Evolution of Laiye Technology’s Private Deployment Architecture: From Manual to Automated Cloud‑Native Solutions

Laiye Technology, a B2B SaaS provider, needed to offer on‑premises (private) deployment solutions for clients in regulated industries that could not use public clouds. Since the first private deployment in 2018, the company has delivered and maintained hundreds of customer environments and thousands of PoCs.

In the initial manual deployment phase, the team copied the entire SaaS platform to customer servers, encountering issues such as service packaging, configuration file modifications, Nginx proxy adjustments, custom server‑initialization scripts, and post‑deployment verification, which together required about 70 person‑days per deployment.

To address these pain points, Laiye introduced a series of improvements: semi‑automatic packaging using Excel‑driven tag extraction, Jinja2‑based configuration templating, defined server/environment constraints with automated initialization scripts, and a Golang‑written comprehensive API integration test suite (siber) that cut manual testing time by 90%.

As product lines expanded, the company moved to a standardization phase, fully embracing Kubernetes, modularizing independent business functions, and defining two deployment scenarios—single‑node Docker‑Compose and high‑availability Kubernetes. An internal system was built to select modules and scenarios for automated packaging.

In the automation phase, Laiye further refined the process by abandoning Docker‑Compose for Kubernetes deployments, recording SaaS release tags and configurations in CI, providing rollback‑capable database migration tools, and adding deployment monitoring and post‑sale inspection services. Standards were established for environment (K8s + Istio + Helm), service (uniform ports, paths, stateless operation), and external dependencies (support for customer‑provided middleware and K8s clusters).

Currently, three core products support private deployments: a pre‑check tool that validates customer environments, an automated packaging tool that generates deployment bundles from SaaS release metadata, and an automated deployment tool that executes the installation based on the pre‑check results and selected modules. These tools now cover over 90% of enterprise customers and more than 60% of government and financial clients.

Remaining technical challenges include the diversity of product components, incomplete service standardization, varied customer environments (different OSes, security constraints, and middleware versions), and the need to support additional operating systems and container clouds. Laiye continues to iterate on these issues to deliver faster, more reliable private deployments.