Editor's note: From 2008 to 2018, from Alibaba's middleware team to Feitian Babu -- a decade of Xiaoxie and Ali.
In April 2008, Xiaoxie officially joined Alibaba. He first came into contact with the Taobao Mall project and started his ten-year Alibaba technical career. He joined Alibaba Cloud in December last year and served as the head of the eight departments of Feitian. This article invites Xiaoxie to conduct an exclusive interview, in-depth interview about his ten-year experience in Ali, in addition, he also shared the history of Ali's technology development and his career insights.
Jiang Jiangwei (flower name: Xiaoxie), researcher of Alibaba Cloud and head of the eight divisions of Feitian, was the former head of Alibaba's middleware team.
Everything starts from Taobao Mall
Xiaoxie joined Ali during the public beta test phase of Taobao Mall (now Tmall), and this was his first project in Ali. This is almost a parallel project with Taobao. The vastness of the project can be imagined. At that time, Xiaoxie was mainly responsible for the brand shopping guide, that is, the brand page on Taobao. Filter brands sequentially.
To the outside world, it may not seem difficult to replicate Taobao's success, given Alibaba's years of experience in e-commerce. But it backfired, and the early performance of Taobao Mall was not satisfactory.
"2008 was the stage of rapid expansion of e-commerce, and the entire industry presented a more impetuous atmosphere, with giants entering and companies falling," Xiaoxie recalled.
In such a big environment, the problem of Taobao Mall quickly became prominent, and the traffic of the entire website continued to decline. In Xiaoxie's view, there are two main reasons why Taobao Mall's business is not ideal: first, the entry threshold for products is very high; second, Taobao's traffic cannot be diverted. Because Taobao Mall and Taobao are completely independent, except for member data, all systems are independent, including commodities, transactions, points, commodity management and even forums are all independent two systems.
Taobao displays products according to the product latitude, and the structure of Taobao Mall is displayed according to the SPU latitude. It's not a problem as long as technology can solve it. After the overall performance of Taobao Mall was not good, the leaders of the two teams soon began to plan to open up the data of the two platforms. Internally, this project was called "Colorful Stone", which was only a short time from the completion of Xiaoxie's first project. just a few months.
"I mainly undertake several things here: one is to rebuild the original shopping guide system to open up the bottom layer of Taobao and Taobao mall; the second is to connect with the search team; the third is to be responsible for the research and development of commodity management, such as the top and bottom of the goods. Shelves, replenishment, etc." The multicolored stone project started in October 2008 and took half a year to complete.
Whether it is for Xiaoxie or Alibaba, the colorful stone project is very meaningful. It completely connects Taobao and Taobao Mall, and it is the first time that middleware is introduced at the entire architecture level and the entire system is distributed. transformation. Xiaoxie admitted that before this, due to the large business volume and frequent changes in requirements, the overall R&D efficiency of the project was very low, and the traditional IOE architecture was still used in the database, which also brought a lot of complexity. The application solves these problems very well.
"The multicolored stone project has laid a solid foundation for the subsequent development of Tmall, as well as today's system architecture; for me, this project has also given me a deeper understanding of the entire e-commerce system."
Advanced Technology: Full-Link Stress Test and Double Eleven
Of course, this is just the beginning. The rapid growth of Taobao Mall's business has brought new problems to the entire technical system.
Xiaoxie said that the application of distributed systems poses a great challenge to stability. In simple terms, maintaining stability requires monitoring, traffic planning, service governance and many other things, and these products later became the entire Alibaba Group. Stable infrastructure.
"What impressed me the most is that I started doing full-link stress testing in 2013."
Taking Double 11 as an example, the full-link stress test is to simulate the traffic and user scale of Double 11. By simulating such a complex scenario, errors can be monitored and resolved in advance. In 2013, the rapid growth of Taobao Mall brought many complex problems to the distributed system. At that time, the full-link stress measurement technology was the most effective solution: it could reasonably plan the system process, and Let the resources of the cluster be fully utilized, and use the least resources to have the highest flow level.
"But we solved these problems effectively in 2013, so the Double Eleven in 2013 performed very well", which is also the core value of technology.
Ten Years of Wind and Cloud: Counting the Changes in Alibaba's Technology System
He joined Alibaba in 2008, took charge of the middleware team in 2012, and now is the head of the eight divisions of Alibaba Cloud Feitian. Xiaoxie's role is constantly changing, and the entire Alibaba technology system has ushered in earth-shaking changes in the past ten years. In his view, there are three main changes:
- The first change is from open source to self-developed. Alibaba has changed from using a large number of open source technologies to more and more self-developed technologies. Because open source technologies are difficult to meet business needs in terms of code quality and functional requirements, the team must have strong self-research capabilities. Of course, after the self-research, the team made a lot of open source to make the product run better.
- The second change is from a chimney architecture to a distributed architecture. With the growth of business scale, distribution is inevitable. Today, no server or system can support such a large computing power.
- The third change is from the pursuit of qualification to the pursuit of perfection. Ali is constantly promoting technological progress, and is constantly applying and improving in the process of landing. Whether it is cloud computing, or the IaaS, database, server, business system, etc. that the team is developing, it is a process of continuous iterative growth, pursuing the ultimate innovation in the field.
Technological Growth: Role Shift is also Responsibility Shift
Being in Alibaba Cloud means getting closer to customers, which is the biggest change for Xiaoxie.
"In the past, the middleware team, products and team running-in were relatively mature, so our focus was on the challenges of Double Eleven every year. But in Alibaba Cloud, we will face various needs and require us to pass the product To present - this is a big difference." Xiaoxie believes that Alibaba Cloud is both a technical team and a business team. This is a very essential difference, and it is necessary to continuously optimize the product according to the needs of customer feedback. And the feedback to the response of the entire demand needs to be kept unobstructed.
But for Xiaoxie, there is no acclimatization to experience such a change. Whether it is the middleware team in Zhongtai or Alibaba Cloud, which is closer to the business, what remains the same is that everyone has the same mission and vision, as well as their commitment to innovation. The ultimate pursuit. In the past six months of Alibaba Cloud, the combat effectiveness of this team has also exceeded his expectations. "The overall technical strength of the Alibaba Cloud team is very strong, and the team's acuity to the market has been very good after many trials. The combat effectiveness of this team is very strong."
Alibaba Cloud Feitian 8 has exported core businesses such as elastic computing, database, network, and storage to the outside world. It is no exaggeration to say that this may be Xiaoxie's biggest battle in the past ten years. In this regard, Xiaoxie believes that the team will mainly do three things next: the first is to solve customer pain points; the second is to improve product competitiveness, improve product cost performance, stability and other indicators; the third is to continue to introduce cloud computing. Top talent.
"I don't want the team to blindly chase hot spots. For the R&D team, focusing on technology is the core task."
postscript
Xiaoxie is a humble, gentle, and easy-to-get-to-be-loved technology god. During the interview, Xiaoxie repeatedly emphasized that technicians should be serious, humble, self-learning, and maintain self-confidence. In addition, despite the fast pace of work in Alibaba Cloud, he has never neglected his family responsibilities.
"Besides work, I also have to deal with home affairs. I will share some fulfilling and interesting things at work with them."