How Serverless Transformed ICBU’s Cross‑Border Supply Chain: A Deep Dive

1. Serverless Trend

Serverless has become a hot topic in recent years, comparable to the SOA and micro‑service revolutions. Despite the hype, many still lack a clear understanding of how to implement it, leading to a situation where everyone claims to be using Serverless without real experience.

According to CNCF, Serverless = FaaS + BaaS. In practice, beyond the standard FaaS, many implementations run additional services (EaaS) on top of the FaaS infrastructure.

2. ICBU Cross‑Border Supply Chain Web Architecture Evolution

Alibaba.com’s oldest business solves B2B cross‑border trade information asymmetry and provides transaction and fulfillment services. The cross‑border supply‑chain platform integrates customs, foreign exchange, tax refunds, logistics, and finance for SMEs, aiming for an “external‑trade big collaboration” vision.

In the early “Webx” era, front‑end and back‑end were tightly coupled, causing collaboration, efficiency, and quality problems, and the technology stack became outdated, limiting team growth and developer happiness.

To address these issues, Egg was introduced as a BFF (Backend‑For‑Frontend) layer. Although the team lacked Node experience, the mature Egg/Node ecosystem allowed a smoother transition, improving collaboration, development experience, and enabling front‑end teams to act as product managers and even initiate commercial projects.

The BFF upgrade also introduced operational overhead, as front‑end engineers now handle some DevOps tasks and Node‑based glue logic, which consumes resources.

3. Serverless Practice and Supporting Engineering, Monitoring

Traditional Node applications require building, pushing, and pulling container images. In contrast, FaaS deploys code snippets that are uploaded to OSS and executed by a Runtime on Kubernetes, enabling rapid deployment (often under a minute) and automatic scaling.

A standard function consists of a JavaScript entry file (business logic) and an f.yml configuration that specifies the Runtime, HTTP/HSF exposure, etc.

Beyond basic configuration, a special Layer mechanism extends Runtime capabilities, allowing Egg/Koa/Express to run within FaaS, achieving up to 80% compatibility with existing micro‑applications.

Engineering closed‑loop processes (creation, branch, pre‑release, gray release, rollback) are required to ensure stable and reliable function delivery.

Monitoring extends beyond CPU/memory to function‑level metrics such as process restarts, broker reconnections, and business‑level tracing (user, time, function, request, response). The “Bian Que” platform provides business‑oriented alerts and rapid diagnosis via Trace‑Id.

4. Phase Results & Outlook

Adopting EaaS and transitioning from BFF to Serverless has yielded significant cost reduction and efficiency gains (data anonymized). Stability has also improved, with higher availability and lower resource waste.

Beyond the metrics, Serverless empowers front‑end teams to own more business logic, lowers the barrier for innovation, and enables concepts like Serverless + SSR or Serverless‑driven data aggregation.

5. Summary

Serverless is still immature but promises a bright future. Its greatest value lies in unlocking business potential and fostering innovative thinking, allowing front‑end developers to work more freely and efficiently in the Serverless era.