SaaS: another manifestation of platform commercialization capability

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Zhongtai and platform are very popular , In fact, Zhongtai is more about the organizational wall dimension , Our multiple domain capabilities are organized together to form a middle ground , So the first thing to do is to divide and merge organizations . As more and more people are involved in China Taiwan Affairs , Now the understanding and positioning of the middle ground are also more inclined to a certain specific and specific ability convergence . For example, the trading center , Mainly around the user selection , Place an order , Pay the link . Or after-sales middle office , It covers the period from the user's order to the performance of the contract b、c End multiple links , For example, when it comes to evaluation 、 Scoring 、 refund 、 Return and other links and functions . It's rare to call it “ E-commerce middle platform ”, Because the plates are too big , The better middle ground still revolves around a certain direction , For example, Alibaba's middle office is more focused on trading , Whether it's Taoxi , Or is the non - Taotao system's in and out Taos are all around the core of trading .

Speaking of the platform, in fact, it is a precipitation of the ability of a specific direction under the middle stage , The platform is more inclined to the precipitation of a specific capability domain , Because there is “ flat ” word , The corresponding is to flatten several chimney like architectures with similar capabilities to form a platform , The process of chimney to platform is designed to be layered , What are generic capabilities , What are business capabilities , What are business capabilities , What are technical capabilities , What are open capabilities, etc .

As a matter of fact, being a middle office is more a political product of senior managers' tearing , Because the purpose of Zhongtai is to reduce cost and increase efficiency , For example, communication cost , How is it convenient , So we need to do some team and department Integration . The relationship between the platform and the technicians is closer , First of all, you have to build a platform , You need to have platform thinking , Analyze the status and future of the business , And then embodied in your platform system design , Some need precipitation and integration , No need to reserve expansion capacity . At the operational level, we need to undertake the operational needs of different departments , Need to do a set of suitable for different business background, students easy to use 、 Easy to use operation management platform . As mentioned in the previous article, a solution for commercialization of platform system business capability is APAAS, Today I would like to introduce another form SAAS.

What is the core of your platform's business capabilities ？

Want to do SAAS The first question to ask yourself is positioning , You this SAAS What is the core of the platform ？ What is his position ？ When you want to understand the problem , The next plan is around this “ Business core ” To do it derived from .

For example, there are SAAS It's about CRM Realized , Some of them are buying, selling and storing , There are customer service orders , The first thing to think about is .

Think about it “ Business core ” After this question, we need to sort out the three unifications , Such as ： Model unification , Data unification , Unified operation .

The unified meaning here is to further converge the personalized requirements of various business parties you see 、 abstract 、 analysis 、 Precipitation forms a unified business model . We also need to abstract the data behind the model , In the hope that it can be applied to different businesses , The advantage of this is , The downstream of our data can use a set of data model to do intelligent actions , For example, there are too many data forks in the upper business model , The downstream data services will certainly need to do a variety of data adaptation, which is extremely expensive . The next step is to start the abstraction of productization or business capability , The personalization of different businesses often lies here , But the operation management system we delivered still hopes to achieve unified operation , In this way, the standards used by all operating students can be drawn up , Reduce learning costs , We should really reduce costs and increase efficiency .

With the stratification of capabilities, we will talk about the closing of some capabilities beyond the core business capabilities , Actually, it's a set of micro services , The service of the car , Capabilities that have nothing to do with business capabilities sink . For example SAAS There are bound to be some accounts 、 Sign in 、 register 、 authentication 、 Tenant 、 Verification and other functions , These can be separated from the corresponding services independently , In the way of micro service SAAS Service provides service .

The above is about technology or architecture , Actually do SAAS It's easy to overlook the ability to operate the back office , For example, a complete SAAS After the platform system is made , Need to meet different packages 、 Different levels of business needs , We need to have a product definition platform , It helps us to abstract different package definitions after functional things are finished , To provide different products for different businesses to use , In this way, we may also need to serve the market platform and open the platform to connect with the existing software products of merchants .

The new retail SAAS product

With all that said, let's take a new retail SAAS Examples of products .

Retail is a very popular concept now . What exactly is new retail ？ How to understand ？ From my point of view, I would like to tell you about our understanding of new retail and how to do it .

Let's have a look first SAAS Online retailers , Why should we talk about e-commerce when we talk about new retail , All our systems depend on the e-commerce system , The bottom is our e-commerce system , Just showing different forms . Whether it's tmall or , Are you hungry under tmall or HEMA Xiansheng , Various forms , And now the unmanned container of the unmanned retail system is also the form of display of our retail system .

The whole e-commerce architecture is divided into several levels .

