Throughout my entire life, the date November 11 pretty much only had one significance to me: my younger brother’s birthday. However, with each year that goes by, that exact date seems to gain more and more traction to become a day that is celebrated in an unconventional way historically: an immense shopping sale. From fashion, furniture, food, travel and many more, it was as if literally all kinds of brands, shops and e-commerce platforms took part. Similarly, it was as if literally everyone I knew likewise participated in the 11.11 sale, purchasing a very wide array of products.
Given the total number of sellers, buyers, as well as products involved in a short window and spanning practically every corner of the globe, do you ever wonder how all of these are made possible and feasible? Alibaba Group, among the world’s top 3 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and the largest provider of public cloud service in China, has shared how they can not only withstand but support such type of grand activity on the global scale through their cloud computing service, Alibaba Cloud.
So, what exactly is Alibaba Cloud? As the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses around the world, such as those doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services. This cutting-edge technology was established and rolled out this year in preparation for this year’s 11.11 festivities. Some of the many clients to benefit from the Alibaba Cloud are fin-tech companies Paytm, DANA and ezlink, e-commerce platforms Lazada, Tokopedia and ITeSHOP, as well as travel and tourism companies Genting, HK Express and Air Asia, to name a few.
Having established what Alibaba Cloud is exactly and the role it plays for various parties, what kind of numeric values and statistics were the result of the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival? They generated a total of 498.2 billion RMB (around 74.1 billion USD) over an 11-day period, thanks to the infrastructural upgrades of the Alibaba Cloud. Peak orders hit 583,000/second, which is 1400 times more than the peak volume during its debut 12 years ago. Overall, Alibaba Cloud was able to support a whopping 800 million consumers and 250,000 brands. The sheer values are eye-popping, and the fact that the entire operation was a great success speaks volumes of the capacity of Alibaba Cloud and what it can achieve from its clients to its consumers.
Alibaba Cloud has several elements and factors that allow it to perform at the level it does and to be as effective as it is. Its Database as a Service (DBaaS) offers to enhance high-concurrency and high-volume web applications, such as e-commerce, online gaming and financial technology. Apache Flink, Alibaba’s real-time computing platform, processed data streams of up to 4 billion items per second during peak time, an improvement from the previous year’s 2.5 billion. MaxCompute, Alibaba’s propriety data warehousing platform, handled 1.7 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) of data on average per day during the 11-day event. With many more factors such as their cloud-native databases PolarDB, Analytics DB and Lindorm that enabled the event to run smoothly, Alibaba Cloud evidently has multiple supporting bodies that work cohesively to achieve maximum overall efficiency for all parties involved.
With the conclusion of the very busy (to say the least) 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, there were many positive takeaways from this year’s technologies and innovations. Firstly, there was a more engaging experience for the consumers, with smooth live streaming experiences and dynamic interactions proven to boost sales. Moreover, they were able to utilize virtual merchants that could explain product details, respond to inquiries and even play games with the consumer while the actual merchant is currently unavailable, which is usually during off-hours. One feature that I found quite fascinating is its 3D modeling design platform that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to create over 100,000 virtual showrooms with virtual 3D products, ultimately reducing model creation from 3 hours to just 10 seconds. Lastly, all of their digital infrastructure with hyper-scale data centers made the 11.11 festivities a lot more environmentally-friendly with the use of liquid-cooling and wind energy. Overall, they were able to reduce energy consumption by 70% and up to 70 million kilowatt hours of electric per year, which is quite impressive, if you ask me.
So, given all this, what exactly is next for Alibaba Cloud? It’s not until another full revolution around the sun until the next 11.11, but that doesn’t mean that Alibaba Cloud still won’t be working its magic and serving millions of customers, brands and companies. If the previous 11.11 events are an indication of anything, we can only expect each one from now on to be even bigger and grander than its predecessor. In anticipation of this, Alibaba plans to invest 200 billion CNY (around 30 billion USD) for new generation data centers in the next 3 years, with sights set on tripling their size and consequently becoming the world’s largest cloud infrastructure. If the recently concluded 11.11 Global Shopping Festival tells us anything, it’s that not only will the succeeding 11.11 events grow to be even bigger and better, but so will Alibaba Cloud as well.
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