Cover Story
Black Tech at the Back of Huawei Vmall

Huawei has released multiple best-selling mobile phones. Days after each release, friend circles still bustle with the news over the exquisite workmanship, photo-taking capabilities, and excellent system performance of the new flagship phones. The question everyone wants answered though is where they can get their hands on it.

Every time a new phone is released, Huawei IT engineers tasked with maintaining the e-commerce website have to think about how much pressure will be exerted on the backbone systems powering Huawei Vmall. Once the sales start, Vmall is inundated with traffic, requiring a highly flexible architecture to support such massive volumes. Huawei fans want the best new phone, so the technical systems better keep up with the demands of unforgiving consumers who don’t want to hear that systems are down.

The self-operated Vmall e-commerce platform adopted HUAWEI CLOUD from the very beginning to deliver the on-demand scaling and other supercharged attributes needed to ensure top UX. This adoption echoes an analogy of Mr. Ren Zhengfei of Huawei, who once said: "The cook should be first to eat his own food just as those who make parachutes should be the ones to make the test jump."

What requirements does Vmall place on HUAWEI CLOUD? How does HUAWEI CLOUD help Vmall power through the challenges during promotional flash sales? What unique perspectives does HUAWEI CLOUD have on the e-commerce industry? All these are questions that fans of Huawei are dying to know. Recently, several technical experts at HUAWEI CLOUD shared on the technical strengths and wide-open flexibility of the platform that make the on-demand scaling in performance and capacity possible to keep all the hungry fans satisfied.

HUAWEI CLOUD Has Been There from the Beginning

  After several rounds of iteration, including those in infrastructure and platforming, Vmall has become one of the largest e-commerce sites in China.

Huawei technical experts emphasize that a large proportion of Vmall’s revenues comes from flash sale activities. Unlike most enterprise systems whose traffic remains fairly constant, e-commerce systems like Vmall must absorb exceptional high levels of volume during new product releases and the biggest annual shopping days like the unofficial Single’s Day in China on November 11, which resembles the Black Friday shopping frenzy in that States. In peak hours, the number of transactions per second is more than 1000, and the peak traffic reaches 30 GB. The high concurrency of the traffic would place great pressure on the IT resources if traditional resource scheduling methods were used because there would be no time to cope with the large volumes of traffic. Therefore, Vmall needs to expand a large number of resources in a short period of time, including network bandwidth and storage and compute resources.

 HUAWEI CLOUD is able to deliver on all fronts with on-demand response. In 2016, Huawei released the HUAWEI Mate 9 Porsche version. HUAWEI CLOUD was able to accurately estimate the peak volumes and used automated scheduling tools to provide the needed resources to keep the flash sale experience smooth throughout the entire event. During the launch of the new product, the number of users on the Vmall increased by nearly five times with the number of concurrent users reaching the millions range. Transactions reached CNY 100 million in just nine hours. Thousands of high-severity attacks were detected. HUAWEI CLOUD was able to handle all of these volume demands and prevent all of the attacks without any deterioration in user experience so fans could enjoy the tech-feeding frenzy.

Vmall’s Three "Must-Haves"

Vmall’s requirements on HUAWEI CLOUD do not stop at just flexible deployment of resources. HUAWEI CLOUD provides a full set of solutions, eliminating any blind spots in tech to provide 360-degree coverage in IT and cloud enablement.

In terms of platform requirements, HUAWEI CLOUD focuses on system scalability and provides flexible cloud resources to ensure high reliability in the complete active-active/DR profile.

In terms of service requirements, HUAWEI CLOUD delivers a complete catalog with all the needed utilities to empower Vmall. It takes only five minutes to provision 300 VMs, a task that would have taken one day (much too long) before without the agility of the cloud platform. In addition, HUAWEI CLOUD offers elastic bandwidth, self-configurable load balancing, anti-DDoS security protection, API interface management, and a host of other offerings so Vmall can accelerate service rollouts.