At the bottom is the ability of a middle ground , For example, users 、 Merchant 、 payment 、 Card voucher 、 members 、 data 、 logistics , These are all interlinked , There's a lot in common .

Up there is the e-commerce system , It contains merchandise 、 Price 、 stock 、 Order , When it comes to new retail, there are more stores 、 Multi warehouse, etc .

Then there is the marketing system , There is a full discount 、 members 、 Cards, coupons, these things . The marketing system is the business system , The business system is B Terminal , also C End user system .

Users log in to your system to do something , What's relevant to you .

Then there is the system of transaction process .

Further forward is to show the user , Whether the page is the home page or , The advertisement page is also good , A lot of classified pages are good , Belongs to the navigation system .

The top layer is the channel layer , The official account is also good , Small program is also good ,H5 Good , Baidu applet , It's all the same , For us, as long as your infrastructure is the same , The channel at the top can be any point . The above is our whole e-commerce Architecture .

You see how important layering is , Many technologists simply understand layering as decoupling , In fact, layering is more about gathering capabilities 、 Convergence forms standardization , Layering is the action of standardizing the capabilities of this layer .

We have learned about the capabilities of the traditional e-commerce system , So let's take a look at the changes in the new retail system ？

A small circle represents an online mall , New retail is made up of many small circles . Besides the business itself , There are many sub stores below , Compared with the online mall system we said , Our new retail has a lot of different features to show .

For example, there may be one store and one mall , Each store has its own 、 Complete mall function , Support direct marketing 、 Join in a variety of stores .

E-commerce online mall is an online scene , So far, we support a lot of offline scenes , shoppers 、 Bill 、 Cash register 、 Self mention 、 Offline payment .

Now it's time for new retail , Connect online and offline , Unified scale , The price is the same , Support stores to share warehouse 、 Independent warehouse 、 Cloud warehouse and other inventory systems .

Offline is the purchase, sale and storage system , It's about the demand of the supply chain .

There are many ways to process orders now , It was online orders before , I deliver goods offline . New retail has a front end warehouse , Orders can be sent to different offline stores , Users can bring up . It also supports different strategies , Assign orders to different stores .

Finally, businesses + Multi store system . Compared with the online shopping mall system , Great changes have taken place in the functional system , In the process , Business architecture design is a difficulty . Especially in the mall to do a good job in the design of retail . If the store system has been taken into account . This is a very central point , So your system design is half done .

Next, let's look at the commodity architecture in the core business architecture of e-commerce system .

Online in the e-commerce commodity system , Online shopping mall involves that goods are online , There may be B2C The order of , Points order , Goods and SKU. If anyone who has done e-commerce knows these models .

The label is also a universal label , Here's the active inventory , The latter price is uniform . What will retail look like ？ There will be a lot more , At this time, commodities have been added to offline products and multi store products .

And then there are the pieces and the combinations , If we do the warehouse system , I have a coke + Sprite combines to form a commodity . I can also sell a coke and a sprite , Here's the concept of combination .

And the relationship between stores and Commodities , Purchase, sales and inventory are related to multi warehouse, as we said before . When designing the whole product model , It is required to consider offline retail when doing online shopping mall , Design the model well .

The bigger the system is, the more consideration should be given to the design of the whole model system . Just spread out the bottom dot , We didn't spread out the dots above . All the commodity related points , We use the commodity to connect the whole system , Marketing system 、 Navigation system 、 Trading system and order system , And live 、 Customer service and so on . This requires that you have a very strong middle ground ability .

Next, let's talk about the inventory system , Online simple inventory system only has ordinary inventory and active inventory . When it comes to new retail, the whole system is totally different .

Purchase, sale and deposit system , And the whole warehouse system is not only wired, but also offline , Share cloud warehouse 、 Independent warehouse 、 Warehouse 、 Store warehouse relationship and so on .

Take the example of men's clothing , They want to make Shanghai 100 Each store generates a virtual warehouse , All stores are integrated into a virtual warehouse to place orders , All the customers are in the virtual warehouse , This is the concept of cloud warehouse . This requires us to take the whole warehouse into account when we do online shopping mall . These dimensions should be considered at the beginning of the design .

Then there is the design of marketing capabilities , Like the price , Goods have cost price and market price , And the marketing price at the time of the event .

for instance , Yes 300 The price of piece Marketing , front 100 Yes 100 Yuan , And then it comes down to 150 Yuan , Back 100 Yes 200 Yuan . I'm going to set off a marketing campaign , Support stepped prices , Price has effective time and expiration time . The system is simple , But start by thinking about what the whole business looks like .

Let's talk about payment architecture design .

In fact, payment is an area with a lot of knowledge , Although we all know about paying , But if you do a payment platform architecture, the challenge is great .

