I live in China for a long time. Last night wife and I up waiting for lock to tick over to midnight. The shopping cart was loaded up with about 30 items and just waiting to hit the go button so that the 11/11 special pricing would kick in. And then kaboom....tried placing the orders and servers couldnt handle it- lots of comms errors, weird errors that didnt even make sense in Chinese, but at least the cart contents never got lost or mangled.
I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.
Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.
Some background info: I'm tech lead for a german shop on tmall.hk, and indeed this time, the numbers are crazy.
What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals.
The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it.
On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
> On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
I visited Alibaba HQ last month. People seemed pretty worked and driven by deadlines which can decrease their code quality. The teams I talked to didn't do much testing.
Supposedly a big chunk of Alibaba's backend infrastructure runs on its custom-developed distributed datastore called Oceanbase, which is available on Github here[1] and here[2].
There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software.
Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail.
Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)
The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]).
I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale.
I work at a young company providing search as a service for multiple medium/big e-commerce sites (mostly those which don't have their own search teams) and 11/11 is indeed a crazy day. It's funny how till 2 years ago, Cyber Monday was the big event we looked at and we noticed major traffic spikes last year on veteran's day (11/11) only to later realize that this was in fact singles' day!
This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected again! :)
I guess if they run a 0.001% risk of doing something disastrous then it doesn't cut it. If 0.001% of purchases fail or orders get lost, or they have a few minutes of complete downtime, it might not be worth adding another 9.
It says something interesting about how think about "high reliability." What it really means is "must never, ever fail" which kind of makes "% reliability" a sort of strange euphemism, I think.
> and a weakening yuan may curb enthusiasm for foreign wares.
I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands)
Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)
Many things are made in what China calls "Special Export Zones" (SEZs). This is for goods that require lots of imported machinery and components to make, which are basically brought into the zones duty free. But as a consequence, what is made in these zones can only be exported.
So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Besides, the iPhone is < 10% Chinese (final assembly), a lot of the components are coming from ROK, Japan, Taiwan, and of course the IP is all American.
For clothes, the amount that foreign companies is paying on material and labor was already ridiculously low, and they still pay for their other costs in dollars (or rather, not yuan) so....
Foreign goods are extremely popular on Tmall and Taobao. There are companies that specialize in shipping containers full of Costco Kirkland goods to China, and usually selling them for a good markup. For example: Ferrero Rocher chocolate boxes can be bought at Costco for between 9 and 13 dollars. They sell in China for 200-250 RMB (thats about 30 USD).
One of my wife's friends is a Chinese citizen who lives in Italy. She selects purses, backpacks, and occasionally wine and markets them in China. There is a lot of demand for showing up your friends with expensive imported goods. Even more benefit if you had to use a connection to purchase the goods.
> Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands)
They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.
It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly the price I was seeing last week.
I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying.
Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.
Ma tried to get to the West with B2C really really hard, but only got burned with the 10 Main fad store, a wasted office lease, and around $100m. wasted on online ads alone.
Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent zero on ads.
retail type of bullshit, literally. stuffing all the sale into a single day when none of the physical or non-physical systems are designed or implemented to meet such peak demand. my current company does everything to eliminate such peaks, which makes sense considering customer satisfaction (service quality) and cost efficiency, and some guys like alibaba doing the opposite. nothing but marketing scam, prices getting bloated in the day before and discounts(?) exclusive to 11.11.
Singles' Day is Nov 11 (11/11), so I'm guessing you're in Pacific time zone? The big splash was when the sale started in China, which is quite a few hours ahead of the US.
[+] [-] zoom6628|9 years ago|reply
I would like to know how many people were doing the same but a conservative guess would be over 100m concurrent users. We had to retry about a dozen times, including pruning the cart because limited stock of certain items was already gone in the first few seconds. Eventually got the order thru about 00:10am with 1/3 of items bought successfully. Now i know for next 3-5 days the courier guys will be heaving huge loads at every city apartment block. And in case you are wondering the volume of online sales on normal days is so high that courier companies have dedicated teams of delivery guys servicing each group of a few apartment buildings. I live in an estate with 4 buildings of 32 floors and here there are 4-6 from one company alone....and there are multiple companies. As someone who works in ERP software this is logistics on steroids.
Any...just sharing a story from the coal face from a HN fanboy.
[+] [-] pvlbdn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|9 years ago|reply
What you have to know though is that B2C shopping on Alibaba is extremely promotion driven. You have a very flat curve most of the time, and then on promotion day, you've got lots of sales. Everyone is waiting for the special deals.
The way this works is that people can buy or sign up for all kinds of different vouchers, rebates and coupons and whatnot, which they can only use during the promotion, which is typically 24h. This will of course affect your margins, but the volume is high, so it can be worth it.
