 "Behind the scenes: How Alibaba Cloud powers the largest shopping holiday in the world")
On Singles Day, China’s largest shopping holiday, the engineers at Alibaba Cloud suit up for battle. Dressed in identical red t-shirts, they gather in the same room and watch as millions of users test their system in 24-hour frenzy of online shopping.
Singles Day, originally a kind of anti-Valentine’s day celebrated by single people, happens every year on November 11th. Its Chinese consumerism on full and terrifying display, where sales – which totaled $17.5 billion this year – eclipse that of Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.
Started in 2009 by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, Singles Day has since evolved well beyond a day of discounts and price-cuts. The shopping event is preceded by weeks of marketing and advertising campaigns, all culminating in Alibaba’s celebratory gala, a show that counts down to midnight when the numbers start pouring in.
Alibaba Cloud also services other clients with large volumes of traffic, such as 12360, the train ticket booking website created by the Chinese Rail Ministry. Every year during national holidays, 12360 get swarmed by tens of millions of users.
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The main reason why Alibaba Cloud is able to pull off Singles Day is because, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, its proprietary.
According to the company, a single Apsara cluster can be scaled up to 10,000 servers with a total of 1 billion gigabytes worth of data storage and analysis capacity.
Integrating Alibaba Cloud’s various custom components – both hardware and software – is ultimately what powers the company’s processing prowess.