For example, in the eyes of users, I'm done with online wechat payment . From the business point of view, there are many different points .

There are many scenarios in the whole payment system , Like paying in installments 、 Online and offline hybrid payments 、 Multiple consolidated payment and automatic refund of repeated payment, etc . The way of payment is wechat payment 、 Alipay 、 Online banking and so on . If the whole architecture is , It's also about income and expenditure details 、 Revenue profile 、 Revenue trends and so on .

There are other business capabilities , We have a lot of third-party payment companies that we work with , They need to take advantage of their affordable integration capabilities . For example, a business comes in , I took a sum of money , May be given to A How much will be given to B How much , How much do I have to pay for each level in distribution , How do you divide the money , How to call the specific account number , It's also a complicated point . Our entire payment system already supports these things , The whole architecture takes a lot of things into account .

Next we'll place an order , Orders and commodities are often seen as the core of the trading system .

For retail, there are all kinds of orders , It's not just the common online order, and then I deliver the goods , This is a physical order , There are actually a lot of virtual orders , Points orders and so on . How to make such a huge order system ？

We will place each order according to its delivery type 、 The delivery method is unified . The way virtual orders interact is different . There are many levels of orders for us , Business order 、 Marketing orders 、 Basic orders and so on . For example, a group order , Five people in a group , How to control the order flow of the group ？ Can I make periodic orders ？ So the whole system is very big . I

It's a periodic recharge order system that's different , So the order system is also a very complex system . If for C For end users , Different orders will help me integrate . Let's look at the order types of meituan reviews , My meal list today , Top up list , Various types of single , It's all integrated into your order .

There are many different things in our whole order , There is a bargain for marketing orders 、 Second kill 、SDP Order , There will be integrated search engines carrying these things . There are also database middleware and other systems supporting huge payment .

So layering and domain modeling , And boundary partition is very important for the design of a large complex system , If it doesn't work well here , After the rules of the system change and expand , Your system will explode .

Let's talk about the order center , All orders will be received , Finally, the basic order is placed , From the basic order unified external presentation of things , Put orders together in series .

Only when the e-commerce system is really realized can we have a profound understanding of it . In addition, you can learn from this point that we do new retail , We talked about the whole thing before AAS system , He talked about the new retail from online mall to online and offline multi store system , Then we talked about the evolution of e-commerce core areas .

The core of the whole e-commerce is to start with commodities , The product is designed , The whole transaction process takes what the goods need , Or I order delivery needs to use all the things carried in the order , When the order is finished , What's left is that we take the route of subsequent delivery , There are different delivery routes for different orders .

Support services

well SAAS Products or architectures can support more than a dozen solutions , Hundreds of packages .

The above is the architecture and design of core e-commerce or new retail , Around the core architecture, there is a bunch of supporting systems , For example, the authority management system , For example, the unified data processing system , Various monitoring and alarm systems , Continuous integration system , Asset management system , Log analysis system , Virtualization and container scheduling system , Big data storage system , Traffic gateway 、waf Security and other systems .

At the bottom of the infrastructure is the infrastructure layer 、 Message middleware 、ES、 cache 、 Flow computation .

Above the infrastructure layer is the service governance layer , That's the most important thing , There's a configuration center 、dubbo、 Registry Center 、 Service management and so on .

There are also basic tools , Like the media center 、 Short domain name 、 Big data services 、IP Service etc. .

At the top is the specific business layer , There's new retail 、 Shop 、 MicroStation, etc . On the left is CAT The monitoring system , This needs to be developed over a long period of time , It has been able to meet the needs of large-scale business monitoring support .

And the global call chain system , This is a must for big Internet companies , After a lot of requests go wrong , An interface is embodied on the outside , Through hundreds of interface calls below , The problem can be found by the global call chain system .

Last

From the perspective of application architecture , A lot of things look simple , But you have to abstract a lot of different scenarios and do a lot of different applications .

We can simply take a look at , For example, the general log , There are a lot of general logs in the back office , Our interface is unified and annotated +AOP. Planning can't be defined , There are so many things coming out . When people change a lot , There are different treatments , How to ensure that these things are clear to everyone at first sight . General permission and risk control interception 、 Sub database, sub table and so on , A lot of is apidoc and http register, There will also be corresponding dynamic registration .

For the retail system , You need to be more efficient , The most important thing is the formulation of many specifications of application architecture and what business processing methods are used in different scenarios , When we do a larger system in the future , You can also take these points into account , Then you will find that the concept and perspective of the whole architecture design are very different .

Recently I heard a sentence ：

Sounds like any man-made rocket is possible , It's not . Many times a project fails is not a software engineering failure , Design failure , The question of resources , Lack of ability , It's a more common reason , Software engineering is just a back burner .