In terms of O&M, HUAWEI CLOUD features easy-to-use interfaces, cloud-based monitoring and reporting, and real-time data reporting to simplify management. Currently, there are less than 10 O&M team members at Vmall, which is enough to handle the O&M management of all Vmall systems with the services available in HUAWEI CLOUD.

The Risk-Control Engine Ensures Full Security of All Transactions

Huawei Vmall must be able to fend off tens of millions of attacks on normal days; that number doubles or triples on product-release days like that of the Mate 10 series of smartphones. The attacks come in all forms, from account- and transaction-based to DoS and hacking attempts on servers.

Huawei Vmall uses intelligence-enabled AI risk control utilities that allow developers to define risk control rules. All rules support the use of standard SQL (such as SQL99) stored procedure definitions, allowing all developers to develop rules with zero learning costs and implement dynamic rule writing. New rules take effect within seconds, something that was impossible just a few years ago. To be effective, data from an entire month needs to be associated with rules during calculations. Currently, no other platform in the world can complete the operation within 50 ms like the Huawei intelligence-enabled AI risk control utilities are able to accomplish. In the financial domain, a 50-millisecond response detection process is embedded in the transaction process to identify the legitimacy of the transaction in real time. If fraud is suspected, the transaction is stopped or a warning is provided, which can effectively prevent credit card theft and other risks.

HUAWEI CLOUD E-Commerce Solution: Taking Enterprises Further

Vmall has served as a test-bed, demonstrating the intense firepower of the HUAWEI CLOUD. The cloud platform has prevailed in each and every live performance test. The full vetting of the e-commerce solution in powering the needs of Vmall has shown operators of other e-commerce platforms that they can rest assured.

For e-commerce users, the biggest attraction of HUAWEI CLOUD is the rich set of industry-specific platforming and services, combined with the basic cloud services and end-to-end e-commerce solutions enterprises need to build up their own ecosystem. Enterprises can build their e-commerce platforms with just a few clicks, create and configure all resources with high levels of automation, and automatically scale compute resources to suit ever-changing service requirements and ensure services remain up at all times.

 HUAWEI CLOUD also provides Hadoop, Spark, HBase, and other capabilities so users can quickly and efficiently process user data, analyze trends in user behavior, and extract the supports from data to improve product display, promotion, operation, and personalized recommendation efforts. These capabilities help e-commerce enterprises optimize business operations and improve return from their marketing investments.

HUAWEI CLOUD technical experts added that e-commerce solution provides a one-stop cloud solution for customers of different scales so they can quickly and cost-efficiently deploy services. The high flexibility, high reliability, high concurrency, and robust protections made possible with the solution allow operators of e-commerce platforms to easily scale ahead of the demands of promotional, seckill, and blowout events. One representative from Huawei was quoted as saying, "Huawei maintains clear service boundaries in delivery of its e-commerce solution. Flexible service scheduling capabilities reduce TCO and allow operators to easily cope with the traffic peaks, thereby improving the shopping experience through static content acceleration and optimization. The comprehensive security protections in the solution also ensure a completely safe experience."

Cloud is becoming a basic utility for organizations of all sizes. More and more e-commerce outfits are moving their services over to the cloud. Anta’s direct marketing mall integrates its on-premises and cloud arms, facilitating rapid business growth. The Pharmacy Network Store (yaofangwang.com) has more than 200,000 drugs available for purchase from more than 100,000 in-network pharmacies, nearly 20,000 hospitals, and more than 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers. HUAWEI CLOUD provides elastic scaling and unlimited capacity expansion capabilities to help yaofangwang.com to easily scale ahead of the demands of promotional and seckill events. YouGuoWang.com is a social networking platform in China. Through the back-end management of HUAWEI CLOUD, plenty of functions come into place to support the selection, purchase, provisioning, configuration, operation, management, and monitoring of services and products, turning complex IT operations into fast and simple ones. Nearly every industry has erected e-commerce platforms to increase information availability, improve revenue, and smooth transactional processing. Find out how HUAWEI CLOUD can help you get your fully functional e-commerce platform online in no time.