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——Focus on digital intelligence and change business
Have you bought a ticket for this "May 1st"?
The popularity of May Day this year can be described as "unprecedented". On April 28 (the day before the holiday), Shanghai's single-day tickets to all stations across the country were sold out. This is the first time this has happened in 115 years. Not only the Shanghai Railway, but also the national railway statistics will send 120 million passengers during the May Day period, which is an increase of 20% compared to 2019 before the outbreak...Train tickets, air ticket bookings, hotel bookings, scenic spot bookings, etc. are all extremely hot.
As one of the largest online travel service companies in China, a large number of users use the Ctrip platform to make travel reservations every day. On the eve of May Day, hundreds of millions of users flooded into the platform, and the transaction volume reached a peak, which put forward extremely high requirements for the stability of the platform and the timeliness of service response.
In addition, the massive amount of data pouring into the platform also means an increase in data management costs, and also requires it to increase attention and investment in user data security and privacy protection, so as to meet the challenges of operation and maintenance.
In order to "continuously improve user experience and provide perfect journeys for passengers from all over the world", on April 25, Ctrip Group and Amazon Cloud Technology announced the establishment of a "joint innovation laboratory" and a long-term cooperation to accelerate digital and intelligent innovation.
The Joint Innovation Lab will rely on Amazon Cloud Technology's advanced technologies and industry practices in cutting-edge fields such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to help Ctrip Group continuously optimize overseas business systems, improve global operational efficiency, and continuously improve user experience. Provide the perfect journey for passengers from all over the world.
It is understood that this year is the fifth year of cooperation between Ctrip Group and Amazon Cloud Technology. The establishment of the joint innovation laboratory is another milestone in the cooperation between the two parties, and it also marks the new exploration of Ctrip Group in the application of Amazon Cloud Technology.
The road to the cloud
The cooperation between Ctrip Group and Amazon Cloud Technology has a long history.
As early as 2017, the two parties began to have in-depth understanding and close communication; in 2019, Ctrip Group accelerated the pace of overseas data migration to the cloud, and with the help of Amazon cloud technology, it built an overseas cloud foundation. This year, the basic framework, CI/CD, and monitoring system of Ctrip Group's overseas business were successfully deployed in Singapore to lay a foundation on the cloud; Ctrip Group's international business department was also successfully launched.
In 2020, the overseas air ticket reservation system will be migrated to the cloud, and the elastic resources on the cloud will be used to flexibly respond to business changes. Hotel direct connection service, using the cloud native system to explore the rapid delivery of cloud business, reduce the delay of overseas data acquisition, and try the practice of operation and maintenance automation.
In 2021, overseas digital marketing will be launched. The marketing email project of Ctrip Group's international business was successfully launched within 3 days, reaching a monthly sending volume of 100 million emails; it also used the Amazon cloud technology video live broadcast solution to quickly launch overseas live broadcasts, driving business improvement.
In 2022, the scope of application will continue to expand. Ctrip Group’s international business microservices migrated to Amazon Cloud Technology, becoming a successful pilot of Ctrip Group’s “Overseas Cloud” strategy, improving the continuous integration and delivery pipeline of functional modules for existing application development, and finally completed the first batch of 5 microservice projects on time The transformation is online. At the beginning of 2023, multiple micro-services of Ctrip Group's international business will be connected with Amazon cloud technology, providing the best model for the follow-up cooperation of more departments such as air tickets and hotels and mature business component tools in the future.
With the in-depth cooperation between Ctrip Group and Amazon cloud technology, cloud technology has achieved remarkable results in empowering the intelligent upgrade of the tourism industry:
1. Improve the flexibility and flexibility of business deployment. As an online travel service provider, Ctrip Group needs to continuously expand and shrink servers to cope with the peak and trough of transaction volume. Amazon Cloud Technology's elastic computing service and container service can help Ctrip Group quickly build and expand highly available cloud-native applications. Improve business agility and scalability.
2. Energy saving and cost reduction. With the global expansion of Ctrip, the volume of overseas data has gradually increased, and the cost of operation and maintenance has also increased. The relational database service of Amazon Cloud Technology can help Ctrip easily build and manage high-performance databases, provide minute-level large-scale dynamic expansion and contraction capabilities, shorten network delays to 100 milliseconds, and increase resource utilization by 6 times, the CPU consumption is reduced by 7 times, and the total memory consumption is reduced by more than 96%, achieving substantial cost savings.
3. Intelligent analysis. Ctrip Group can use Amazon Cloud Technology's artificial intelligence and machine learning services to improve user experience and transaction efficiency. For example, use the voice conversion service of Amazon Cloud Technology to convert the user's voice into text, so as to better understand the needs of users; use the recommendation engine service of Amazon Cloud Technology to recommend personalized travel products to users.
