Netizens help Taobao to sell train tickets

Looking forward to a long time, the white-collar Miss Feng finally looked forward to the "double 11" day. Like many netizens, she had already waited in advance to prepare for the computer before the computer, but suddenly the system "clamshell" still made her somewhat unprepared.

The first minute was 136,000, and the third minute was 192,000.... Some customers reported that they had encountered payment waiting and delays. Due to the rapid increase in traffic and orders in the short term, the Tmall Site and Alipay also suffered "card jams," but overall they have withstood the test. Some netizens think of the Spring Festival online shopping train ticket experience, Tucao "let Taobao to sell train tickets."

Alibaba 3000 Engineers Battle "Double Eleven"

At the peak of the peak, there was a network “cracking”, and similar situations have been common in the Ministry of Railways's 12306 booking website. Just before the National Day, the 12306 ticketing website completed a new round of upgrades, but many users reported to the Oriental Morning Post that after the upgrade, the user's ticket purchases may be forcibly queued. Due to multiple loopholes in the system, the probability of purchase failure after queuing Great.

Compared to 12306's "chronic illness," Tmall and Alipay are at the height of this wave of trading, and the entire system has stood the test. Data published by Alibaba showed that on the November 11th Singles Day, a total of 213 million independent users visited Tmall and Taobao, which is equivalent to nearly 40% of domestic Internet users rushing into “double 11” promotional online shopping.

According to Mr. Wang, an engineer of Alibaba Group, in terms of web login, the Group’s own system level, about 3,000 engineers participated in “Double 11′′. There are more than 100,000 servers on the hardware and more than 150 CDN (content distribution network) nodes are deployed. Prevent the occurrence of special circumstances (such as sudden power failure, air conditioning failure, network interruption, etc.), and deal with various external attacks.

"More importantly, as a platform, 'Double 11' also has major online banking, telecom operators, ISVs (independent software vendors) and tens of thousands of merchants' engineers participating in the collaboration. So this is a comprehensive test of domestic Internet technology. Mr. Wang said.

Under the myth of the 19.1 billion Alipay deal, there is a project called “The Gathering Tower” that backs up the high-speed back-end system of the Tmall and Taobao sellers in the background, handling tens of millions of orders. "This way merchants don't have to rent servers themselves," said Mr. Wang.

In terms of payment, Alipay has achieved the lowest cost in the industry by using a self-developed distributed computing platform to meet the largest amount of online payment transactions. The daily transaction volume that can be handled is as high as 100 million yuan. "This year, Alipay has also accelerated the construction of the "third-generation technology architecture," which is a basis for Alipay to support such a large transaction volume." Alipay CTO Li Jingming said.

Put the technology in the right place

"Don't let Taobao sell train tickets? At least it won't be booked out," said Zhang Lihua, author of Huawei R&D, on Weibo.

After the "double 11" e-commerce war, another discussion on technology is underway. Many netizens spontaneously thought of the 12306 ticketing website with poor user experience.

Prior to this month, a report from Wu Yun, a third-party security feedback platform, stated that the 12306 website's important business system was not strictly controlled, resulting in the IT system being able to be compromised, and the domain name of 12306.cn may be hijacked.

Some internet architects pointed out through Weibo that the SQL statement code is very low and is the real cause of the inefficiency of the 12306 website. “New graduates often make such mistakes and appear on the 12306 online system and cannot be rationalized.”

It is understood that SQL is a database query and programming language for accessing data and for querying, updating, and managing relational database systems.

In this regard, Mr. Wang, Alibaba Group Engineer, believes that SQL is like a kitchen knife without sharpening. It is to use a knife to cut vegetables or a knife to cut vegetables. This depends on how the chef uses it. “The application scenario of e-commerce is not the same as that of the Ministry of Railways. Besides, the lack of rail capacity is also a fact. It is important to put technology in the right place and do the right thing.”

The comment writer Liu Chunlong suggested that the Ministry of Railways could learn from the private e-commerce enterprises to cope with the "double 11" process and learn from each other to improve the management of the 12306 website and even the entire railway system.

"Compared to Taobao, the Ministry of Railways needs to learn, apart from those bits and pieces that sparkle the hard work, intelligence, and humanization of Taobao employees. What's more important and more essential is the clear property rights and market competition," said Liu Chunlong.

The main responsibility for the railway electronic ticketing system is the Institute of Electronics of the Academy of Railway Sciences. Regarding the question of why it does not cooperate with domestic mature e-commerce systems, an electronics researcher once said: “The 12306 website is non-profit and will not cooperate with commercial companies, and we have confidence in our own technology.”