Yantai Shinho Enterprise Food Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Shinho") was founded in 1992. Since its establishment, it has been focusing on the perception of "home" and committed to providing each family with high-quality seasoning and leisure food. After 26 years of continuous development, Shinho has gradually grown from a small company only making soy sauce to a large enterprise producing many kinds of food, with more than ten subsidiaries under a group management mode, providing products including original brewed soy sauce, top-grade high-salt dilute soy sauce, delicious and convenient peanut and chili products, organic food, miso and etc. Familiar brands like "June Fresh", "congbanlv" and "Huangfeihong" are all from Shinho. The core advantages of Shinho are reliable food supply chain, innovative product research and development, high standard production and manufacturing, convenient retail channels, extreme food experience and all-round food education. At present, Shinho's products have been sold to more than 100 countries and regions around the world.
Amazon Web Services cloud platform provides powerful data processing ability, all-round security guarantee as well as support for open source and partner solutions, enabling us to quickly build an IT system with high security, high availability and elastic scalability, which integrates perfectly with business system and making Shinho truly a digital-driven enterprise.
Guo Qingyi
Director of IT & Management Department, Shinho
Challenges
Shinho has 11 product brands and hundreds of products. Every day, more than 40 million families use Shinho products. Every year, hundreds of millions of Shinho products go to thousands of families and become indispensable food for millions of families.
With the expansion of production scale, to better manage production process and improve production efficiency, Shinho has established information management system and started to use ERP system as the internal production management system since 2000. However, as an enterprise that produces and sells fast-moving consumer goods, Shinho must make great efforts in product research and development, marketing, consumer communication and marketing channel management, fully understand consumers' preferences for products, and effectively manage its own or dealers’ sales terminals and services in order to achieve faster and better development. Therefore, Shinho started the journey of digital transformation from the beginning of 2014, using the public cloud platform to build e-commerce platform and dealer and consumer application system. After more than three years of development, the original IT architecture suffered from new problems, unable to perfectly meet the needs of rapid business development. "At that time, we mainly used self-built server and public cloud in a mixed way. When we first used the public cloud service, we did not carry out systematic architecture design, resulting in the lack of business architecture elasticity and security risks. In terms of self-built server, due to the lack of agility in resource configuration and change, we could not match the changes of business well, and could not bring good experience to users, ” said Guo Qingyi, Director of Information Technology and Management Department of Shinho. On the other hand, multi-brand and all-round business development puts forward higher requirements for large-scale data analysis and processing. Thus, Shinho's traditional data warehousing system faced the challenge of large-scale computing while the shortage of resources and talents also gets in the way of self-building big data platform. In order to meet these challenges, Shinho carefully assessed various solutions, comprehensively considered various factors such as products, services, security, premium support and so on, and finally chose to reconstruct the whole system architecture based on Amazon Web Services cloud platform, migrating the original system to Amazon Web Services cloud platform as a whole, and carrying out overall big data strategic planning based on Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
Why Amazon Web Services?
The strong big data analysis and processing ability of Amazon Web Services cloud platform, comprehensive data protection, openness and rich partner solutions are the main reasons for Shinho to choose Amazon Web Services. "When we decide to reconstruct the whole IT system, we expect to make the technology platform quickly match the needs of the business and build an IT system with high security, high availability and elastic scalability to achieve the best integration of IT system and business system, thus truly making Shinho a digital driven enterprise, ” said Guo Qingyi.
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Big data analysis and processing ability
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Security
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Openness and rich partner solutions
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Big data analysis and processing ability
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In Shinho's business system, the construction of HUB is quite essential, which can make the underlying data of each business system interconnected.
Amazon Web Services cloud platform provides rich functions to support the construction of HUB, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EMR, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RedShift and other functions that cover data storage, security protection, analysis, processing and so on. "We specially value the rich functions provided by Amazon Redshift, which greatly improves the performance of HUB," said Guo Qingyi. Amazon redshift is a fast and fully-managed PB level data warehousing, which allows users to use existing business intelligence tools to analyze all data in an easy and economical way. It uses column storage technology to improve I / O efficiency, and can run queries in parallel across points of presence, greatly improving query performance. Amazon Redshift also provides custom JDBC and ODBC drivers that allow users to use a variety of familiar SQL clients. With the data warehouse architecture of Amazon Redshift, users can also automatically handle most of the common management tasks, including the pre-configuration, configuration and monitoring of cloud data warehousing. Data will be automatically backed up to Amazon S3 in a continuous and incremental way. In terms of data security, Amazon Redshift has built-in security protection function. Users can protect static data and data in transmission, and also use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for isolation of clusters. All API calls, connection attempts, queries and cluster changes will be logged and auditable.
