Are you experiencing latency issues or networking problems with your China users? Do you have customers or employees based in China that are using your SaaS product and are having problems? These are some common questions I get that I will try to answer in this article.
For many international businesses present in China, latency issues and networking stability problems are often some of the biggest concerns when their customers or employees in China try to access their services based in other countries and regions. There are multiple ways to solve these problems, but in this article, I’m going to focus on a specific product offered by Alibaba Cloud that works very well. It is now a relatively simple and straightforward task to get your mission-critical SaaS applications running smoothly for your Chinese user base!
Introduction to Global Acceleration
Alibaba Cloud has several network products and services which help to resolve networking issues for customers in and outside of China, including Global Acceleration, also known as GA.
GA is a network acceleration product that is designed to accelerate the transmission of network traffic. GA is a network acceleration product that provides a dedicated network connection between two Alibaba Cloud regions. One region is designated as the “service area” and one is the “accelerated area”. The “service area” is the region that hosts the service or application your users need access to, while the “accelerated area” is an Alibaba Cloud region closest to your users (say, in China). The accelerated area will usually expose a public IP (a fundamental concept of GA) to users which they can use to access whatever service is hosted in the “service area”.
Sample Scenario
The following scenario is used as an example. A company has built two on-premises backend servers including Server 1 and Server 2 in the US (Silicon Valley) region and deployed enterprise applications on the servers. Server 1 processes up to 20% of the total workloads. Server 2 processes up to 80% of the total workloads. Unstable network performance may cause issues such as latency, network jitter, and packet loss. This occurs when users from the office in the China (Hong Kong) region connect to the enterprise applications deployed in the US (Silicon Valley) region over the Internet.
To accelerate connections to the backend servers, you can create a GA instance that provides an access point in China (Hong Kong). When users in China (Hong Kong) region send requests to the servers, the access point in the China (Hong Kong) region receives the requests and forwards the requests to the endpoints in the US (Silicon Valley) region through intelligent routing. The system uses the endpoints to distribute 20% of the requests to Server 1 and 80% of the requests to Server 2.
Proof Of Concept (POC)
If you want to determine the feasibility of the service and want to verify the functionality of the Global Accelerator product, we can help you by providing a POC, just contact us. We are experts in building and implementing this kind of cloud solutions in the Alibaba Cloud platform.
