Merge pull request #21 from Sherlock113/master

Add Aqara case study English version

content/en/case/aqara.md

@@ -6,62 +6,107 @@ css: scss/case-detail.scss
 
 section1:
   title: Aqara
-  content: KubeSphere is trusted by various enterprises and organizations to the innovators driving the future of software.
+  content: Aqara is owned by Lumi United Technology, headquartered in Shenzhen, China. Currently, we have over 300 Aqara service providers and 300 smart home showrooms across China. Our users include students, families, working professionals and multi-corporations spanning over 158 countries.
 
 section2:
   listLeft:
     - title: Company Introduction
       contentList:
-        - content: China Minsheng Bank’s main applications were written in C and Java, using traditional architecture. “Our biggest challenge is how to make our traditional legacy applications adaptable to the cloud native environment,” says Zhang Li, who is leader of technology for CMBC’s container cloud. “We want to do distributed applications because in the past we used VMs, and that was quite expensive.”
-        - content: China Minsheng Bank’s main applications were written in C and Java, using traditional architecture. “Our biggest challenge is how to make our traditional legacy applications adaptable to the cloud native environment,” says Zhang Li, who is leader of technology for CMBC’s container cloud. “We want to do distributed applications because in the past we used VMs, and that was quite expensive.”
+        - content: Five years ago, we set out to create a different kind of smart home solution, one that is reliable, eco-friendly, and available to anyone who wants to improve their homes and simplify their daily lives. We believe that building a smart home should not be complex or cost prohibitive, which is why we have over 200 Aqara R&D team members working tirelessly to make the most innovative and highest quality products we could at an affordable cost.
       image: /images/case/aqara-1.jpg
 
-    - title: Challenge
+    - title: Background
       contentList:
-        - content: CMBC brought in Alibaba Cloud to help with its cloud native transformation. The company is now in the process of breaking down and migrating its legacy applications to a Kubernetes platform, as well as developing new microservices on it.
+        - content: From adopting the traditional approach to operation and maintenance (O&M) to using Docker Swarm, to running microservices of Spring Cloud family on Kubernetes, and finally to embracing KubeSphere, Lumi United has come a long way in its endeavor to build its own IoT platform of microservices based on KubeSphere. It has been running KubeSphere and Kubernetes stably in the production environment for more than half a year. In this regard, Lumi United has acquired considerable expertise in microservice application development and application platform O&M. This article is contributed by Wei Hengjun and Xu Yangbing, both of whom are O&M engineers from Lumi United Technology Co., Ltd. Image assets in the article come from the official website of Aqara (https://www.aqara.com/).
       image:
 
-    - title: Solution
+    - title: Traditional Approach to Container Technology
       contentList:
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform, delivery efficiency has increased 3-4x, and resource utilization has doubled. “We are now developing AI-based applications, a blockchain application, and some big data analysis applications on the cloud native platform,” says Zhang.
+        - content: As an O&M engineer with multiple years of experience, Wei Hengjun understands the significance of O&M can never be overstated. At the beginning, he shouldered machines himself to the workplace, struggled to use even a cable clamp in his work, and torpidly installed operating systems. Deploying applications and improving services was never an easy job for him as he might suddenly wake up in the middle of a night just for a series of system warns. All of these have made him who he is now, always working just as a great firefighter.
+        - content: Rapid technological advances have seen us embrace microservices, virtualization, and containerization and cloud native technologies one after another. O&M has also come a long way from manual operation at the beginning to scripts, platforms and now, containers. Initially, O&M only included tens of machines and it has grown to nearly 1,000 machines operated and maintained all by myself. The traditional way of application deployment requires a large amount of time spent in the preparation of configuration files, caution lists and databases every time it is updated. After that, it has to go through a strict review and approval process before it can finally be released. The whole process can take more than half a month. In this Internet era where speed is highly valued, the conventional approach can no longer serve as an efficient solution. Against this backdrop, container technology has emerged to the spotlight of our time.
       image:
 
