In a blink of an eye, the twelfth Double Eleven has passed. From the first 27 brands with a turnover of 52 million yuan, to the 23-day hand-picking carnival, with a turnover of 498.2 billion yuan.
Ten years ago, the singles of Singles’ Day turned into “finalists” pushing shopping carts.
Think about it. Last year, I was in the first video of station B. I was to introduce Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya, as well as the past and present life of Taobao live broadcast. In less than a year, they have become well-known big anchors, and “bringing goods” is even more of a hot word of the year.
The power under the consumer society is really the best.
Double Eleven is not only a battle for young people like me to fight for hand-speed Internet speed, but also an annual test for Ali employees, especially programmers.
Since 2009, the annual Double Eleven is the most stressful day for Ali programmers. What they are facing is a traffic attack from the national chopstick party. And batch after batch of Ali technicians have survived this brutal battle.
Double Eleven in twelve years, half of Ali’s technology history.
Today’s content, I want to talk to you about the history of Alibaba technology behind Double Eleven.
01. There is a famous thesis in the Internet circle: Tencent is better than products, Baidu is better than technology, and Alibaba attaches importance to operations.
In other words, Ali is not a company that specializes in technology.
Ten years ago, it was right.
For example, the omnipotent Taobao.com was actually made by 7 engineers after a month in the lakeside garden. The core system was made by Americans who bought it, and it went live after a little modification.
Another example is Taobao Mall, which later became Tmall. At the beginning of its launch, it was actually two systems and two websites with the main Taobao website. Users need to re-register and log in to make purchases, which is unimaginable trouble.
With the rise of Taobao, Alipay, and Taobao Mall, the number of user orders is increasing, and server pressure is also a problem.
Based on Ali’s technical status, let alone activities like Double Eleven, I will do my best to maintain daily operations
It happens to be such a grass-roots team, but it is very imaginative.
In the autumn of 2009, the Taobao Mall operation team had a whim and wanted to plan an online shopping festival following the “Black Friday” in the United States. The planning team calculated the dates. There will be Golden Week in October and Christmas in December, except that there is no important holiday in November.
At the time, the president of Taobao Mall, and now the head of Ali “Xiaoyaozi” Zhang Yong made a decision: It’s November 11th, let the bachelors who have nothing to do come shopping!
The slogan of the first Double Eleven event was 50% off the entire venue, and a total of 27 merchants participated.
This event really exposed the immaturity of Ali’s early technical team.
Before the event, there was almost no plan, no server capacity, network bandwidth capacity, and system protection. Programmers and operators did not expect that Taobao Mall’s system would be so vulnerable.
On November 11, 2009, at one point in time, users attracted by the discount went online instantly. Taobao mall traffic surged, and the server was suddenly down. The engineers were taken aback and hurried to restart the server. After restarting, the system is restored, and the shop and product pictures are no longer available.
On that day, the order volume of Taobao Mall was ten times the usual.
Many articles have recorded that crazy day. Many merchants use pictures from external links, but the traffic is too large, which crushes the external picture space; some merchants’ printers burned up because of too many print orders, and Taobao’s customer service phone was blown up, and security could only be brought on Act as a customer service.
Fortunately, just in the previous year, the Alibaba technical team spent a lot of effort to unify the underlying system architecture of Taobao and the mall after a “fancy stone battle”.
Although the traffic of the mall has exploded, it is not too exaggerated compared to the daily traffic of Taobao. After a moment of confusion, Taobao’s trading system can be regarded as the first Double Eleven.
The battle report came out, and the transaction volume reached 52 million yuan.
For the operation team, this is undoubtedly a big victory, but the technical team is beginning to worry: With a transaction volume of just over 50 million, the technology is slack, isn’t it appropriate?
After Double Eleven, every Alibaba technical person is very worried: I will do it again next year. I don’t know if this system can withstand it.
Alibaba’s management has also seen this problem: if the underlying structure is not resolved, it will seriously restrict the development of e-commerce and financial services. Before he could fight with Tencent and Baidu, Ali himself blew himself up.
The situation in the next few years is just as they expected.
In 2010, for the second Double Eleven, programmers were full of confidence, doubling the capacity of the system, should it be enough?
And consumers gave these naive programmers a ruthless punishment: 936 million sales, a full 18 times increase.
That is where many Ali programmersFamiliar, the most thrilling double eleven.
After 0:00, the transaction volume suddenly soared to three times the daily amount, payment was congested, and the total capacity of the system couldn’t survive noon.
Everyone was hurriedly turning off various non-essential functions that day. Just like a computer, in order to ensure the operation of the main program, various unimportant programs are killed.
When the last function was cut, only 4 seconds were left before the database crashed.
It can be said that there was only 4 seconds between the second Double Eleven and the fiasco. If the system unfortunately collapsed that day, maybe the Tmall Double Eleven Carnival, like the New Year’s Day, would not exist.
Just 4 seconds!
This year, China’s express delivery industry felt the horror of e-commerce for the first time, and many people knew the term “explosion” for the first time.
In the next year, on November 11, 2011, on the double eleven that was rare in a century, the transaction volume once again more than tripled to 3.36 billion yuan and 22 million packages.
This year, programmers dare not underestimate the enemy. Although the alarms continue throughout the day, the system has never crashed, which is considered to be withstanding.
In 2012, Taobao Mall became an independent business unit and changed its name to Tmall.