About Huice
Founded in 2011, Huice is a technology-driven smart retail service provider. It provides smart retail solutions based on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) models to help retailers achieve digital and intelligent upgrades and realize large-scale business development. Huice has established more than 130 service sites across China. Customers in more than 400 cities can obtain services by accessing the nearest sites. Huice is gradually providing services for more cities and regions inside and outside China.
Huice, formerly known as Wangdiantong, started its business by providing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for enterprises in the upstream and downstream sectors to lay out their business in the retail sector. Huice builds an integrated smart retail solution to break down data silos, uses a built-in AI system to realize smart decision-making, and helps retail enterprises to realize smart transformation. Leveraging on the advantages of technology, products, and services, Huice has become an influential brand in the retail industry and is widely recognized by retailers.
Challenges
As business continues to grow, Huice, like most enterprises in the SaaS and PaaS fields, faces the following pain points:
Pain point 1: Data accuracy and information security
The data layer models in the database deployment architecture of the SaaS-based Wangdiantong ERP system vary based on the types of enterprises. The accuracy and security of data are essential for Huice to provide services. Huice has high requirements for databases. The requirements include ensuring data security, isolation of customer information, better management of database usage, and identification of potential health issues in the databases.
Pain point 2: Elastic scaling and balance between costs and availability
Huice serves different types of customers that have different requirements for database architectures. As business grows, the number of instances increases and a large volume of data exists. Some tenants have terabytes of data, and the data volume is still increasing. Huice faces the following top issues: how to serve different types of customers with the same architecture, implement elastic scaling of storage and computing resources at the earliest opportunity to handle traffic peaks, and meet the increasing storage needs.
Pain point 3: Lightweight management and O&M, reducing the complexity and costs of management and O&M
As the number of instances of customers grows, the management cost is increasing. In addition, the development and upgrade of customer business require data migration, information isolation for major customers, and partitioning for major customers, and even tailored development. Huice faces the following top three challenges and pain points: how to achieve lightweight management and O&M, how to meet the needs of tailored development, and how to formulate a reasonable migration plan with a controllable migration duration and low risk of human operations
Solution
Huice uses ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL to build the SaaS-based Wangdiantong ERP system. ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides highly available, reliable, secure, scalable, and enterprise-class capabilities to meet Huice's business requirements of faster speed, more powerful features, higher stability, higher data accuracy, and higher data security.
Faster speed: All parameters in ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL have been practiced and optimized by database experts of Alibaba Cloud. This ensures that RDS instances use the optimal configuration and provides a foundation for fast data processing. ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL supports elastic scaling to meet the requirements of large promotions. ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL runs stably and provides a solid foundation for the entire system to process 164,000 orders per second.
More powerful features: AliSQL of ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides more enterprise-class features than open source MySQL, such as enterprise-class backup and restoration, thread pooling, and parallel query. AliSQL can work with multi-tenant management in the Wangdiantong ERP system to use the enterprise-class backup and restoration feature to help customers back up and restore data.
Higher stability: As a data-intensive application, the running of the Wangdiantong ERP system relies heavily on databases. RDS High-availability Edition can ensure that the Wangdiantong ERP system provides 24/7 services.
Higher data accuracy: ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides metrics such as SQL statement performance, CPU utilization, IOPS usage, memory usage, disk capacity usage, the number of connections, lock information, and hotspot tables. The metrics help Huice better manage database usage. In addition, Database Autonomy Service (DAS) provides intelligent diagnostics and optimization features to identify existing and potential database health issues.
Higher data security: ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL provides a variety of security measures, such as access control, system security, and data encryption, to ensure data security and provide enterprise-class security for the Wangdiantong ERP system.
Customer values
ApsaraDB RDS helps customers simplify management and O&M and reduce O&M costs. ApsaraDB RDS provides features such as automatic backup, backup and restoration, and monitoring to manage databases in an easier and more efficient manner.
ApsaraDB RDS helps customers achieve high availability. ApsaraDB RDS provides a highly available system that consists of a primary RDS instance and a secondary RDS instance. If the primary RDS instance becomes faulty, workloads are switched to the secondary RDS instance. This helps prevent service interruptions.
ApsaraDB RDS provides elastic scaling to handle traffic surges and increasing data volumes. This allows customers to adjust resources based on business requirements.
ApsaraDB RDS ensures the data security of customers. ApsaraDB RDS provides a variety of security measures, such as access control policies, VPC isolation, SQL audit, data encryption, and automatic backup.