-    - title: Benefit
+    - title: 'Docker Swarm: Build a Container Orchestration System'
       contentList:
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform, delivery efficiency has increased 3-4x, and resource utilization has doubled. “We are now developing AI-based applications, a blockchain application, and some big data analysis applications on the cloud native platform,” says Zhang.
+        - content: The traditional way of application deployment has haunted managers for so long as the resource utilization remains at a very low level. Against this background, container technology came to my awareness in 2017 and I tried to develop and test environments in my company, which directly resulted in a 50% increase in the resource utilization in the development and test environment. In 2018, we started to use the Docker container orchestration tool, also known as Docker Swarm, in the production environment, which also greatly improved resource utilization.
+        - content: 'There have been twists and turns along the road from the command line to scripts and ultimately to platforms. When I just joined the Lumi family, I found the O&M process was still at a primitive stage. At that time, all I could do was roll up my sleeves to analyze the condition under great pressure. It turned out to be that more than 80% of the microservice architecture was nearly based on memory with low resource utilization, especially CPU and disk storage. The update timeline was also unsatisfactory. All of these were extremely irritating. I determined to truly make a difference. Starting from continuous integration, I built environments with Jenkins and Harbor. I used Docker Swarm for orchestration in testing environments. Ultimately, my efforts paid off as the delivery speed and quality in the testing environment had been greatly improved. Nevertheless, as our business grew exponentially, we noticed that Docker Swarm has some apparent weaknesses:'
+        - content: 1. Inefficient cross-platform support;
+        - content: 2. Internal communications among services will run overtime in the traffic peak period.
       image:
 
     - type: 1
       contentList:
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform
+        - content: Improved Resource Utilization
+        - content: Cross-platform Support
+        - content: Efficient Container Orchestration
 
-
-    - title: Installation Architecture
+    - title: 'A Comprehensive Shift: Docker Swarm to Kubernetes'
       contentList:
-        - content: CMBC brought in Alibaba Cloud to help with its cloud native transformation. The company is now in the process of breaking down and migrating its legacy applications to a Kubernetes platform, as well as developing new microservices on it.
+        - content: The time when the three giants dominated the container orchestration field had past as Kubernetes outpaced Docker Swarm and Mesos as the de facto standard in the area. Therefore, we have steered our business from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes in all respects. In fact, we have been thinking about the shift for several years, especially when we need nearly 1,000 machines for O&M. In this connection, an O&M-friendly and unified container cloud platform is necessary for us in terms of the large-scale deployment of cloud native microservice applications based on Kubernetes.
       image:
 
-    - title: Bussiness introduction
+    - title: 'Model Selection: Embrace KubeSphere'
       contentList:
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform, delivery efficiency has increased 3-4x, and resource utilization has doubled. “We are now developing AI-based applications, a blockchain application, and some big data analysis applications on the cloud native platform,” says Zhang.
+        - content: For the native installation and O&M of Kubernetes, open source solutions from a third party are still required. After careful consideration, Rancher and KubeSphere appeared to be our possible choices.
+        - content: KubeSphere is an open source project initiated by QingCloud and co-developed by multiple enterprises. Compared with Rancher, KubeSphere features a neater user interface and a useful wizard for resource creation. With applications as its kernel, KubeSphere focuses more on the management of Kubernetes cluster resources than Rancher. It provides elegant API ports and integrates common components for development and O&M based on Kubernetes, such as Jenkins, Harbor, Promethues and Apache SkyWalking. Besides, it can be deployed in any infrastructure environment. All of these explain why we have selected the KubeSphere container platform without any hesitation.
+        - content: We have deepened our understanding of different modules in Kubernetes amidst our use of KubeShpere which features great compatibility with multiple cloud platforms and plugins. It has also accelerated our path to put container orchestration of Kubernetes into practice for the production environment. Furthermore, KubeSphere has liberated us from repetitive work facing O&M, reducing the entire cost of application maintenance. It is truly a cutting-edge tool for the O&M team and provides tremendous benefits to Internet companies.
       image:
 
     - type: 2
-      content: 'We are now developing AI-based applications, a blockchain application, and some big data analysis applications'
-      author: 'Katherine Martinez'
+      content: 'KubeSphere is truly a cutting-edge tool for the O&M team and provides tremendous benefits to Internet companies.'
+      author: 'Wei Hengjun'
 
