Smooth Cloud Experience Delivers Data Dividends for iReader

iReader Technology is one of the world’s leading digital reading platforms, providing users with a high-quality mobile reading experience. The company has launched a series of products of diversified content, such as iReader Ebooks, iReader Comics, iReader Magazine, etc.

The industry leader has also introduced innovative technologies such as 3D simulation page turning and eye-protection mode and developed advances in document recognition, conversion, and layout.

Growing demands on data

With a focus on the digital reading field for a decade, iReader has accumulated huge volumes of operation data. As a result, ensuring smooth system upgrades and expansions, and making full use of data are necessary.

iReader needed to handle bidirectional data to track which books a reader likes, and who else likes those books, which requires two main tables in a database: one for readers and one for books. Comparing these two tables requires a versatile index that can manage unstructured data effectively.

Different iReader apps also need to adapt to multiple scenarios and operational activities in which data is constantly updated and changed, making it difficult for traditional relational databases to handle. In addition, with the business growth across iReader apps, the data fields are constantly expanding, and the data volumes reached terabytes. These huge volumes of high-concurrency data require synchronous upgrades and management.

Significant improvements in service performance

In April 2022, iReader transformed its cloud-native core services which significantly improved R&D efficiency and ensured service availability, resulting in service performance improvement of over 30%.

iReader chose ApsaraDB for MongoDB for several reasons: the document structure allows flexible field expansion and bidirectional data queries while sharding and multi-node disaster tolerance are supported to achieve massive data storage and availability. Transaction support enables multiple document transaction types, while support from Alibaba Cloud provides a solid foundation for future hybrid cloud architectures.

Continuously enhanced capabilities

ApsaraDB for MongoDB is delivering benefits across iReader’s operation. iReader migrated all its transaction statements from HBase to MongoDB, constructing a financial sharing center to remove bottlenecks and effectively manage the growing volume of transaction data.

Each iReader user has a personal cloud ‘bookshelf’ where they can add or delete books. Relationships between books and people are intricate and complex, and MongoDB enables the dynamic management of this constantly changing data. It also manages a multi-transaction, multi-document at the back end of the platform that allows book reviews and personal comments to be uploaded for each book, chapter, or sentence.

ApsaraDB for MongoDB brings significant values in terms of efficiency, cost reduction, and stability. iReader can now focus on enhancing its capabilities and operational efficiency. MongoDB provides stable data elasticity and has cut operational costs by over 10% since the system was introduced.