4. Safe and compliant data protection. Ctrip Group needs to ensure the security and privacy of user data. Amazon Cloud Technology provides the world's leading security and compliance services, including network security, identity and access management, encryption and key management, etc., which can help Ctrip protect the security and privacy of user data .
5. Stable network transmission, covering global users. In response to overseas business expansion needs, Ctrip Group needs to quickly transmit overseas content and services to users around the world, and Amazon Cloud Technology can provide global coverage of high-speed network and content distribution services to help Ctrip Group achieve global high-speed transactions.
Various cloud computing services and solutions of Amazon Cloud Technology can provide Ctrip with more efficient, flexible and reliable technical support, and help Ctrip Group maintain its leading position in the fierce competition.
At present, Ctrip Group's travel business has spread to more than 200 countries and regions around the world, has more than 30,000 channel partners and millions of hotels and travel route services, and provides more than hundreds of millions of members worldwide with mobile applications, A full range of travel services including hotel reservations, air ticket reservations, travel and vacation, business travel management and travel information.
Cooperation and upgrade
This joint innovation laboratory is an upgrade of the close cooperation between Ctrip Group and Amazon Cloud Technology.
In this regard, Gu Fan, general manager of the Strategic Business Development Department of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China, told Data Ape: "The joint innovation laboratory has brought our cooperation into a new chapter. There will be more cooperation in AI. I also hope that the cooperation between the two parties can help Ctrip Group find more innovative scenarios, whether it is intelligent search, personalized product recommendation, or even personalized travel planning. Looking forward to The two parties can work together to do more exploration in the direction of 'engineering of large industry models', and I believe this will bring more value to the business."
Regarding the innovative technical solutions provided by the joint laboratory, Liu Yaxiao, CTO of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China, made a further explanation. The joint innovation laboratory takes improving user satisfaction as the ultimate goal and subdivides it into two short-term goals:
One is to combine new solution capabilities to connect business and technical departments. The user-centered innovation method quantifies user satisfaction as a design standard for digital tools, through which relevant tools can be delivered quickly, and iteratively precipitated into a set of tools related to user satisfaction.
The second is to use short-term projects to co-create prototypes of landing technologies. Through design and customization, the general AI large model is integrated and launched in an engineering way, and the cloud architecture is optimized to provide users with fully controllable self-service (Self-Service), and build various digital capabilities related to user satisfaction .
Take the exploration of international air ticket service experience optimization scenarios as an example: firstly, in the innovation experience workshop, connect digital tools with overseas users’ air ticket search and recommendation satisfaction; secondly, add general AI large models to digital tools to optimize overseas air tickets Search results improve the matching degree; if the optimization results do not improve significantly, further consider combining search, user and large language models to explore whether it can better understand customer needs and provide corresponding products; finally consider whether it is necessary to train a Airline large model, and whether the capabilities of the model can be generalized to other fields, such as cost optimization management.
In 2023, as the first year of cooperation, the technical work of the joint innovation laboratory will focus on three aspects:
First, explore the optimization of cloud technology architecture to improve deployment and operating costs, etc., and invest all our efforts in making a customized version of the "Well Architect" tool for Ctrip to support its overall expansion needs.
Second, explore multi-modal AI and comprehensively utilize diverse customer information to extract knowledge.
Third, explore the large-scale engineering model and discuss the development of the large-scale model of Ctrip.
In terms of AI large-scale model and travel business exploration, Liu Yaxiao said that he will first consider the application of the general-purpose large-scale model in the existing digital tools of Ctrip Group, and explore the application of the large-scale model in vertical fields such as airlines, hotels, and customer service based on its own advantages. Whether it can provide customers with a better experience is a process of continuous exploration and continuous iteration.
Zhang Chen, executive vice president of Ctrip Group, said frankly: "For the large model, we believe that the core is to find the right scene, not to make a large model for the sake of the large model. To analyze the travel scene, the integration of the large model with what scene may affect our user experience and Efficiency brings the greatest improvement, which is a process of continuous exploration and innovation, which is why we established this joint innovation laboratory."
"Ctrip Group is committed to improving the travel experience and lifestyle of global travelers. The global infrastructure and cloud services of Amazon Cloud Technology are the strong support for our globalization core strategy. The establishment of the joint innovation laboratory of the two parties will help us in the latest technology Explore and practice business innovation scenarios in the field, build in-depth digital and intelligent service capabilities, and provide better and faster journey experience and services for global tourists." Zhang Chen said.
Ctrip Group is the world's leading online travel service provider, and Amazon Cloud Technology is the world's leading cloud computing service provider. With the comprehensive deepening of cloud innovation between the two parties, Ctrip Group "enhances user experience and provides perfect journeys for hundreds of millions of travelers." "The vision is expected to be realized.
Text: Mu Yang / Data Ape