On the technical side, the APIs are astonishingly bad. I suppose this is the result of building this very quickly, and it has grown ever since. I don't know how they manage to maintain it.
[+] [-] ngokevin|9 years ago|reply
I visited Alibaba HQ last month. People seemed pretty worked and driven by deadlines which can decrease their code quality. The teams I talked to didn't do much testing.
[+] [-] NKCSS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hncommenter13|9 years ago|reply
There are some presentations[3] and papers online (see links below), but I haven't found any information on people other than Alibaba running this software.
Would love to learn more about this if anyone has experience with it / more technical detail.
[1] https://github.com/alibaba/oceanbase
[2] https://github.com/alibaba/OceanBase-0.5
[3] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/Ocean%20Base%20Taobao.pdf
Here are some academic links describing Oceanbase. I would love to see some of these, if anyone has access; I haven't been able to download the academic papers. (Need Google translate, I imagine.)
I've accessed this [http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-39527-7...] but it was only the abstract, not the full paper in printed form.
There are a bunch of references here, but not in English: http://yuanjian.cnki.com.cn/Search/Result?content=oceanbase
[+] [-] brandur|9 years ago|reply
https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
The article is a little dated though, and some of the links to their open source repositories don't work anymore (maybe this is because is because they moved to GitHub [2]).
I assume it's the language barrier, but for such a huge company I could find surprisingly little information on their technology or infrastructure. If anyone has any more current information, I'm sure quite a few of us would be interested to hear about running software at that scale.
[1] https://spring.io/blog/2013/03/04/spring-at-china-scale-alib...
[2] https://github.com/alibaba
[+] [-] Hanks10100|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/alibaba/weex
[+] [-] Hanks10100|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmax108|9 years ago|reply
This year we were geared up and it's been a crazy rise in traffic as expected again! :)
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|9 years ago|reply
I've been filling my shopping cart for the past week, waiting for tomorrow's Singles' Day (aka 11.11 Shopping Festival).
On a side note, I think their Android app is top notch (far better than any shopping app I've used before).
[+] [-] wcummings|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dodgedcactii|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyph0n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kimshibal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|9 years ago|reply
It says something interesting about how think about "high reliability." What it really means is "must never, ever fail" which kind of makes "% reliability" a sort of strange euphemism, I think.
[+] [-] hueving|9 years ago|reply
If your timeline is only one day, 99.999% reliability is less than a second of downtime.
[+] [-] busterarm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abc_lisper|9 years ago|reply
What I do is, have an active-active system in a data center, and with another similar system in another DC.
Having said that, your average online stock brokers do the same thing.
[+] [-] kogepathic|9 years ago|reply
I don't get it. Aren't most brands these days made in China or south east Asia? (looking at you, fashion brands)
Now, I don't speak Chinese so I stick to AliExpress, but you don't typically find non-Chinese made products for sale there (at least in the realm of clothing or electronics)
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|9 years ago|reply
So that iPhone you buy in China has to be imported into China with appropriate duty! Made in China but still imported on a dollar basis. Besides, the iPhone is < 10% Chinese (final assembly), a lot of the components are coming from ROK, Japan, Taiwan, and of course the IP is all American.
For clothes, the amount that foreign companies is paying on material and labor was already ridiculously low, and they still pay for their other costs in dollars (or rather, not yuan) so....
[+] [-] Cerium|9 years ago|reply
One of my wife's friends is a Chinese citizen who lives in Italy. She selects purses, backpacks, and occasionally wine and markets them in China. There is a lot of demand for showing up your friends with expensive imported goods. Even more benefit if you had to use a connection to purchase the goods.
[+] [-] nicolas_t|9 years ago|reply
It's not just Aliexpress...
[+] [-] laurentdc|9 years ago|reply
They are. And the highest, most expensive fashion brands are still made by underpaid Chinese workers in Italy or France, so they can stick a "Made in $country" logo on the final product.
[+] [-] Hanks10100|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dndyh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marban|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenbin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngokevin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richardhawthorn|9 years ago|reply
I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying.
Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.
[+] [-] baybal2|9 years ago|reply
Interestingly, their biggest operation abroad is in Russia, where they spent zero on ads.
[+] [-] ensiferum|9 years ago|reply
Instead we should have a "buy nothing day" that'd get celebrated for its 0$ sales.
[+] [-] pman2000|9 years ago|reply
I'm gonna have to implement my own single's day sale in 2017!
[+] [-] adgulacti|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danvoell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capnjngl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hanks10100|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|9 years ago|reply
2 Aliexpress.com tries to make tons of UDP connections, WebRTC? (unable to disable in desktop chrome)
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|9 years ago|reply