Alibaba CTO Cheng Li: Tmall Double 11 in 2022 is moving towards deep digital-real integration and technological evolution opens up a new future

"An era of comprehensive and in-depth use of cloud is coming." In the 2022 Tmall Double 11 technology sharing, Alibaba CTO Cheng Li said that after the tempering of the large-scale scenarios of Double 11 , Alibaba has transformed the advancement of cloud into the improvement of technological efficiency. This year's Double 11, Alibaba's overall unit computing power cost dropped by another 8 % . The comprehensive use of cloud has brought about agile innovation of business and changes in consumer experience. The evolution of technology has led the business and social systems towards a more comprehensive and in-depth integration.

"This year is Alibaba's first Double 11 in which it makes full and in-depth use of the cloud. Cloud computing has unleashed huge technological dividends, making Double 11 more agile, more economical, and greener, " said Cheng Li.

The elasticity of the cloud brings more possibilities for "agile innovation" of business. This year's Double 11 realized the superposition of three peaks for the first time, that is, spot orders, pre-sale final payment, and refund functions were fully opened at 20:00 on November 10th . The use of the cloud can easily cope with the traffic peak caused by high concurrency. By calling the cloud database T air for cloud optimization, Double 11 achieved the expansion of Taobao shopping carts from 120 to 300. Lightweight connection, asynchronous support and other technologies supported the ultra-large number of connections, making the access traffic of a single cluster reach 100GB/ s .

Cheng Li said that cloud -native Serverless is accelerating the reshaping of Alibaba's application architecture and R&D model . This year, Taobao 's homepage has been 100 % Serverless , and the application deployment time has been significantly reduced. In the future, the comprehensive cloud-native architecture will make the business more agile, forming the ability to flexibly deploy in the cloud environment at any time and use cloud resources on demand .

With the help of comprehensive and in-depth use of the cloud , the massive digital collaboration on Double 11 has become more "economical and green". This year , Alibaba's self-developed CPU Yitian 7 10 has been widely used in Double 11 , realizing the coordinated optimization of chips, computing architecture and operating system for the first time . Yitian 7 10 has reduced the power consumption per unit computing power by 60%. This year, Alibaba Cloud's five super data centers have fully enabled clean energy . During Double 11, the total clean energy use of Zhangbei Base and Nantong Base exceeded 60 million kWh, more than doubled compared with the same period of Double 11 last year , of which the daily average use of green electricity increased by 30 % year-on-year .

The next generation of Internet technology is opening up new possibilities for "experiential e-commerce". In terms of immersive shopping, this year's Double 11, Alibaba created a more three-dimensional consumer experience from the three aspects of people, goods, and venues. In terms of display methods , products have changed from flat photos in the past to three-dimensional 3D models, such as watches, jewelry, mobile phones, sports shoes, etc. The 3Dization of products can accurately express their appearance color, shape structure, physical material and other information, making the consumer shopping experience more intuitive. In this year's Double 11 Tmall Cat Sharing, the coverage rate of 3D products has reached 60%. In terms of 3D modeling, Alibaba launched an innovative hardware and software integrated 3D reconstruction solution, which for the first time implemented the academic neural rendering (NeRF) algorithm on a large scale in the industry. Currently, more than 10 categories on Taobao and Tmall are using NeRF for high-quality, large-scale modeling .

"From flat interactive experience to 3D immersive interaction, from the digital world to the world that combines the digital and the real, technology is leading to a more comprehensive and in-depth integration of business and social systems," said Cheng Li.

Taking Ali Lingyang as an example, the digital system is connecting Ali, merchants, and third-party systems in real time, forming a huge social collaboration. In terms of supply and demand matching, the digitization of Tmall and Taobao merchants' orders of hundreds of millions and tens of millions of product pools has achieved the ability to update the real warehouse inventory and basic information of millions of products per second , improving the business efficiency and certainty of contract performance. The guarantee of technology allows the real-time interconnected and digital-physical system to operate more efficiently and accurately, which is knowable, perceptible, and visible.

The technology honed during the Double 11 Shopping Festival is being shared with the whole society in a more open way . Havenask, a large-scale distributed search engine widely used by Alibaba , was officially open sourced during this year's Double 11 Shopping Festival . The engine supports the entire Alibaba search business including Taobao, Tmall, Cainiao, and Youku. It is a core competitive product accumulated by Alibaba in the e-commerce field over the past decade . It can support real-time retrieval of hundreds of billions of data , millions of QPS queries, millions of TPS high-time writing guarantees, and millisecond-level query delays and data updates.

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