Introduction

China Literature Limited ("China Literature" or "the Company") is a pioneer of the online literature market and operates a leading online literature platform in China. The Company’s shares were listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code 0772 on November 8, 2017.

China Literature is a market leader as measured by the scale and quality of writers, readers and literary content offerings. As of June 30, 2019, the Company had 7.8 million writers and 11.7 million online literary works, covering over 200 genres and reaching millions of readers. During 1H19, the Company had on average 217.1 million monthly active users on its platform and its self-operated channels on partner distribution platforms.

The Company owns nine major branded products, among which QQ Reading serves as a flagship product and is a unified mobile content aggregation and distribution platform, while the other products focus more specifically on individual genres and their respective fan bases. China Literature’s blue-chip shareholder and strategic partner, Tencent, provides the Company with exclusive content distribution access via its suite of leading mobile and Internet products, including Mobile QQ, QQ Browser, Tencent News, Weixin Reading and Tencent Video. The Company also licenses the content to third-party partners such as Baidu, Sogou, JD.com and Xiaomi Duokan for distribution, thus further broadening its user reach.

China Literature also monetizes its vast and proprietary content library through online paid reading and content adaptations into various entertainment formats. The content library provides an enduring runway of high quality literary work and lays a solid foundation of the Company’s future business development. China Literature further expanded its content capabilities downstream by acquiring New Classics Media, a renowned TV series, web series and film producer in China in 2018.

Challenge

1. Early single-access architectures were problematic in terms of fault tolerance. Failure of the access layer/data center node may result in full service unavailability.
2. The back-end service technology stack used to have .Net and Oracle storage. There are hundreds of Windows Server system servers. And there are also two languages that are widely used in the network literature industry, such as JAVA and PHP. It is necessary to unify the technical architecture. Otherwise, the cost of docking during development is too high.
3. The company has integrated many readings from different sources. There are also many different channels. There will be a lot of repetitive work in the development process.
4. Business is growing and the number of calls per day is huge. Nearly 60 kinds of business services, for the conventional development and deployment methods, will inevitably cost a lot of cost for coding, deployment and operation and maintenance. “China Literature has grown rapidly in recent years, and now MAU has exceeded 190 million. In this case, the Spring Festival has a red envelope activity, QPS is about 100,000, and the core engine data has reached 100,000. In order to support this The magnitude of how to make a high-performance, high-concurrency architecture is a challenge."

Solution

In response to the above problems, the technical staff of China Literature believes that the company needs a distributed, high-performance RPC architecture with a micro-service governance platform. Utilizing the idea of microservices, abstracting common components eliminates the cost of repetitive coding. The company adheres to the concepts of rapid construction, common development, continuous integration, rapid iteration and efficient operation, and unifies the architecture into the TARS framework. With TARS's experience in processing massive requests, it improves the ability to handle high concurrency and prepares for future business expansion.

Impact

Fu Xujun, vice president of China Literature, said that “TARS. Through continuous technical exchanges and gradual structural evolution, it solved the problems of China Literature in service discovery, intelligent scheduling, load balancing, disaster tolerance, three-dimensional monitoring and visual operation management. China Literature has achieved good results in terms of technical architecture, which is very consistent with our expectations. The research and development efficiency has been greatly improved, the operation and maintenance cost has also been significantly reduced, and the stability of the overall system has achieved excellent results. ”

At the same time, TARS has a very good performance in research and development and operation. For the APP of China Literature, it has resisted 515 book fan festivals, millions of red envelopes, and New Year's Eve Q online linkages and other activities of over 100 million users.

“What impressed me the most is that although TARS is a platform that has been used internally by Tencent and has gradually become open source, it provides us with an enterprise-level service. The technical team of China Literature uses open source technology. At the same time, I also made a lot of contributions to foreign open source."

Unified technical architecture to address business integration

China Literature was established in 2015 and was formed by the integration of Tencent Literature and the original Shanda Literature. Because it consists of the technical architecture of many sub-brand companies, it is necessary to unify the technical architecture.

Fu Xujun said: "The first challenge we face is to unify the technical architecture. This is our first problem to be solved." The Group's back-end service technology stack used to have .Net and Oracle storage. Hundreds of Windows Server system servers, of course, there are two languages ​​that are widely used in the network literature industry, such as JAVA and PHP. Therefore, adhering to the concept of rapid construction, common development, continuous integration, rapid iteration, and efficient operation, the unified work of the structure has been carried out smoothly.

Technical decision maker experience, microservice architecture selection

Because of the remote calling feature of RPC, it has inherent advantages for the horizontal expansion of communication and computing power between multiple systems. The early architecture of China Literature was a single-access chimney architecture. If an access layer failure or a data center node failure occurs, the entire service will be unavailable.

In response to the selection of new technology architecture, Fu Xujun stated: "China Literature needs a distributed computing framework, a high-performance RPC architecture and a microservices governance platform. After doing a lot of technical architecture selection, it finally chose Tencent's TARS. Through continuous technical exchanges and gradual structural evolution, it solved the problems of China Literature in service discovery, intelligent scheduling, load balancing, disaster tolerance, three-dimensional monitoring and visual operation management. The results have been very good, very consistent with our expectations, the research and development efficiency has been greatly improved, the operation and maintenance costs have also been significantly reduced, and the stability of the overall system has also achieved excellent results."

Abstract public components to improve R&D efficiency

China Literature has developed rapidly in recent years, providing many different reading channels for different readers, and providing different cooperation methods for different partners. As a result, many different solutions are formed, and it is very difficult to make a separate architecture for each solution.

Fu Xujun said: "China Literature started with the content of online texts such as reading and QQ reading. Later, it made a lot of subdivisions, for example, for female readers, for secondary readers and overseas readers. Channel. There are also many cooperations with genuine paper books, such as providing content for WeChat reading, such as "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings" are published through reading. Although these programs are very different, they have many public Components can be extracted, such as billing, accounts, remuneration, anti-cheating of comments, etc. There are probably hundreds of parts, so slowly extract them to achieve better iterations, in order to improve R & D efficiency. ”

High performance and high concurrency, serving massive users

“China Literature has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and now MAU has exceeded 190 million. In this case, the Spring Festival has a red envelope activity, QPS is about 100,000, and the core engine data has reached 100,000. Supporting such an order of magnitude, how to make a high-performance and high-concurrency architecture is a challenge.” Fu Xujun added.

The daily call value of China Literature business is huge. Nearly 60 kinds of business services, for the conventional development and deployment methods, will inevitably cost a lot of cost for coding, deployment and operation and maintenance. It is based on Tencent's TARS architecture, which has excellent performance in R&D and operation. It has resisted 515 book fan festivals, millions of red envelopes, and New Year's Eve Q online links for APP of China Literature. Level of user activity.

Technology rewards the community and accelerates open source development

Fu Xujun said at the end: "What impressed me the most is that although TARS is a platform that has been used internally by Tencent and then slowly becomes open source, it provides us with an enterprise-level service. In addition to using open source technology, the team also made a lot of contributions to external open source. For example, in the support of multi-language, the original TARS lacks support for the PHP language, and China Literature is relatively thorough in the accumulation of PHP language development. So we helped TARS to do PHP language extensions. At the same time, we also had in-depth sharing and communication with TARS technical team last year. In the future, reading will make more technical feedback to the open source community and accelerate the entire open source community. development of."