Introduction: Catering is becoming the largest testing ground for the application of digital intelligence transformation in the real economy, promoting the evolution of SaaS into a new infrastructure in the catering industry. As one of the first domestic enterprises to set foot in catering SaaS, Dindao is helping catering companies to further solve the needs of cost control and efficiency improvement in a cloud-native way. By migrating the business platform to Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK, server resource utilization has increased by more than 30%, capacity expansion efficiency has increased by nearly 80%, version release cycle has been shortened by nearly 40%, and zero cluster failures have provided full guarantee for business continuity.
Author | Xi __ Yang,
Review & proofreading: Xiyang, Haizhu,
Editing & Typesetting: Wen Yan
"Food is the heaven for the people" is an old saying carved in the DNA of every Chinese. The catering industry has never lacked fierce competition. Consumption upgrades, changes in payment habits, rising manpower and operating costs, and uncertainty brought about by the epidemic continue to spread, making catering companies increasingly urgent for cost control, efficiency improvement, and refined operations.
New trends in all-cloud development and the evolution of SaaS
The "2020 China Enterprise SaaS Industry Research Report" shows that by 2022, the scale of the Chinese enterprise SaaS market is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan. At the same time, enterprise services that are deeply cultivated in vertical fields such as catering SaaS have entered the stage of large-scale application.
As one of the first pioneers in China to set foot in catering SaaS, Li Zhenhong, the founder of Catering, believes that the trend of traditional catering to the Internet is an inevitable choice to adapt to the times. This has also driven catering SaaS to gradually become an important choice for catering companies to enhance their management level and optimize their cost structure. Nowadays, even a food stall on the street is using the Internet for settlement; almost all restaurants in major business districts are using the SaaS collection and payment system. Technically speaking, catering SaaS has been able to penetrate from the initial purchase to customer payment, customer maintenance, takeaway orders, rider delivery, human management, supply chain, data center and other links.
Cloud computing is the foundation of the development of SaaS. Under the new trend of all-cloud development brought by cloud native, where will the next generation of SaaS evolve? This article will use a practical case based on Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK in the restaurant to share how the cloud-native architecture based on Kubernetes can help catering SaaS achieve more stable and reliable services, and further help companies optimize resources and labor costs.
dining course creates an ACK-based integrated and innovative cloud base
Cando positions itself as a "connector" for the new retail industry in catering. As of October 2021, its services have covered 400+ cities across the country, 80,000+ stores, and 3.5 million+ orders processed daily. From the perspective of Catering Road, the future catering companies will definitely take the integration and innovation of "data serviceization", "omnichannel serviceization" and "new business development agility" as their development direction.
In order to help merchants establish a one-stop management method for full-link business and achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase, the restaurant has built an integrated data intelligent application based on the SaaS architecture, which can be connected to the take-out platform, the merchant’s self-built system, the cashier system, the membership system, Distribution suppliers, back kitchens, ERP systems, online payment systems, etc.
Restaurant business architecture diagram
The restaurant attaches great importance to the customer's service experience, and regards system stability, the iterative efficiency of business functions, and the rapid positioning and resolution of problems as the cornerstone of building core competitiveness. The peaks and troughs of business traffic in the catering industry are obvious, and promotions are often used to attract customers. If unreasonable resource allocation leads to orders overflow during peak periods and insufficient capacity, it will greatly affect the experience of customers and businesses; in addition, dining Dao provides many vertical business functions such as order management system, CDBI, applet, aggregated distribution, DMS, agent operation, etc. Under the rapid changes in market demand, product function innovation and iterative efficiency issues are also a major challenge to the technical architecture.
The solutions to these status quo coincide with the core capabilities brought about by the cloud native architecture. The restaurant channel deploys main business applications, including front-end web containers, gateways, and back-end microservices through a Kubernetes cluster, to help businesses iterate quickly and flexibly respond to business needs in a cloud-native way.
Meal Road SaaS service architecture based on ACK
Under the cloud native trend, Kubernetes has become the infrastructure of a new generation of cloud IT architecture for enterprises. However, in the process of enterprise deployment and operation and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters, the complexity is still high. For SaaS service providers, if they choose to build Kunernetes by themselves, as long as there are virtual machines, they can create a Kubernetes cluster and run the entire application system on the cluster, regardless of whether these virtual machines come from a local IDC or a cloud platform. If it is to meet the needs of customers who have privatized deployment needs, the self-built method can be used to conveniently call the required computing resources.
But when the scale reaches a certain level, there will be many problems in self-built Kunernetes, such as instability caused by DNS resolution. In addition, when encountering traffic peak scenarios such as business activities, you need to purchase servers for expansion, and perform a series of tedious tasks such as various initial installation operations and cluster configuration. It takes at least 15 minutes to add a server, whether it is resources, time or maintenance. The cost is relatively high.
