Behind the scenes: how Alibaba Cloud powers the largest shopping holiday in the world

Alibaba Cloud engineers ready for action. Photo credit: Alibaba Group.

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 a 24-hour frenzy of online shopping.

“It’s the feeling of marching with troops and waging war,” He Yunfei, senior product manager at Alibaba Cloud, tells Tech in Asia. “It’s thrilling.”

Singles Day, originally a kind of anti-Valentine’s day celebrated by single people, happens every year on November 11th. It’s Chinese consumerism on full and terrifying display, where sales – which totaled US$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.

“It’s different every year, especially when you stand in front of the screen at midnight,” says Yunfei, describing the scene at Alibaba’s Hangzhou headquarters. “In one moment, a hundred million [RMB] passes over. And then we’ll applaud. Before the sound of our applause even dies away, [sales] reach 1 billion.”

Yunfei has been at Alibaba for eight years, before the cloud computing division was even founded in 2009. He’s in charge of Apsara, Alibaba’s cloud computing platform, and oversees some of the most crucial infrastructure underneath the tech giant’s ecommerce business. During this year’s Singles Day, for example, Alibaba Cloud processed 175,000 transactions and 120,000 payments per second at peak traffic.

Kobe Bryant at this year’s Alibaba’s Countdown Celebration Gala. Photo credit: Alizila.

But it’s a two-way relationship. When I ask Yunfei what makes Alibaba Cloud capable of such high-volume operations, he mentions the millions of users that Alibaba’s ecommerce business brings in.

“We have good large scale training opportunities for our computing power and big data ability, like Singles Day,” says Yunfei. 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 gets swarmed by tens of millions of users.

“We are continuously training,” he says.

Build it yourself

The main reason why Alibaba Cloud is able to pull off Singles Day is because, like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, it’s proprietary. It is designed to meet Alibaba’s needs.

“On the public cloud, there’s actually a lot of tools,” says Yunfei. “The biggest difference is that we developed our own system, so we can control every line of code really well.”

That’s important because Taobao has developed into an incredibly complex platform with almost 10,000 applications, says Yunfei. For example, there’s an application that lets users shake their phone to get promoted products during the Singles Day gala. In order to prevent bottlenecks and deal with surging volumes of traffic, Apsara leverages Alibaba Cloud’s own data centers and computing power.

Beyond buy-and-sell