5 Steps to Successfully Manage Peaks in Online Demand

The Alibaba Cloud 2021 Double 11 Cloud Services Sale is live now! For a limited time only you can turbocharge your cloud journey with core Alibaba Cloud products available from just $1, while you can win up to $1,111 in cash plus $1,111 in Alibaba Cloud credits in the Number Guessing Contest.

Find out more about how the cloud powers The Technologies behind the Biggest Global Shopping Festival in our latest whitepaper.

The Double 11 Global Shopping Festival continues to set new records. The 2020 event recorded more than US$74 billion GMV, with a peak of 583,000 orders created per second.

Events like Double 11 also highlight how technology can boost your business, providing organizations with a blueprint for e-retail success. In this post, we reveal how companies can manage peaks in demand, to provide your customers with a consistent and reliable online experience.

Step 1: Choosing the Right Infrastructure

It’s vital to put the right architecture in place, to provide your end users with a reliable and high-quality online service. Our Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is the foundation on which many cloud-based services sit, providing a high-performance, stable, reliable and scalable solution to online businesses.

Our Server Load Balancer (SLB) boosts your scalability, distributing inbound traffic among multiple ECS instances. Used in conjunction with Auto Scaling, you can also dynamically scale up your servers for guaranteed stability and availability.

Express Connect also allows you to establish high bandwidth, reliable, secure, and private connections between different networks.

Step 2: Providing Seamless Content

In today’s hyper-digitized world, our online interactions are not a one-way experience. Whether researching, buying or watching a video streaming review of a product, users want to seamlessly interact with digital storefronts, unconstrained by geographical boundaries.

High-quality content provides businesses with a competitive advantage. Our Content Distribution Network (CDN) and Apsara Live solutions, for example, can help businesses reach shoppers and sellers alike.

During the promotion period of Double 11, a massive amount of AI and video/image transcoding was also performed on heterogeneous computing clusters provided by Alibaba Cloud, which are also ideal for parallel computing.

Step 3: Safeguarding Your Platform with Scalability

During the 2019 Double 11 event, the Alibaba Cloud platform automatically detected and blocked more than six billion attacks from 184 countries.

This was only possible thanks to our extensive range of end-to-end security solutions, which work across your application, data and platform security. These solutions are highly scalable and include Web Application Firewall (WAF), Anti-DDoS Premium, and Threat Detection Service.

Step 4: Managing Data Effectively

By the end of the 2019 Double 11 event, 970PB of data had been processed and close to 1.3 billion orders were generated. In 2020, the Cainiao network processed from the 2.3 billion orders. That’s a lot of information to process and manage within only 48 hours.

The ApsaraDB umbrella provided most of the database services during Double 11. Our MaxCompute fully hosted GB/TB/PB level data warehouse solution also supported all of the offline big data computing activities during Double 11.

Our AnalyticDB data analytics services was also run in conjunction with PolarDB during Double 11, enabling big data processing in order to gain actionable insights. Thanks to AnalyticDB, the difficulties of storing massive amounts of data are resolved and quick and precise real-time analysis could be carried out.

Step 5: Ensuring Fast Deliveries

Your scalability doesn’t end in the online world. Most e-commerce businesses need to deliver physical products to the end consumer. Our IoT Platform, for example, helped expedite deliveries during the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival.

What’s more, our Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is also helping businesses further streamline their operations.

To summarize, there are many cloud-based solutions to help businesses manage peaks in online demand. The great thing about the cloud is that it’s a highly scalable option – where businesses only pay for the resources they use, with no upfront costs and ongoing O&M expenditure. It’s a win-win for businesses eager to grow in the online world, without compromising on cost or the end-user experience.

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Alibaba Cloud is a world-class cloud provider with extensive experience in the e-commerce industry. To find out more about our work during Double 11, download our new whitepaper The Technologies behind the Biggest Global Shopping Festival.

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5 Steps to Successfully Manage Peaks in Online Demand

Step 1: Choosing the Right Infrastructure

Step 2: Providing Seamless Content

Step 3: Safeguarding Your Platform with Scalability

Step 4: Managing Data Effectively

Step 5: Ensuring Fast Deliveries

Discover More

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