Media Views｜No e-commerce giants have money, and they have to challenge the peak traffic on Double Eleven. How did a low-cost, high-quality big promotion work?

At the beginning of July this year, Tian Zhen, the head of Bitauto's database, became more anxious.

At this time, there is only one month left before the official opening of the 818 car carnival, but the database stress test results are not satisfactory.

818 Car Carnival is the first big promotion event of Yiche.com, and adopts the interactive live broadcast format of Taiwan and the Internet. There are many application scenarios involving databases, such as real-time data board, interactive live broadcast of Taiwan and Internet, shake, live voting, etc., not only required The database can store massive amounts of data, while supporting high concurrency and low latency scenarios. However, the original MySQL-based solution was not very effective. During the stress test, the master-slave delay was high, the switching time was too long, the database was temporarily unavailable, and real-time tasks continued to write large amounts of data, causing the disk to become full. In actual use, it may affect the user experience.

The DBA team of Bitauto.com did not have much experience in the big promotion scenario for the first time. Time is tight, tasks are urgent, and team size is limited. Tian Zhen's heart is getting more and more bottomless. It is unknown whether he can survive the traffic peak of 818 Carnival.

At this moment, a coincidence allowed Bitauto.com to successfully complete the database project establishment, model selection, scheme design, pressure test and online deployment in just one month, and finally perfectly supported Bitauto 818 Carnival and achieved full success. The platform has watched 224 million live broadcasts, 43,900 online orders, and an outstanding result of a cumulative turnover of 6.42 billion yuan.

Coincidentally, Bitauto, Autohome, Xiaomi Youpin, JD Logistics, Ping An... Nowadays, big promotion is no longer unique to e-commerce giants, and is becoming a way for all industries to change business models and get closer to consumers. In new business scenarios, more and more users are facing the challenge of peak data traffic in the big promotion scenario, which also drives the birth of a new trend: that is, whether the big promotion can achieve a lower threshold and make more than electricity Business giants’ enterprises independently, low-cost, and high-quality cope with data traffic peak scenarios such as big promotions.

The big promotion brings both opportunities and challenges.

Every big promotion is a big test

Good technology often makes consumers feel indifferent and only immersed in the joy of the consumption process.

However, even the e-commerce giants had a lot of "unbearable" in the big promotion a few years ago: every double eleven at zero o'clock, the page freezes, the app does not respond, and the order payment has been in a circle...

From 2009 to now, in more than ten years, the peak orders of e-commerce giants such as Alibaba and JD.com have expanded by thousands of times, and the number of orders and total transaction volume have been steadily increasing. Every big promotion is like a big test of technology, challenging the limits of transaction volume, real-time data analysis, and data consistency. Yang Mu, the product manager of JD Cloud Database, said bluntly that the traffic during the big promotion scenario is generally more than 10 times that of normal. For example, panic buying and spikes during the big promotion will bring extremely intensive traffic and put great pressure on the database and other businesses.

Nowadays, big promotion has become the most core business scenario of e-commerce giants, and the ever-expanding scale of data transactions has also promoted the continuous reflection and evolution of technology by e-commerce giants. Taking JD Cloud as an example, it supports a large number of businesses such as JD Mall and JD Logistics. When supporting the big promotion scenario, the database has gone through the process from MySQL to TiDB.

Like most Internet companies, JD Cloud also adopted the MySQL database when supporting JD’s logistics business. However, MySQL also has many drawbacks. For example, when the sub-control supervisory structure is expanded in advance, the process is cumbersome and the operation and maintenance are complicated. If a node fails, it needs to be handled manually. These are not major problems during stress testing. Once they occur in the real scene of a big promotion , Which may have a great impact on the user experience.

"Now, JD Cloud only needs to click on the console according to the needs. The whole expansion process is very simple. In the big promotion scenario, the whole process of the traffic peak from disappearing is very calm." Yang Mu said, "TiDB It has strong compatibility with MySQL itself, with low migration cost and low risk. After migrating MySQL to TiDB, the overall cost has dropped significantly, and the highest cost of a business system has dropped to one-third of the previous one."

In fact, in order to prepare for the big promotion scenario, e-commerce giants often invest half a year in advance to prepare for the war, invest a lot of personnel to make all-round preparations, and continue to iterate and improve in technology, and gradually have a good shopping experience. Kind of big promotion. Now, the big promotion has a trend of normalization, not only the exclusive use of e-commerce, but also other industries are eager to try. While more and more companies are admiring and admiring Ali, they are also actively thinking about "Can they also do their own big promotion activities like Ali?".

Can you deal with your own big promotion scenarios without the technical team and scale of the e-commerce giant? The answer is YES!

How to make a big promotion like an e-commerce giant

The ideal is full, but the reality is skinny.

