"Cloud query" 400000 times per second, AliCloud helped 12306 to shoulder the peak of ticket sales this spring festival
After three years of cloud upgrading, this year's 12306 has steadily passed the first wave of Spring Festival travel ticket sales peak: the average response time of a booking transaction is 0.5 seconds, the PV value of the website exceeds 40 billion times every day, and "cloud query" has carried up to 25 billion visits every day.
12306 is one of the largest real-time trading systems in the world, known as the "busiest website". Up to now, the highest daily ticket sales volume is on December 23 (advance sales of tickets for the 24th day of the lunar month), with 11.672 million tickets sold on that day, including 8.556 million tickets sold through Internet channels, 2.13 million more than the peak of the Spring Festival last year.
Experts said that due to factors such as the advance of the Spring Festival travel, the shortening of the pre-sale period, and the superposition of passenger flow, the online ticket selling pressure this year is greater. The last December 27 was the most difficult day to grab tickets for the Spring Festival travel this year, and all the tickets for popular trains were basically sold out within a few minutes after the sale. Nevertheless, the 12306 website and the client have been running smoothly so far, without any problems such as getting stuck or being disconnected.
How to solve it? The answer given by 12306 is to let Alibaba Cloud and other public cloud platforms undertake most of the remaining ticket query business. Zhu Jiansheng, a researcher of the Institute of Computing Technology of China Academy of Railway Sciences, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency that since 2014, 12306 has shared the query business with the largest number of website visits to the "cloud". This year, the cloud capacity has been further expanded. Almost 100% of the query access is conducted in the cloud, and the query capacity can reach 400000 times per second.
As the largest real-time trading system, 12306 has always been a key problem to be solved with high traffic and high concurrency. After a series of technical transformations such as hybrid cloud architecture, evolution and upgrading are gradually realized iteratively.
"Generally speaking, query is the most visited part of most ticketing systems, and its request times generally account for more than 85% of the whole website." Yang Li, an Alibaba Cloud engineer, once participated in e-commerce websites and 12306 projects, told reporters that in the process of transaction related, he would submit query requests many times, not to mention the increased workload after the advent of a large number of ticketing software, All these make the remaining ticket inquiry system become the pressure center of the whole system.
The introduction of public cloud, on the one hand, can provide sufficient traffic space for the Spring Festival travel peak, avoiding the jam and downtime caused by high concurrent traffic impact; On the other hand, when the number of requests decreases, cloud computing resources can be reduced, which can save a lot of costs. Yang Li said.
Up to now, online ticket sales account for 73.3% of the total ticket sales, including 5.762 million mobile APP sales, accounting for 67.3% of online ticket sales. As websites and mobile phone clients become the mainstream channels for purchasing tickets for the Spring Festival Railway, 12306 will also face greater technical challenges.
In addition, scalper ticket scalping has also developed from offline to online. For this reason, 12306 is effectively curbing through innovative technical means. For example, this year, a background conflict judgment mechanism was launched to analyze ticket buying behavior; Analyze the big data of accounts and addresses with abnormal ticket buying behavior, and implement risk prevention and control measures. For example, some IP addresses with too frequent access or too fast ticket swiping will be processed.
Fortunately, Chinese Internet companies have unique advantages and experience in similar high concurrency scenarios, which is reflected in the world famous Double 11. Subsequently, the domestic cloud computing industry and talent pool are also responsive to such extreme scenarios.
Innovatively embracing cloud computing, big data and other technologies, 12306's progress in recent years reflects the rise of China's scientific and technological power as well as industry innovation. "12306 can be seen as a typical case of the application of cloud computing in China, which means that we can fully lead the world in the application of cloud computing, which has a demonstration effect on the popularity of cloud computing", said Luo Zhongwei, a researcher at the Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
