Aliyun, Alibaba Group’s cloud-computing arm, is providing network services powering a key feature of China Railway’s ticket-booking website in the run-up to the Lunar New Year holiday, during which some 300 million Chinese workers migrate to their home cities and villages to celebrate with families.
For several years, the Ministry of Railway’s website, www.12306.cn, has been overwhelmed with traffic as travelers scramble online to secure tickets home for the holiday. Also known as the Spring Festival, Lunar New Year falls on Feb. 19 in 2015.
Toreduce service outages and improve the rate of successful ticket purchases, this year about 75 percent of the traffic from travelers checking ticket availability on the glitch-plagued site is being handled by Aliyun, which provides the distributed-computing infrastructurefor Alibaba’s giant e-commerce platforms including Taobao Marketplace and Tmall.com.
Checking availability is the first step to buying tickets online and accounts for about 90 percent of activity on the railway ministry’s website—making it the main cause of purchase failures during high-traffic periods like Spring Festival,according to Li Zhiming, an Aliyuntechnician who participated in 12306.cn project.Railway officials boosted network capacity for the glitch-plagued website by using Aliyun’s on-demand cloud services, allowing the government agency to cost-effectively scale up its I.T. infrastructure to cope with massive, seasonal spikes in users.
“The core technology of Aliyun is to connect tens of or even hundreds of thousands of (network) servers as a huge computing resource pool, and then rent the computing capacity to millions of enterprises based on how busy they are,” explained Li. Aliyun also provides cloud services to the China Meteorological Administration and the China Food and Drug Administration, among others.
The railway ministry in May began testing Aliyun services, successfully handling a surge in tickets booked during China’s National Day rush in October, Aliyun officials said.On Dec. 19, when tickets for travel on Feb. 16, 2015,went on sale, the site successfully processed some 29.7 billion visits, or more than 300,000 visits per second.
A record-breaking 9.56 million train tickets were sold on Dec. 19 through all outlets online and offline; 59 percent were sold through the 12306.cn website, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.