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Security
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As Shinho belongs to fast-moving consumer goods industry, Customer data and sales data have a great impact on business development while for HUB, data persistence and security are priority factors. As Amazon Web Services cloud platform not only provides Amazon VPC, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) for other security management functions, users can configure firewall rules according to their needs to ensure that data will not be accessed by unauthorized means. More importantly, "never touch customer data" is Amazon Web Services's commitment to all customers, which is also an important reason for Shinho to migrate from other public cloud platform to Amazon Web Services.
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Openness and rich partner solutions
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Amazon Web Services cloud platform gives full support for many third-party products and open source products, which provides users with better openness. "When building a new system, we not only use the functions provided by Amazon Web Services cloud platform, but also use third-party products such as Fortinet and Talend according to our own needs. The support of Amazon Web Services cloud platform for these products makes it easy for us to realize the integration of multiple products, ” said Guo Qingyi.
In addition, the professional service of Amazon Web Services is also an important reason for Shinho to choose Amazon Web Services cloud platform. "As a traditional enterprise, we will encounter many technical challenges in the process of turning to cloud platform, while the professional service teams of Amazon Web Services can provide us with great help in system architecture design, data migration and etc., ” said Guo Qingyi.
Achievements
In January, 2018, Shinho began to carry out system migration and the construction of HUB architecture. In the early stage, it investigated the status quo of infrastructure, business system and etc.; then it isolated the production environment from the test environment, deployed based on the third-party tower security network architecture, connected the self-built servers and other public clouds with the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, and standardized the image, monitoring, backup, naming specification, authority and so on. "In this process, the professional service teams of Amazon Web Services gave us great help. With the help of the Amazon Web Services consultant, we integrated the original business system architecture with the existing services of Amazon Web Services, designed a reasonable architecture and made changes to the business system. First, we conducted business and performance integration tests in the test environment, and then gradually deployed several systems to the production environment, ” said Guo Qingyi. The same is true for the implementation of HUB project. After the investigation and research of business status and technical exploration, the on-premise data was uploaded to Amazon Web Services cloud platform; and then combined with Talend ETL tool, the data flow from database to Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift was tested for pressure and production environment, and adjusted appropriately in combination with BDT layer and later modeling requirements. Finally, the first phase of migration task was successfully completed in March 2018.
At present, the businesses running on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform include Shinho's front-end application services and new business services based on the Amazon Web Services products including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon EMR, Amazon RedShift, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Data Transfer, Amazon Lambda, Amazon SDK, Amazon VPC, Amazon IAM and Amazon Web Services professional services. Figure 1 is a diagram for the technical architecture of Shinho’s big data platform based on Amazon Web Services cloud platform, and Figure 2 is a schematic diagram for Shinho’s production network.
Migrating the previous business system to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform brings Shinho many benefits. First of all, with the help of the professional service teams of Amazon Web Services, the technical architecture of the whole system is replanned. The infrastructure design is more reasonable than before, and some single point applications are deployed in the cluster mode. A single point failure trigger mechanism is established, and the application availability is improved. Second, after migrating to Amazon Web Services cloud platform, Shinho takes advantage of Amazon Redshift and other cloud services, improves the availability and security of HUB, realizes the high availability and scalability of data warehousing, which makes the underlying data of each business system easy to use, and provides strong support for business development through call and analysis, thus helping Shinho move forward to "digital driven enterprise". In addition, the use of Amazon Web Services cloud service also improves the security of Shinho's entire business system. The previously used static Access ID Access Key call mode is changed to the scheme of calling the IAM role after using Amazon Web Services, which improves the security level and at the same time, a stricter security mechanism is established by using Amazon VPC, Amazon IAM and other security components. In the future, Shinho's previous business system will be migrated to Amazon Web Services cloud platform as planned. And it will make full use of the automatic management function and open source technology provided by Amazon Web Services cloud platform, establish DevOps platform, continuously improve management efficiency and optimize cost.
More Information
To learn how to get insight into customer needs from data and meet them quickly, visit Data Lake and Analysis on Amazon Web Services page for details.
For more solutions for the food manufacturing industry, visit the Manufacturing page for details.
