Fast enough to service the path of cloud migration

Fast enough is a collaborative service provider based on cloud storage in China. For all types of enterprises and institutions, government agencies and school groups, to provide the establishment of the Ali Yunping platform for cloud storage and cloud-based storage based on a variety of collaborative application services. Infoq is quick enough to interview engineers for fast-moving architectures to migrate to the clouds.

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InfoQ: "Fast enough" why do you want to put your business on the cloud? Is there a stage before the server is not put on the cloud but it is responsible for the server's processing?

Chiang Shuo Miao: before.

InfoQ: What was the problem with the previous approach? Why did you decide to migrate your business to the cloud?

Chiang Shuo Miao: Well, first of all, it's like we put our business on our own deployed servers, the beginning is relatively small, the server add up to not more than 20 units, then give us the feeling that they can maintain over, then also developed a number of procedures to do monitoring, management, and the real bottlenecks encountered in the network. Because we are doing storage services, it is important to do storage services is the network. Because China's network service providers have Unicom, telecommunications, mobile and so on, in such a large network environment, we need to establish at least unicom, telecommunications two rooms, and we are doing so, which led to the number of our machines doubled. And as the business progresses, we need to manage nearly 100 servers, so our servers are the equivalent of a private cloud, but we find that in addition to the cost of the machine itself, we need to pay extra:

For today's 100, 200 machines to optimize the private cloud, the need for a more powerful operational development team, the need for better bandwidth.

Our servers are placed in different computer rooms, and special maintenance personnel are required in each room. Because we do is the cloud storage, hard disk is very easy to damage, so when this happens, the need to replace the hard disk, repair data, that requires us to monitor the server at any time. In fact, the server monitoring, management of this piece of work we have a lot of energy.

The advent of Aliyun gives us the feeling that while hardware and bandwidth costs are more expensive than our own deployments, we save a lot of hidden costs. When I use Aliyun, I have a deep understanding of this. As we deploy our own servers, the first place 10, 20 servers, but if the subsequent business needs 100, 200 machines, but the telecommunications room does not have a spare seat, we have only two options, one is to change the server room, the other is in another room to deploy the server, Then by pulling the optical fiber and other ways to two of the computer room string up. The cost is very large, although there is enough money to do it, but because we have to provide continuous service, so time we need at least one or two days to deploy the structure. In this context, we choose to use Aliyun.

InfoQ: We believe that the cloud can bring a lot of help to enterprises, such as the cost of reducing, but the cloud is not omnipotent, so fast enough in the process of using Aliyun have not thought of the problem? And how to solve it?

Chiang Shuo Miao: In fact I feel "fast enough" is accompanied by the growth of Aliyun. When we first used Aliyun, including OSS systems, there were a lot of problems, and we had a lot of feedback about bugs. In fact, I feel that this matter needs to be looked at objectively, I believe that the cloud still has many problems, but these problems we do will encounter, the difference is now is Aliyun to help us solve the problem. Take a few days before encountered a situation to example: we found that the site a few days ago, and then I asked Aliyun, they said it was a DDoS, and then they almost spent 2 hours to stop the attack traffic. Because we have previously deployed the server has encountered such a problem, is also DDoS, for us to need a week or forced to change the IP way to be able to evade this DDoS. In fact, this is another problem, such as when we run the server downtime, DDoS or Ali Misoperation caused the server down, but because we have deployed the machine, and do not ensure that our technology can guarantee the foolproof, including the grand or Amazon cloud can not be perfect, These problems are encountered in our personal operations, so Aliyun will encounter them. The difference is that when we personally encounter may be a way to solve their own, and now rely on the hosting provider to solve, from the operating point of view is not know when he will solve this is the gap, the other is the same. In fact, I think the Chinese cloud services have just arisen, including Shanda, Ali's service has yet to be improved, but I believe that if they do this service, it will certainly be faster than our own development. After all, running on their machine services not only our own family, I may only encounter their own bugs, I would like to say that I provided a bug to Aliyun, he will solve the bug, then the entire platform will not encounter this problem.

InfoQ: Can I think of it this way: "Fast enough" is a success with Aliyun, from scratch, from small to large development?

Chiang Shuo Miao: Yes, we did witness the growth of Aliyun, and many of their services are good, including testing services, OSS, etc.

InfoQ: For companies using the cloud, I think the change to the team is not a sharp reduction in operational costs?

Jiang Shuo Miao: Yun-dimensional divided into two, one is customer service operation dimension, this is not reduced. The main is the cost of the operation of the server to reduce, now we are responsible for a person. He is a daily look at the running state of the Aliyun server, such as space, network, configuration is correct, if there is an exception to the feedback to Aliyun, and then repaired by them.

When we deploy our own servers, we need to recruit at least 5 team members to do the operation and management.

InfoQ: It seems that Aliyun is fast enough to provide productivity promotion and cost reduction, indirectly resulting in an increase in enterprise competitiveness.

Jiang Miao: Yes, then from another perspective, we are now providing packaged cloud services for other businesses. After the use of our products Aliyun will enhance the confidence of our users, because the service is Ali to provide support, users feel that the service will feel good, including data security and other aspects will be more assured. At the same time, data hosting in Aliyun, we are also more comfortable.

InfoQ: Last question, what were the factors that made you choose Aliyun when you chose a cloud service provider?

Jiang Shuo Miao: The most important aspect is the speed of access. Our services are mainly domestic, then tried many foreign services, including Microsoft, found that these visits are slow, and Amazon, Google's services are easily blocked. Then the rest of the domestic big company is grand, Ali, of course, now the other small companies in China also provide cloud platform, I personally feel that they are just providing virtual machines, because our business requirements need to provide a full-service provider solution, including storage, structured data query, virtual machines, load balancing.

Aliyun is a built-in super network, education, telecommunications, Unicom and other use of the same IP address, network optimization to access speed are almost the same. Based on these, we choose Aliyun.

Also consider the user experience, because for users, users need to choose Unicom or Telecom portal, if the user chose the wrong, later services will not be smooth.

(Responsible editor: admin)