Yesterday afternoon, a Zhihu user who claimed to be an Alibaba Cloud programmer and also participated in this year's 12306 Spring Festival travel rush projectdisclosed for the first timethat Alibaba had been cooperating with the railway ticketing website 12306 since the beginning of last year, and by this year's Spring Festival travel rush, 12306 had handed over 75% of its remaining-ticket query services to Alibaba Cloud for hosting.
The programmer said that in early 2014, the technical teams of Alibaba and 12306 began discussing how to put the remaining-ticket query system on the cloud, tested it during the National Day Golden Week, and the results were "pretty good".
During this year's Spring Festival travel rush, netizens generally reported that 12306's ticket grabbing and issuing efficiency was much faster than in previous years. In addition, the advance booking period was changed to 60 days, giving everyone enough buffer time, and some new rules were introduced, making the intensity of ticket grabbing less concentrated than before. These multi-pronged measures made people feel that going home this year no longer provoked as many complaints as in previous years, and 12306's performance was also recognized by everyone.
Previously, people kept saying that it would be great to let websites like Taobao and JD.com, which handled the Double 11 shopping frenzy, run 12306. At this moment, this joke has finally been verified. 12306 is indeed mobilizing the whole nation's strength, and it does not exclude non-official civilian forces, which also reflects the powerful force of commerce and the market.
The programmer also disclosed that the user demands on 12306 are different from the server demands during Double 11. Moreover, he dispelled people's misconception, saying that the key factor affecting 12306's ticket grabbing efficiency and server operation is not the ticket purchase process, but the remaining-ticket query step. In fact, this is also very logical. We all find that we cannot get tickets while repeatedly refreshing; those who get tickets have their seats locked, and within the next 45 minutes they can freely choose when to pay. So when we feel that tickets cannot be bought, it is not that all tickets have been bought by others, but that all tickets have been queried.
Specifically, the steps to let Alibaba Cloud share 12306's pressure are:
1. Separate the remaining-ticket query module from 12306's existing system so that it can be deployed independently;
2. Independently deploy a remaining-ticket query system on the cloud. In this way, both 12306 and the cloud have a remaining-ticket query system, making scheduling more flexible;
3. Some security measures;
4. Depending on the operating conditions, the remaining-ticket query on the cloud and 12306's original remaining-ticket query can complement each other, adjusting the different access ratios based on real-time load conditions to fully utilize the elasticity of the cloud.
After the query is completed, user information and the ticket purchase process are still currently handled on 12306's own servers. For the integration between the cloud and the existing system, as well as potential security risks, Alibaba Cloud has also implemented some security measures to help prevent them.
In January 2014, an article by a "former Taobao engineer" defended 12306, which was facing criticism at the time, proving through the technical bottlenecks he understood that 12306 had already done well enough. Currently, one can see many similar defenses and praises of 12306 from people with server operations experience online. The programmer also quoted this article and commented:
It has been nearly half a year since I started working on this project, and I have many feelings. Everyone knows that Double 11 is a considerable challenge for Alibaba's technical team. I participated for 4 years, and two of those years were particularly difficult. At that time, the technical team was often blamed by the business side, just like the current attitude everyone has toward 12306. But objectively speaking, the Double 11 promotion drove Alibaba's technological maturity, and the Spring Festival travel rush also pushed 12306 to adopt more future-oriented technologies.
Finally, he quoted a passage from a 12306 engineer recalling the time when the system had just launched:
12306 is a newcomer to the internet, or can be called a "rich second generation". It looks ugly, is foolish and silly, and its body is weak... So it messed up its first appearance. That day, all the internet big shots and netizens across China were watching it, and basically all netizens in China flooded into its home. That day it went down, and on the same day criticism surged... Actually, we know that they weren't cursing 12306; they were cursing this era.
Original source: http://cn.technode.com/post/2015-01-16/12306-by-aliyun/