Accelerating Project Deployment with a Container Platform and Domain Convergence

In the fast‑moving internet era, developers often face lengthy deployment cycles that can take days, involving steps such as domain registration, server provisioning, authorization, and gateway configuration. To shorten these phases, the infrastructure department launched two projects: “Domain Convergence” and a “Container Platform”.

The Container Platform leverages container consistency, unified hardware scheduling, and self‑service gateway and log configuration to enable rapid, hour‑level production releases. It integrates with a Git‑driven DevOps pipeline that automatically builds images, creates Kubernetes deployments, services, and ingresses, and triggers gateway updates for service discovery.

Built on Kubernetes, the platform includes a cloud‑native pipeline engine inspired by Prow, supporting Tag, Push, and Merge events from GitLab. Plugins handle event routing, allowing image builds based on specific tags or commits.

Horizontal Pod Autoscaling provides elastic scaling based on CPU metrics, automatically adjusting replica counts during traffic spikes and releasing resources when load drops.

Log collection is automated using Filebeat daemon sets, aggregating logs from host and container levels, forwarding them to Kafka and an Elasticsearch cluster for centralized analysis.

The Domain Convergence project addresses the proliferation of thousands of domain names by consolidating services under four core domains (app.xueersi.com, app.xesv5.com, api.xueersi.com, api.xesv5.com). Services are identified by URL tags, and the gateway rewrites host, upstream, and URI accordingly, simplifying the onboarding process to just domain filing and upstream creation.

Implementation includes a dynamic routing plugin (dyroute) that extracts tags, rewrites requests, and enforces a path‑pool mechanism to prevent unauthorized access. Additional solutions handle log segregation per service, cookie management to avoid conflicts, cross‑origin policies, and dual‑active deployment across multiple data centers.

Despite challenges such as path‑pool vulnerabilities, log explosion, cookie collisions, CORS restrictions, and resistance to change, the team achieved a functional domain convergence system, reducing deployment time to under an hour and consolidating over 500 domains across the organization.