Tech upgrades drive Alibaba Cloud online shopping | ZAWYA MENA Edition

Tech upgrades drive Alibaba Cloud online shopping | ZAWYA MENA Edition

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology arm of Alibaba Group, said that this year's 11.11 Global Shopping Festival revenue of RMB498.2 billion ($74.1 billion) over an 11-day period was made possible by infrastructure upgrades.Right after midnight on November 11, for example, just 26 seconds after shopping began, peak orders hit 583,000 per second – 1,400 times peak volume at the festival's debut 12 years ago on November 11, 2009.Alibaba's real-time computing platform, powered by Apache Flink, processed data streams totalling 4 billion items per second during peak time, a considerable surge from 2.5 billion last year. MaxCompute, Alibaba's proprietary data warehousing platform, handled up to 1.7 exabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes) of data a day during the 11-day festival from November 1 to 11, equivalent to processing 230 high-res photos of each of the 7 billion people in the world. Despite the extreme scalability and high performance required, no downtime was reported throughout this year's extended festival period.Leveraging cloud-native databases, including PolarDB, AnalyticDB and Lindorm, Alibaba Cloud enabled 11.11 to run smoothly even during peak periods. PolarDB set a new record with 140 million queries per second during peak time at 11.11, a 60% increase from last