SAE joins hands with Chengyun Zhida and Pony Test to fight the epidemic

Author: Campfire, Ji Yuan, Zhang Zuwang

The current epidemic situation is still severe, and all walks of life are united to fight against the epidemic. Nucleic acid detection and screening of the new coronavirus is an important part of epidemic prevention and control. How to deal with the repeated epidemics and the tens of thousands of nucleic acid test results every day has become a difficult problem for every testing company.

background

Founded in 2002, Pony Testing Group has developed into a large-scale comprehensive testing group with more than 6,000 employees and a service network consisting of nearly 30 large-scale experimental bases and nearly 100 wholly-owned subsidiaries and branches across the country. At the same time, it is also a biomedical engineering laboratory approved by Beijing, an engineering technology research center recognized by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, and an enterprise technology center recognized by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology.

On April 15, 2020, Beijing announced to undertake the new coronavirus nucleic acid testing service unit, and Beijing Pony Medical, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pony Testing Group, became one of the first batch of new coronavirus nucleic acid testing institutions to undertake the responsibility of Beijing and surrounding urban areas and towns. New coronavirus nucleic acid testing work.

Old platforms encounter new problems

Initially, Pony Testing's new coronavirus nucleic acid detection business was built on a local physical machine. However, during the operation of the business, some problems were exposed one after another. Therefore, Pony Testing gradually came up with the idea of upgrading the structure. As the flagship partner of Alibaba Cloud, Beijing Chengyun Zhida has maintained close communication with Pony and continues to provide assistance in product support and solution design.

In October 2021, the new crown epidemic broke out in X Province, and the cumulative number of confirmed cases climbed to more than 100 in a short period of time. The local government quickly carried out epidemic prevention work, and Pony Test took on the task of nucleic acid testing in towns around the provincial capital. The time is tight and the task is heavy. After internal evaluation by Pony, the existing technical architecture can no longer meet the requirements of the inspection work. In order to improve the efficiency of nucleic acid detection and deal with sudden high concurrency scenarios, the head of R&D took the initiative to contact Beijing Chengyun Zhida, hoping to solve existing problems from a technical perspective through Alibaba Cloud related products and solutions.

Combined with the requirements of this testing task and the technical exchanges with Pony testing in the past, Beijing Chengyun Zhida summarized the three major problems faced by Pony testing:

• High operation and maintenance costs: In the face of business peaks, tedious operations such as capacity estimation, environment preparation, and application deployment must be performed in advance each time, resulting in a lot of repetitive work.
• Insufficient ability to deal with business peaks : In the face of sudden traffic surges, applications are often deployed temporarily to deal with them. The entire process is not only time-consuming, but also affects the user experience on the client side.
• High risk of version iteration : A complete solution is required for system launch and version iteration process. Every time a new version is launched, tedious configuration is required to realize the release, and the stability after the release cannot be guaranteed.

SAE Problem Solving

After full communication, after having a deep understanding of the application scenarios and requirements of the Pony test, Chengyun Zhida recommended the Alibaba Cloud Serverless Application Engine (hereinafter referred to as SAE) for the Pony test. Many features of SAE can be very useful. Effectively help to Pony test:

• Perfect support for Java microservice architecture: SAE can quickly build a platform for full life cycle management and service governance of JavaSpringCloud technology stack microservice applications. There is no need to spend additional resources and costs to build supporting components, which greatly improves the construction efficiency of the system.

• Flexible elastic policies and extreme elastic speed: Through SAE's extreme elastic capabilities and flexible elastic policies, it is easy to build a mechanism and architecture that can efficiently and stably respond to irregular nucleic acid reservation traffic peaks. The service instance can be scaled adaptively according to the business traffic, and the whole process is unaware of the user and requires no manual intervention.

• Greatly guarantees the stability of business applications : Through the built-in APM application monitoring capability of SAE, the health status of applications is analyzed in two dimensions from vertical indicators to horizontal links, and the overall application health is well known. At the same time, with health check and non-destructive online and offline capabilities, applications can be released during the day, which greatly improves the speed of operation and maintenance messages and version iteration.

Steady migration to the cloud, calmly cope with detection peaks

In order to better help Pony Test complete the migration of its technical architecture, Chengyun Zhida adopts four service strategies of "test", "ask", "band" and "arrange":

• Testing : One-step testing with the customer, conducting advanced research and testing on the deployment steps in the SAE document and video data, experiencing the operation process of each step, and making corresponding records of the problems in the testing process.

• Q : Find the corresponding solutions for the problems encountered in the process of testing the SAE deployment and application, and contact the Alibaba Cloud cloud native team in time to communicate about the steps that you do not understand;

• Belt : issue SAE detailed deployment plan documents and front-end container packaging process for customers, lead customers to conduct business test deployment one-on-one, answer customers' questions about the deployment process patiently and meticulously, and promote customers' understanding of SAE deployment process;

• Arrangement : Actively respond to customer problems during use, troubleshoot and resolve them in a timely manner, and contact Alibaba Cloud's cloud native team for support to ensure the normal operation of the application.

With SAE's flexible speed, flexible strategy, and ability to manage the full life cycle of applications, Pony Test has greatly improved the efficiency and stability of the testing platform, successfully responded to multiple large-scale testing scenarios, and added to the national anti-epidemic cause. A reliable, contribute their own strength.

• Quickly build a robust core system : Thanks to the various capabilities of SAE integration, Pony Test uses the Java SpringCloud technology stack to develop and build the entire system in a very short time, and it is stable and reliable.
• Greatly improve operation and maintenance efficiency and reduce operation and maintenance costs: Through the SAE elastic policy solution, it is possible to calmly cope with fixed-period business peaks, eliminating the original operation of estimating resources and deploying applications, and greatly saving the work of the operation and maintenance team quantity.
• Coping with business peaks calmly : With the extreme flexibility of SAE, it is possible to calmly respond to sudden surges in service traffic without temporarily deploying applications.
• Always perceive the health status of business applications : Through the microservice lifecycle management capabilities and microservice governance capabilities provided by the SAE platform, the launch cycle can be shortened and the version iteration stability can be increased to quickly discover application performance bottlenecks and formulate optimization strategies.

The tide ebbs and there is no wind in the river, and the flat boats help each other with the king.
Alibaba Cloud has joined hands with Chengyun Zhida and Pony Testing to jointly build an anti-epidemic fortress, fight against the epidemic and overcome difficulties together.

Beijing Chengyun Zhida Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2016, headquartered in Beijing, with branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Shijiazhuang and other places. Manufacturing, new agriculture, finance and other industries serve more than 20,000 customers, with an annual turnover of 300 million yuan. Combined with Alibaba Cloud products and solutions, it provides customers with cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence and other solutions, Pre-sales consultation, delivery implementation, after-sales and other integrated services