xingyuan's words, on the one hand, Alibaba Cloud has a relatively high degree of maturity in the entire cloud computing product; on the other hand, Alibaba Cloud's operation and maintenance management process, customer protection, and user success transaction mechanism are relatively complete, timely response, and consistent service.

At the end of 2019, the opportunity for Huifu Tianxia Cloud Native to fight hard came. Under Zhou Ye's overall requirements of "smooth migration, zero downtime, and up and down", the "Cross to the Clouds" project was officially born.

So, why does Huifu World choose the "cloud native" architecture unswervingly? Cloud native is not a new technology field. It is a combination of Cloud+Native. It can be seen literally as adopting the technical architecture design of the cloud, applying the technology stack of the cloud, and running on the infrastructure of cloud characteristics. Cloud native includes complete and rich technical definitions, such as microservices, Docker, K8S, and DevOps. For enterprises, the more important thing is that the business philosophy and corporate culture also need to infinitely conform to the development trend of the cloud computing era.

Zhou Ye described Huifu’s “Raising the Clouds” project in this way. Under the bottom-line requirement of “not affecting the business for one second”, the cloud migration is completely “live operation” and a real “replacement of tires on highways”. In this context, Huifu World has chosen the difficult mode. What about the benefits it brings?

fact is that after the closing of the Yunxiao project, Huifu World has achieved leapfrog improvements in many aspects:

First, cost reduction and efficiency increase are obvious.

When making the overall plan prediction, Liang Xingyuan also specifically asked Alibaba Cloud what the cost would change after the underlying technology architecture was transformed into cloud native. However, because Huifu Tianxia is the first case of cloud-native transformation of the overall architecture, Alibaba Cloud cannot give a relatively accurate data. "We estimated at the time that it would be great to save 20% of costs, but the final effect exceeded expectations." Liang Xingyuan said.

"From 2018 to now, our traffic has increased by more than ten times, and the cost is the same as before. This is still very surprising." Liang Xingyuan revealed to Light Finance that the current structure of Huifu World can support transactions in a week. The volume has increased dozens of times over the past, breaking through the 100 million mark.

Second, the operation and maintenance efficiency has been greatly improved. On the cloud-native architecture, system operation and maintenance are clearer, and resources can be managed automatically and quickly with flexibility.

Third, the support for business is more agile. cloud native architecture has not only brought about changes in the system operation and maintenance model, but more importantly, it has brought about a change in the company's business model. The business end can quickly respond to customer needs and provide innovative services.

Specifically, Huifu has launched a lightweight "payment + SaaS" product-"Adapay". The time for customer connection has been greatly shortened from a few weeks to a few days, and more than half of the customers can realize self-service operation services.

In the end, a large number of engineers have been experienced and realized the training and promotion of technical talents.

"This project has motivated everyone, and all technicians can sincerely shout, "We are doing technology in Huifu." At the celebration dinner, Zhou Ye said proudly.

3. How to make data create value

A key project that accounts for nearly 40% of the "Climbing to the Clouds" project is the migration from traditional databases to Alibaba Cloud databases.

For the past many years, Huifu has always been dominated by a traditional centralized technology architecture. Although such a technical structure has provided strong support for the company's early and rapid development, it has exposed defects in the process of supporting the strategic transformation of Huifu.

There are many specific reasons. Firstly, the traditional database software in a centralized architecture is expensive; secondly, it cannot support the elastic rise and shrinkage of database resources in the case of a large increase in transaction volume; thirdly, more and more innovative businesses are generated, which is very difficult for the database. Higher requirements were put forward, and new challenges were also raised for database design and operation and maintenance; fourth, the original database support services could not meet the business demands of Huifu.

As the core infrastructure, the database records every transaction of Huifu's customers and must be safe and accurate. When switching from the traditional architecture to the cloud-native architecture, Huifu World also put forward a more demanding requirement: migration without downtime, users feel unconscious.

"Because there is no specific case to refer to, I can only explore and move forward by myself." Liang Xingyuan said frankly that the challenges in all aspects of the entire migration process can be said to be very great, "It is equivalent to driving a car on the highway and maintaining a safe situation. Change the tires next."

Alibaba Cloud database experts Ning Yu and Jiangyun also felt the same way. In the 282 days of participating in the project, Ning Yu, Jiangyun and other students have worked with Huifu's engineers on many occasions to support database and system switching. This kind of switch is usually in the early morning, during the time period when the transaction volume on the HuiPay platform is the smallest.

Looking back on this project now, they still have lingering fears. "Huifu's system involves the settlement of huge amounts of funds. As long as there is a downtime, there will be problems and wrong accounts. Therefore, everyone is very careful during the migration process."

Fortunately, through the preliminary business combing and tailored database selection, the databases involved include RDS for MySQL, cloud-native database PolarDB, cloud-native distributed database PolarDB-X, cloud-native database warehouse ADB and other database products, and Through multiple Alibaba Cloud database services such as the traditional database compatibility assessment and transformation tool ADAM and the data transmission service DTS, Huifu World successfully completed the smooth migration of the database.

On the whole, through the cloud-native transformation, the overall cost of Huifu Tianxia database has been reduced by 75%. On the one hand, it saves a lot of traditional database authorization fees; on the other hand, it uses cloud-native database products to support extreme flexibility and use more resources. saving. The use of Alibaba Cloud ecological tools has greatly improved the intelligent operation and maintenance capabilities of the database and is more efficient. At the same time, based on the Alibaba Cloud database data management tool DMS, a set of financial enterprise-level data security management and control platforms have been constructed.

In addition, through the use of a wealth of cloud-native technology products, Huifu World also has the ability to process global data to help improve marketing, risk control, and services.

Nowadays, data assets are no longer a gold mine "guarded" by Huifu, but have become a value-creating tool.

4. Conclusion

To provide customers with digital solutions is the mission of Huifu. The business logic of Huifu World’s transition from “SaaS+Payment” to “Payment+SaaS” is to create fast, efficient and customized scenario solutions for different types of merchants.

Among them, technology is the very core base. The successful implementation of the "Cross to the Clouds" project means that Huifu World has fought a successful technological innovation, and it has also become an important milestone for Huifu World on the technological level.

is conceivable that after the battle of cloud native, Huifu has opened a new chapter in the world.

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