Interview with Zhuoran Zhuang (Ares) & Zhao Xu

QCon: What are your main take aways for your QCon talk?

Ares/Zhao: We'd like to share our thinkings on technical infrastructure and solutions in mobile era. In the past few years, we have done a lot of interesting technology innovation and architecture upgrade, so as to ensure that our user experience, research and development efficiency and scalability meet the needs of the mobile era. We do hope to share how Alibaba scales and optimizes the mobile infrastructure, with agility and performance guaranteed to handle 300 Million monthly active consumers in this session.

QCon: When you say user experience, what are you describing?

Ares/Zhao: The mobile user experience covers design, functionality, stability, performance and more dimensions in general. Regarding our talk, we will mainly focus on the mobile application performance, which normally has two major quantitative assessment: client rendering time and network speed, and share how we make improvements on network performance.

QCon: How will you plan to go about discussing Taobao's architecture in the talk?

Ares/Zhao: First we will start from taobao server-side architecture principle & overview, and then share the case study of 11.11 online shopping festival. Based on these, we will let our our considerations on architecture design when evolving to mobile era, by figuring out the key differences in architecture characteristics, and finally show how we solve technical challenges in Taobao Mobile application.

QCon: Can you tell me more about 11.11?

Ares/Zhao: The 11.11 shopping promotion festival, held annually on Nov. 11, was a light hearted holiday for China's single people. After first launch in 2009 by Tmall.com of Alibaba, it has grown over the last several years into a shopping frenzy as millions of Chinese consumers frantically take to their keyboards to score discounts of up to 50 percent. On Nov. 11, 2014, some $9 billion worth of goods were sold on Alibaba Group shopping platforms Tmall.com and Taobao Marketplace, making the event the largest 24-hour online shopping binge in the world. By comparison, online sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday topped $2.9 billion in 2013, according to comScore.