A small life-saving document, a relay between time and life and death

Introduction to can be a beacon to illuminate the dark and open a way to survive.

On July 20, 2021, a heavy rain broke the tranquility of a city. In just 24 hours, the "Central Plains Granary" by the Yellow River has become a vast ocean.

A rare heavy rainstorm swept the entire Henan. The heavy rain destroyed most of the infrastructure in the city. Communication was blocked and a large number of people in the disaster area could not receive effective rescue. Many people have been in the water for several hours but no one knows.

Since the evening of July 20, a lot of information about the heavy rain in Henan began to spread rapidly on various social media, and various online documents began to appear. Different types of rescue information were edited into different types of documents by volunteers. For a time, documents such as "list of rescuers", "haven list", "accommodation and transportation material information" and other documents began to be carried out in various social media. spread.

In normal times, a document may be an indispensable tool for our work and life. But in this disaster situation, every document is a high-speed channel of information, and every character embodies the ardent concern of all sectors of society for the disaster-stricken compatriots.

Documents are the ark of rescue, which is particularly important at this moment. Graphite Documents provides free premium products and services to government departments/medical institutions/non-profit organizations/social groups/individual volunteers who are fighting the flood in the first time. Assist all parties to collect and release information and achieve more efficient communication and coordination.

According to current data, since the evening of the 20th, as of this week, more than 1,600 disaster-related documents have been created across the country, and document collaboration services have been provided to millions of devices. Topics include on-site assistance, material synchronization, flood volunteers reporting, flood self-rescue knowledge popularization, etc. Within 24 hours of the disaster, the number of visits to the mobile terminal of Graphite Documents surged by more than 5.4 times.

"Henan flood disaster emergency help information registration form" visit trend chart by provinces and cities

Real-time heat map of disaster-related documents

The life-saving messages one after another have provided vitality to the people in the disaster area, but also made the IT system behind Graphite Documents face huge challenges. The most important challenge is how to ensure the smooth operation of the system.

Only when the system runs steadily, users can organize, edit, and summarize all kinds of life-saving documents at the first time, so that more people can participate in the joint collaboration of the documents, so that the life-saving information can be sent to those who really need it. Human hands.

In this disaster situation, Graphite Document accomplished its task as an "information carrier" to ensure that the document is always stable and available. And this time, during the disaster, the graphite document can perform so well. A large part of the reason is that the graphite document used Alibaba Cloud to build a complete set of intelligent operation and maintenance system as early as 5 months ago. It has unified management, intelligent alarm and pre-inspection capabilities.

Shortly after the outbreak in Henan, the engineers of the Graphite Document SRE team suddenly received an alarm call when they were on duty on the evening of July 20. The voice on the other end of the phone automatically broadcast the K8S cluster resource utilization rate of Graphite Line soaring, and the PV increased by more than 200% year-on-year. Immediately afterwards, I received warnings that the traffic of certain business interfaces increased sharply and multiple resources were approaching pressure, and it was accompanied by multiple automatic container expansion events. Through an omni-channel event bus based on SLS, the cause of the event can be quickly located: the number of reads and writes of multiple documents and the number of visitors have increased abnormally.

After locating the relevant documents, it was discovered that some people used graphite documents to count the disaster relief information, so a large number of users were accessing them at the same time. Due to the rapid increase in the number of visitors, and the subsequent upward trend is not known, SRE engineers urgently coordinated the Alibaba Cloud computing resources several times larger than in the past to expand the infrastructure on a large scale. Ensure that these disaster relief documents are coordinated by thousands of people at the same time, and a stable and smooth experience can be maintained even when millions of people are browsing, so as to ensure the smooth progress of disaster relief work.

A document affects the heart of a city; a document opens a way to survive; a document brings new hope to the disaster-stricken people in Henan...

After entering the cloud-native era, the gradual improvement of IT infrastructure has promoted digital innovation in enterprise business. How to improve the user experience and let the business serve users quickly and steadily is the key to the development of enterprises in this era. Especially when the business needs to be used in the face of various emergencies, only by being "fast and stable" can the business play the greatest role at the critical moment.

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