-    - title: Testimonial
+    - title: Deployment Architecture
       contentList:
-        - content: With the Kubernetes platform, delivery efficiency has increased 3-4x, and resource utilization has doubled. “We are now developing AI-based applications, a blockchain application, and some big data analysis applications on the cloud native platform,” says Zhang.
+        - content: Currently, our company is using 7 servers in Tencent Cloud to build the cluster.
+        - content: All stateless services are now running in KubeSphere. Besides, we are using Redis, HBase, Flink, Elasticsearch and MySQL in cloud for stateful data storage services.
+        - content: Our system has been running for over half a year so far without major issues. As a result, we are planning to transfer all stateful and stateless services in the development, testing and production environment of our company to KubeSphere in recent days.
+      image:
+
+    - title: Design Architecture
+      contentList:
+        - content: Let us take a look at the business architecture of Lumi United. Currently nearly all of its overseas services are running on KubeSphere, including Gateway, message sending and pushing, and IFTTT.
+        - content: As our business is mainly based on Java, we provide microservices on the basis of Spring Cloud, manage configurations with Apollo, a distributed system configuration center, and use Eureka for service registration and discovery.
+        - content: With Ribbon and Feign, load balancing and service calling is achieved for microservices. At the same time, we use Hystrix thread poop for isolation, circuit breaking, fallback and traffic limit (sentinel). Springcloud-gateway is used for route scheduling and ELK is used for logging solutions. We use Skywalking as the APM tool for Java microservices distributed system.
+        - content: We use Tencent Cloud for IaaS. Microservices are mainly included in the platform, where most applications are running on KubeSphere. All the sub-devices are linked to Hub devices (Smart Gateway, Smart Socket Gateway, Cameras, etc.) through the Zigbee protocol. Hub devices are connected to our microservice platform through the PRC protocol and the platform provides data for applications (SaaS). Reversely, applications can call the microservice platform through security authentication, which is how smart home devices are controlled. At the service level, we have plugins for tracing analysis, basic monitoring and CI/CD.
+        - content: KubeSphere makes it much easier for us to use Kubernetes, accelerating our step in deploying Kubernetes in the production environment. It has significantly improved our efficiency of business update, making it possible for our R&D engineers to quickly switch among different applications for the deployment and authentication of their features.
+        - content: The IoT microservice platform has been running in our production environment for over half a year so far without major issues. As a result, we are planning to transfer all stateful and stateless services in the development, testing and production environment of our company to KubeSphere in recent days.
+      image:
+
+    - title: Q&A
+      contentList:
+        - content: Do you have any questions as you use KubeSphere?
+        - content: Yes. For example, the release of packages (War/Jar) in the DevOps pipeline was an issue. In the DevOps pipeline, images needed to be packed to the repository while we also needed a solution for the distribution of old business (War) through Ansible.
+        - content: I learned that in DevOps, the pod of the correspond template was pulled through jenkins-agent for the whole process. However, we could not get the Jar package as the Maven pod of Java template exited after the execution.
+        - content: Ultimately, we found that we could find the corresponding template by logging in Jenkins and selecting Manage Jenkins => Configure System. We could set mav package -Dpath=${target_path} in the pipeline and the issue would be solved.
+        - content: What kind of application development platform can meet the need of the smart home industry going forward?
+        - content: It should be a platform equipped with comprehensive features of audit, monitoring, logging, alerting and access assignment, offering an elegant strategy for customized resource scaling. Components should also be customized, elegant and pluggable. The platform itself needs to have a self-check strategy for regular issues. Fortunately, KubeSphere supports all of these functions.
+        - content: What improvements does KubeSphere need to make in functions or designs?
+        - content: 1. The place to switch the language can be more obvious;
+        - content: 2. More integration flexibility of Grafana templates;
+        - content: 3. The Kubernetes node scaling feature can be more simple and it is suggested that it be done in a interface;
+        - content: 4. "copy from" can be supported in pipeline creation;
+        - content: 5. Multi-selection can be supported in pipeline running;
+        - content: 6. Examples can be provided in API documentation; readability can be improved as necessary parameters of many Swagger ports are difficult to understand.
+      image:
+
+    - title: Postscript
+      contentList:
+        - content: We would like to extend our deep gratitude to these two users from Lumi United for sharing their practices of the IoT microservice platform in the smart home industry. This entire journey of Lumi United also represents how some Chinese enterprises work to build their own microservice application platforms.
+        - content: If you are interested in the details of how Lumi United puts its IoT microservice platform into practice and look for further communications with these two engineers, you are welcome to join the KubeSphere open source community. We will invite them someday in the future for an online technical sharing session based on your needs. Besides, you are also welcome to share your own stories related to the deployment of KubeSphere and Kubernetes in our own environment.
+      image:
+
+    - title: About KubeSphere
+      contentList:
+        - content: KubeSphere is an open source container platform built on Kubernetes with applications as its kernel. It is capable of full stack IT automated operation and maintenance, streamlining the DevOps workflow for enterprises.
+        - content: Thousands of enterprises across the globe have been using KubeSphere, including Aqara, Benlai, Sina, Maxnerva, WeBank, VNF Corporation and Radore. KubeSphere provides a user-friendly wizard interface for operation and maintenance with abundant enterprise-grade features available, including Kubernetes resource management, DevOps (CI/CD), application lifecycle management, service mesh, multi-tenant management, monitoring and logging, alert and notification, storage and network management and GPU support. All of these can help enterprises quickly build a strong and feature-rich container cloud platform.
       image:
 
   rightPart:
     icon: /images/case/aqara-detail.jpg
     list:
       - title: INDUSTRY
-        content: Financial Services
+        content: Smart Home
       - title: LOCATION
         content: China
       - title: CLOUD TYPE