Alibaba Cloud has unveiled the cutting-edge technologies rolled out in support of the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. According to the announcement, this year’s 11.11, which generated US$74.1 billion in GMV over an 11-day period, was made possible by Alibaba Cloud infrastructure upgrades.
Alibaba supported 250,000 brands during the fest
At midnight on November 11, just 26 seconds after shopping began, peak orders hit 583,000 per second. This equals 1,400 times peak volume at the festival’s debut 12 years ago on November 11, 2009.
Li Cheng, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Group, said,
“We were very proud to support 800 million consumers and 250,000 brands during the world’s largest shopping festival. From the robust digital infrastructure supporting zero downtime operation to cloud-native offerings for developers’ efficiencies and consumer-facing applications for creating some of smoothest engagement experiences, Alibaba’s technologies have once again passed the toughest tests with flying colors.”
Alibaba’s real-time computing platform, powered by Apache Flink, processed data streams totaling 4 billion items per second during peak time. MaxCompute, Alibaba’s proprietary data warehousing platform, handled up to 1.7 exabytes of data a day during the 11-day festival from November 1 to 11, equivalent to processing 230 high-res photos of each of the 7 billion people in the world.
Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud supported one of the world’s largest container clusters, enabling the upscaling to one million containers in an hour. The optimal elasticity and scheduling capacity enabled by the cutting-edge cloud-native technologies led to an 80% reduction of computing resources for every 10,000 transactions conducted compared to four years ago.
Highlights of the 11.11. global shopping fest
- Alibaba DAMO Academy’s (DAMO) latest multi-module technology Taobao Live launched its virtual anchor service for merchants. Virtual anchors can explain product details, respond to some inquiries and even play games with the audience during live streaming sessions.
- During 11.11, over 70% of the AliExpress merchants used the translation capability of Alibaba DAMO Academy’s (DAMO) which can also reduce inaudibility in noisy live streaming environment and even understand accented speech.
- Virtual tours with 3D visuals were available on Taobao to sell big-ticket items like houses and furniture. Alibaba offered a 3D modeling design platform for brands, reducing the time for model creation from three hours to 10 seconds.