How Alibaba’s Light Store Uses Serverless FaaS to Boost Front‑End Efficiency

Background

Light Store is a new, exploratory business within the Alibaba ecosystem that requires rapid iteration with minimal manpower. Serverless, with its "only focus your business" principle, became essential for enabling low‑cost, fast‑fail development.

R&D Mode Upgrade

The team surveyed internal and external Serverless practices, selected appropriate technologies, and implemented a sidecar‑and‑bottle based architecture combined with a unified FaaS SDK to improve development efficiency and ensure stability.

Technical Status

Various business units have built Serverless foundations covering infrastructure, development models, orchestration, and stability. These platforms (referred to as C‑platform and G‑platform) provide FaaS capabilities for both B‑side and C‑side services.

Technology Selection

After comparing C‑platform and G‑platform, the G‑platform was chosen because its bottle capability offers richer client‑side solutions and a simpler, higher‑performance stack.

Light Store FaaS System

The system, codenamed "DaiMao", consists of three layers:

Base Capability Layer : API aggregation, data mapping, function fallback, gray‑release, etc.

Atomic Service Layer : Encapsulated middle‑platform services such as product, merchant, store, coupon, and UI components.

FaaS‑SDK : Provides platform adaptation, multi‑level caching, logging standards, lock mechanisms, and database wrappers.

SideCar & Bottle Architecture

In the G‑Serverless platform, each pod runs two containers: a sidecar handling request discovery, routing, and protocol parsing, and a function container executing Node.js runtime code. Communication between containers uses gRPC, and business code invokes rich client or middleware services via the bottle‑SDK.

Capability Map

Middleware capabilities include message queues (MetaQ), operations (Switch, Diamond), services (HSF, mtop, HTTP), caches (Tair, Redis), databases (Cloud RDS), and schedulers (SchedulerX). Middle‑platform capabilities cover product, merchant, store, coupon, label, shop, and UI components.

Public Layer Features

The public layer (code‑named "LingYang") offers common services such as custom delivery (integrating Alibaba’s internal ad platform), fallback mechanisms for high‑availability APIs, and aggregation of page‑level and interface‑level data to improve performance and enable gray releases.

Integrated Development Mode

By combining the public layer, atomic services, SDK, and sidecar‑bottle architecture, the team unified mini‑program development and FaaS deployment. Front‑end code can directly call FaaS functions without HTTP requests, and both front‑end and back‑end assets are built, released, and versioned together, dramatically reducing coordination and integration effort.

As the business matures, the Light Store FaaS system continues to evolve, solidifying a full‑stack, low‑cost development workflow.

Stability and Standard Development Chain

A standardized development pipeline defines measures for each lifecycle stage (development, pre‑release, release, post‑release) to ensure reliability and stability.

Future Outlook

The team will continue to refine the Light Store FaaS foundation and explore best practices for integrated development to further boost efficiency.