Why Wolai Chose Serverless Architecture: Lessons from Alibaba Cloud Function Compute

Wolai, a cloud‑based collaborative document platform, needed an architecture that could handle real‑time multi‑user editing, high concurrency, and rapid iteration.

Why we chose Serverless

After evaluating several serverless offerings, we selected Alibaba Cloud Function Compute (FC) for its support, integrated solutions, and fit with our requirements.

Serverless provides a stable web‑service interface, scalable distributed database, and cost‑effective resource usage, allowing us to focus on business logic rather than server maintenance.

Cost and operational benefits

Using FC reduced both manpower and cloud resource costs, cutting operational expenses by over 50 % for a small startup.

Deployments became faster, with daily releases and minimal downtime, because each function can be updated independently.

Snapshot system for collaborative editing

Wolai stores user actions as transactions sent to FC, which orders them, updates Redis, and generates minute‑level snapshots stored in OSS. This ensures consistent document state and supports high‑frequency edits.

Problems solved by Serverless

Scalable handling of user data submissions.

Maintaining response speed under massive concurrency.

Decoupling functions to enable small teams to deliver quickly.

Overall, Serverless architecture has allowed Wolai to deliver a stable, cost‑effective collaborative platform and focus on product innovation.