Looking at the world, almost no company can have the technology system and team configuration of Internet giants, but in reality there are real big promotion scenarios. For example, automobile Internet platforms such as Autohome and Bitauto are promoting the 818 car carnival; another example As a representative of the fan economy, Xiaomi Youpin will give back to fans and expand its influence through 816 Thanksgiving season activities every year; Ping An Life Insurance has upgraded to 108 Fortuna Day on the basis of the "good start"... Today, with the emphasis on user first, the big promotion will definitely come Gradually become the standard equipment in all walks of life.

At the same time, many companies are faced with the huge amount of data in the big promotion scene, and there is an unavoidable reality of "being embarrassing."

One of the biggest challenges is that most companies do not have a large enough technical team to support the big promotion scenario. Take Autohome as an example. It has teamed up with Hunan Satellite TV to create the "818 Global Car Night" for three consecutive years. This kind of live event has many interactions and large variables. The data traffic caused by a spike may be dozens of times more than usual. This year The maximum data peak value is as high as 400,000 writes per second; the database not only needs to solve the challenge of massive real-time transactions, but also needs to feed back real-time analysis data to the on-site host. The entire process needs to be stable and reliable.

The entire "818 Global Car Night" requires high level of scalability, disaster tolerance, and cloud capabilities of the distributed database. With the preparation of the technical team of Autohome, the program design, pressure test, optimization and deployment are carried out by itself. Very difficult in a short time. Facts have proved that TiDB is a wise choice for Autohome. With mature and reliable distributed database solutions and the power of PingCAP technical experts, Autohome can quickly make up for the shortcomings of its own technical team and efficiently complete the big promotion scenarios. Support.

Another factor that cannot be ignored is that there is no relevant experience in the big promotion scene. There are not a few companies like Bitauto. The first time they face a big promotion scenario, they often have no idea: they are unpredictable, do not know how much traffic peaks can reach, and do not know how to design a database plan; for the event period may trigger The extreme situation of the situation is not clear, let alone how to deal with it. And database solutions that have been tested by actual big promotion scenarios will undoubtedly be more popular with them.

Finally, most companies are eager for large-scale technology solutions with reasonable costs. Unlike e-commerce platforms, most companies are gradually deriving large promotion scenarios in the process of digital transformation. Few companies have the financial and human resources of Internet giants. They are more eager to use a reasonable cost database solution. Meet the big promotion needs.

Facts have proved that more and more companies like Autohome, Bitauto, Xiaomi, and Ping An are completing their own big promotion business independently. This big promotion scenario may not be as large as the e-commerce platform, and the technical team configuration is relatively limited. , The preparation cycle is shorter. But without exception, these companies tend to worry-free and easy-to-use TiDB distributed database solutions, ready to use, without too much technology migration and system maintenance, and complete efficient support for big promotion scenarios in a short time.

Enlightenment behind the big promotion

James McQuivey, chief analyst at Forrester, stated in "Subversion: Innovative Thinking and Business Models in the Digital Economy": In the digital wave, market competitors are using new technologies, tools and platforms to participate in market competition, approach users, and even It is subverting the old business model.

Nowadays, the promotion is not only an "obvious" business festival, but also an "invisible" technical battlefield. It represents the struggle of business, but also the competition of digital capabilities. It is like a touchstone, testing the success or failure of each company's digital transformation. The big promotion gives companies not only the increase in turnover and user stickiness, but also the rethinking of the value of digital transformation and new technologies.

First of all, in the digital age, the rapid change of scenes is by no means empty talk. Even if it is a big promotion, the current big promotion is very different in form, method, and scale from ten years ago. There will be only more innovations in the big promotion scene in the future. Many, rapidly changing business logic will further promote the digital transformation of enterprises and the choice of technology.

Secondly, new scenarios such as big promotions are an excellent opportunity to break technological prejudices and adopt advanced technologies. New technology trends will be implemented, recognized and promoted in the scenarios. Take today’s hot HTAP as an example. It does not need to split tables like MySQL to achieve real-time massive-scale OLTP and real-time data analysis. It can also be deployed in multiple clouds and two-three-center disaster recovery. This is in line with the massive transaction, real-time data display, and stability. The requirements of the operation are highly compatible. People used to think that HTAP was too far away from the actual scene, but users such as Autohome and Bitauto.com have proven the value of the new technology with facts.

Finally, all enterprises are facing an era of increasing uncertainty, and only continuous scene innovation and digital capabilities can resist various uncertainties. The business scale and technical system of Internet giants certainly represent the top level in the industry, but whether they are truly suitable for them and for their use remains to be discussed. Users need to constantly understand themselves and find technologies, solutions and models that suit their own development needs.

Facing the future, data will become the most important production factor for enterprises, and the ability to innovate around data storage, management and application will become the core competitiveness of enterprises, especially as high-peak scenarios such as major promotions become normalized, with low thresholds like TiDB , Low-cost and high-quality distributed database technology and solutions will surely be favored by more industry users to achieve rapid improvement of digital core capabilities, so as to achieve "numbers" in the ever-changing market.