With the popularity of containerized applications in production environments, enterprises' demand for managed Kubernetes continues to grow. In the latest CNCF cloud native survey in 2021, 26% of respondents said they are using managed Kubernetes services, up from 23% a year ago, and are rapidly approaching the proportion of local installations (31%).
In order to better ensure the stability of the business system while saving operation and maintenance manpower costs, recently chose to migrate its business applications deployed on its self-built Kubernetes cluster to Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK to build its catering SaaS platform.
Based on Alibaba Cloud's reliable and stable IaaS platform, ACK has packaged 30+ cloud products downwards, forming a new interface for automated operation and maintenance and cloud platform interaction, thereby enhancing the flexibility and automated operation and maintenance capabilities of enterprise business systems. Internally, ACK supports the cloud nativeization of 100% of the group's applications, and at the same time provides upgrade services for tens of thousands of enterprises on the cloud to realize modern application transformation and upgrading.
Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK product family
person in charge of the technical architecture of the restaurant, said that when choosing ACK, we mainly value the following capabilities:
The first is the stability of services, ACK is the result of large-scale scenes Ali cloud proven and optimized, we do not need a lot of pit themselves to step on, we do not need to spend a lot of energy to do applications optimized adaptation. While improving the stability of the system, it saves a lot of operation and maintenance manpower costs.
followed by the expansion speed of ACK. can be expanded to multiple units at once, and no matter how many units are expanded, it can be completed within 10 minutes, so that when we encounter some unexpected unexpected traffic, we can be faster To respond.
In addition, ACK integrates various capabilities Cloud. 161971a4182be1 can help companies run cloud Kubernetes containerized applications efficiently. For example, the integrated Prometheus monitoring service in ACK can help quickly locate performance problems and better ensure business Continuity.
For companies like Candao that have built their own Kubernetes clusters in their own IDCs or on the cloud, Alibaba Cloud provides a complete migration solution that can support the smooth migration of hundreds of services to ACK on the cloud at the same time. Relying on the self-developed tool library, the classic network can be connected to the VPC network, the pod/service in the classic Kubernetes cluster and the pod/service in the ACK can be connected, and the whitelist for various database migrations can be set. The impact on enterprise business during the migration period is minimized, ensuring business reliability, stability, security and flexibility.
Self-built K8s smoothly migrate ACK
ACK is also the world's first service platform to pass the Kubernetes conformance certification. Based on the standard Kubernetes, it has greatly improved the one-stop service capabilities of security protection, high availability assurance, and stable upgrades in the enterprise production environment. Therefore, after migrating to ACK, there is basically no change in the application release process built on the restaurant SaaS platform, and the cluster is more stable. There has not been a case of Kubernetes operation and maintenance problems so far, so that the enterprise itself can focus more on business Innovation and rapid development.
At the same time, during the period when the restaurant business platform was migrated to ACK, significant results were achieved in the four dimensions of cost, stability, efficiency, and enabling business:
- resource utilization rate increased: server resource utilization rate increased by 30%+;
- supports rapid business development: can be quickly isolated after a problem occurs. When faced with a rapid increase in business volume, the expansion can be completed in a short time. The self-built cluster originally took 15 minutes to expand a node, but now the ACK cluster only needs 3 on average. A node can be expanded in minutes, and the expansion efficiency has increased by nearly 80%;
- iteration efficiency improvement: version iteration, the service update speed has been significantly improved, shortening the version release time by nearly 40%;
- 0 Cluster failure: cluster also provides sufficient protection for the system. Up to now, the number of cluster failures on the various business platforms of the restaurant is 0.
It is foreseeable that with the increase in business volume of merchants in the future, the full lifecycle management capabilities of containerized applications provided by ACK will help the food courts to exert greater value.
Cloud native redefines catering SaaS market demand
It can be said that catering is becoming the largest testing ground for the application of digital intelligence transformation in the real economy. In the near future, SaaS will evolve into the infrastructure of the catering industry, bringing more development opportunities to catering companies by combining more advanced and efficient technology and operation methods with traditional catering categories.
At the same time, with the development of cloud-native technology, architecture and services represented by Kubernetes, in the future, wherever cloud is needed, enterprises will be able to enjoy unified cloud operation and maintenance and resource management and control capabilities, enabling R&D and operation and maintenance personnel There is no need to pay attention to system reliability, availability, and stability, and focus on business innovation to further release human and resource costs.
From the Internet to new retail, catering, finance, manufacturing, and transportation, ACK is supporting more and more industries to use cloud-native methods to solve business problems and accelerate scenario innovation. Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK is also looking forward to working with more and more "dinners" to help more potential companies inspire innovation and vitality, and grow together with change makers in all walks of life.
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