The mission of CommonWealth Magazine has always been to help society become more prosperous and glorious, and to continually work toward becoming the best Chinese-language financial media to provide readers with the latest global industrial analyses and financial and technology trends. Under this digital trend, CommonWealth Magazine, which published its first issue 37 years ago, also faces many challenges. How can it transform from a media operation website to a digital service company framework that puts the user experience at the forefront to remain on top of the waves of the times?
There are many aspects to digital transformation. From considering the operational aspect, the technical aspect and the business models — not only is continuing to produce good content an important mission of media, how to make good use of cloud technology and digital tools to create a high-quality online service platform is also something that CommonWealth cares about. Therefore, CommonWealth’s cooperation with iKala Cloud, a service provider of the Google Cloud Platform, is also an important milestone, helping the readers of the “CW digital subscription” and “CW Daily” enjoy more stable reading quality for a better reading experience.
One of the keys to transformation within the digital wave – cooperation with cloud platforms
The most important things about cloud services are expandability and stability. Initially, CW tried to use domestic cloud service providers with basic access functions and cloud tools as the main requirements. However, with the diversification of digital product types and services from CW, CW wishes to provide its users with a safer, higher-quality and more stable reading experience. Therefore, CW started to look for cloud platform supplier partners. After evaluating current mainstream cloud platforms, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) became the final choice of CW because of its three major features: convenience of operation and maintenance, stability, and cost. And as a long-term and well-known partner of Google, iKala Cloud has provided enterprises in different industries with complete and professional cloud architectures and technical services. Therefore, CW and iKala Cloud started planning and implementing a cloud platform.
Sinder, the deputy manager of CW’s Information Technology Department, stated: “There are always technical issues during the actual construction process; iKala Cloud not only provided complete technical advice for the architecture, they also provided education and training according to the needs of CW and shared application cases. They provided us with great help.”
Comprehensive cloud service deployment in preparation for optimizing data analysis
The project started with the construction of the cloud architecture. With the help of the iKala Cloud technical team, the services of CW were quickly migrated to GCP and started operating. Through the Google Compute Engine (VM) and Google Cloud Storage, all of CommonWealth Group’s official websites, subsites of additional products, digital streaming services (MasterCheers, B2B online learning streaming platform), CWLC and CW E-learning Parenting have all been migrated to the GCP platform, and the engineers of CW could access and maintain the data easily. In general, the maintenance time and cost have currently been reduced by at least half
In order to strengthen the monitoring of operation and maintenance, expand functions automatically and have agile development, CW will also gradually start using the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) under the guidance of iKala Cloud, hoping to convert the overall architecture to a microservice model through GKE in the future so that each service can be separated and developed using individual languages and databases. Kubernetes also provides the Service Discovery mechanism so that all services can communicate with one another in order to achieve capabilities for automatic expansion.
The cooperation between CW and iKala Cloud shows that the application of digital tools and technology is one of the keys to help enterprises accelerate their transformation, and it is the direction that many enterprises are still trying to work toward. However, finding the right products and partners gives greater chances of reducing the pain periods of enterprise transformation, while allowing internal colleagues and external markets to have greater confidence in the products.
