Wanduoduo CTO Shan Zebing: The technical architecture of start-ups should be flexible, simple and efficient

[51CTO.com original article] The reporter arrived at Wanduoduo on time at 9:30 am to interview CTO Shan Zebing. On the way to the meeting room, several of Shan Zebing's colleagues looked at him and said, "You came so early?!" They all looked at him strangely. At first, the reporter thought that the benefits of the startup company were good and the working hours were very late. Later, after asking, he found out that he had worked overtime with the technical team until late at night the night before, and came to the company early the next morning to work.

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Small changes in the world

The main business of Wanduoduo can be summarized in four words: toy rental. Shan Zebing told the reporter that the decision to rent toys was not made on a whim, but after careful consideration. He asked the reporter: What accompanies children for the longest time from 1 to 6 years old? The reporter answered, "Isn't it their parents?" He shook his head and said, "Toys are what accompany children for the longest time."

It is true that there are many toys in today's society, and children can learn a lot of new knowledge through toys. Some toys can practice balance, and some toys can bring a new visual and auditory experience through sound and color. If you only buy toys, first, it costs a lot of money, especially the international first-line toy brands are expensive; second, the utilization rate is low, and once the children's novelty of toys is over, the toys are often put aside; third, the quality varies. If parents are greedy for cheapness, the quality of toys is worrying, accompanied by the risk of harming children's health. "Then can we change another way and use leasing to let more children share toys?" Shan Zebing pointed out that leasing toys costs less, second, they are all international first-line brands with reliable quality, and third, children can come into contact with more toys, and it will not take up space at home.

With this in mind, Wanduoduo was founded. Shan Zebing said that Wanduoduo has a lot of resources from international first-tier toy suppliers, and he hopes to create a new form of toy sharing and "make a small difference in the world."

The only two principles of technical architecture: simplicity, flexibility and efficiency

"We are trying to cooperate with Sesame Credit. Today, our activities will be promoted in key locations of Sesame Credit. In order to cope with the large traffic volume, our technical team has been working overtime last night to make advance deployments." Shan Zebing explained.

Although he had worked as a technical director in well-known companies such as Lenovo and Ganji.com and had rich technical experience, Shan Zebing said that success is absolute, and it is actually very unreliable to directly copy the perfect technical structure of a large company to a micro-startup company. First of all, the performance requirements are not that high, and secondly, start-ups do not need to lay out such a large plate, such as load balancing, caching, and high concurrency. "Of course, I have experienced the changes of the company from small to large, so I have a better understanding of what problems will be encountered at each stage and what the focus of technology is at each stage."

He told reporters that Wanduoduo chose to engage in toy rental, which is both an emerging industry and a start-up, and Chinese users will naturally distrust the company itself. So in terms of technical architecture, we need to be able to respond quickly, quickly trial and error, and flexibly adjust.

At that time, the company decided to make the product in one month. For Shan Zebing, there were only two solutions: one was to find a mature structure and make modifications directly on it; the other was to make a simple result. In the end, Shan Zebing chose the latter.

He chose a three-tier architecture model, and each layer takes scalability into consideration. "Wanduoduo focuses on mobile terminals. WeChat public accounts need a set of pages, and Taobao also needs a set. What we need is a development that can adapt to multiple display forms, using various tools from H***PP to reduce development costs to the minimum." He introduced that he used react.js on the front end, and the product display in the form of pages can be flexibly adjusted without making too many changes to the data.

At the operational level, there are many differences between the leasing model and the e-commerce model. There is no standard warehouse management system on the market. Shan Zebing led the technical team to develop a leasing model warehouse management system from scratch. He gave an example. Customers attach great importance to the hygiene of toys. They set up 11 processes for disinfection in the warehouse, but how to ensure that these disinfection work has been carried out once, rather than just on paper? In the end, they have a code scanning link after each disinfection process. After completing a process, they scan a code. Then, in the background, you can see who picks up the toys, who disinfects them, and who puts the toys on the shelves. Not only is the whole process controllable, but it can also avoid negligence at work, making toys safer and more reliable. In this way, the customer experience is better and Wanduoduo is recognized.

Of course, not all systems are put online after they are 100% perfect, but are modified while in operation. First the inventory is put online, and then the status update is improved, which eventually evolves into detail tracking. Wanduoduo's technical route is becoming more and more complete by constantly adding new components and making repairs.

"Wanduoduo was established not long ago, and the technical principle we consider is that it must have efficiency. In the future, the service components will be more independent, without so much coupling. Since we have not made it into microservices, all services are still in the same system. If necessary, we will split out a single service, such as order service. If the business volume is large, we will split it out separately, which is easier to expand." Shan Zebing particularly emphasized the flexibility of the technical architecture.

He told reporters that in terms of system deployment, Wanduoduo's business is all running in the cloud. They use different containers to load different services in the cloud. Through virtualization technology, these different virtual machines can be easily copied and solved in a few minutes. Take the Wanduoduo advertisement on Sesame Credit as an example. If the traffic increases suddenly, then Shan Zebing needs to adopt a dynamic expansion form.

Of course, he also pointed out that resource elasticity depends on the initial design of the technology. If the initial technical design does not support distribution, then it is impossible to achieve rapid elastic expansion. Wanduoduo's technical architecture supports serving multiple nodes, because containers have ports and resources, which can be placed in warehouses. Once there is a demand for services, they can be quickly copied and migrated. These warehousing, pricing, user accounts, commodities and other application services can be flexibly expanded.

Know the highlights of WOT speech first

On April 14, 2017, the 2017 Global Architecture and Operation Technology Summit hosted by 51CTO will be held at the Beijing Renaissance Hotel. At that time, Shan Zebing will give a keynote speech on "Typical Technical Practices of Internet + Toy Rental" on the technological changes under the sharing economy.

Shan Zebing also revealed some information about the content of the speech, saying that his speech will be divided into three parts.

First, I will introduce to you what the sharing economy is, and then give you a detailed introduction to the background and original intention of toy rental.

Secondly, regarding toy rental, he will talk in detail about the technical difficulties and how to solve them.

***He will list two typical application scenarios. One is how to recommend toys to users, which involves big data technology, such as how to select from a large number of toys and how to dynamically recommend toys of the same age. The other is the warehouse operation scenario, how to build a system from scratch without the support of a typical system.

Reporters are looking forward to his wonderful speech.

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[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]