After several weeks of warm-up, Double 11 peaked in traffic yesterday.
Double 11 is not only a consumer carnival, but also a big training of technical supporters. In the past thirteen years of development, from the launch of cloud computing in 2013, to the intelligent customer service in 2016, when it began to play the main role in Alipay, and then to the launch of the merchant pirate image protection tool "Que Chisel" in 2019, every year's double 11 has tested and witnessed a new technological upgrade. Ant Group, which is behind it, not only has to withstand the test of the payment peak this year, but also achieves a green KPI: increase server utilization, reduce carbon emissions, and achieve "stable and green".
In fact, the green theme reflects all aspects of this year's Double 11. Users are more likely to feel the store's promotion support for green home appliances, green logistics and "green 0 account period" on the front end, and in the cloud computing link that they cannot directly touch, the carbon reduction effect achieved by Ant Group through technological innovation also effectively reflects every order.
It is understood that Ant Group also invited the Central Joint Certification Center (CEC) to calculate the carbon emission reduction data during the Double 11 period. Data show that during this year's double 11 period, Ant Group through the large-scale application of green computing, effectively reduce the investment in double 11 servers, after the application of this technology, 11 days to save 640,000 kWh of electricity, equivalent to 820 residents a year of electricity consumption; reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 394 tons, equivalent to 30,000 fuel cars do not travel a day.
01. Double 11 Reduces carbon per payment
As an Ant Group that guarantees functions such as stable payments, in the past, every double 11, the team would joke that "engineers have to drink Red Bull to survive the peak of the flood". There is a statue of Guan Gong in the middle of the workbench, several programmers sitting around the computer, "worshiping Guan Gong to fight the peak" is the unique sense of humor of this group in the face of challenges, and also conveys the pressure they faced during the Double 11 period in previous years.
It is precisely under the pressure of difficulties that Ant Group has independently developed a series of core technologies such as Oceanbase, multi-active structure of three places and five centers, SOFAStack, ant chain, intelligent risk control engine AlphaRisk in recent years, which further improve the work efficiency of the ant team while ensuring the stability of services. Today, the application of "green computing" technology has further improved the efficiency of the use of computing power resources.
It is understood that this year's double 11 is the first large-scale application of "green computing" by Ant Group, and the research and development of related technologies has been opened as early as a few years ago. In 2019, all businesses of Ant Group began to go to the cloud one after another, fully entered the cloud era, began to systematically explore the use of technology to improve the efficiency of computing power resources, and gradually applied these three technologies in daily scenarios. Cloud computing facilitates the functioning of society and also generates energy consumption. Therefore, Ni Xingjun, chief technology officer of Ant Group, believes that in the cloud era, it is not only necessary to pursue the efficiency of computing, but also to evaluate the energy consumption of computing, and simultaneously explore how to achieve "green computing" in cloud computing.
With this social responsibility, relying on open source technologies related to technology giants such as Google, Ant Group has now realized computing power sharing through three resource scheduling technologies: offline hybrid deployment technology, cloud-native time-sharing scheduling, and AI elastic capacity to reduce the carbon emissions of data centers.
Today, Ant Group's server utilization has increased by more than 2 times compared with the same period in 2019. This means that every payment made by Ant users consumes less hash power resources than before. At this moment, the carnival of Double Eleven has ended, resisting the traffic peak is the bottom line guarded by Ant Group, and reducing the carbon emissions of each order is another challenge it has taken the initiative to raise.
02. How can cloud computing achieve "green computing"?
When it comes to "green computing", the current industry is generally concerned about the initiative to reduce the PUE of data centers. PUE is more to reflect the energy consumption of data center infrastructure, but under the "double carbon" goal, PUE has various limitations and cannot fully evaluate the green energy saving of data centers. For example, PUE cannot reflect the actual power consumption, and cannot reflect the proportion of energy consumption of each sub-module inside the infrastructure and IT equipment.
In addition to reducing the data center PUE, in fact, "green computing" also includes the rational allocation of computing resources. At present, this path has not been widely practiced. However, with the efforts of many technical teams of Ant Group in the past two years, they have explored a set of resource scheduling technology systems. Three of the core technologies include: hybrid deployment offline, cloud-native time-of-use scheduling, and AI elastic capacity.
In terms of the image of offline hybrid deployment technology, it is similar to a freight company itself has 10 trucks, the capacity during the double 11 period is insufficient, previously it could only rely on buying more trucks to meet the demand, but now through the scientific deployment of the delivery system, the company can borrow cars, and even embezzle other buses and cars to transport goods together, to avoid the problem of waste of resources after double 11.
Cloud-native time-sharing scheduling technology flexibly allocates the same resource to different activities according to the time period to solve the problem of insufficient resources. For example, some idle server resources give way to Ant Forest at 7:00 a.m., give way to takeout payment at noon, and give way to fund wealth management at 3:00 p.m.
The AI elastic capacity technology is simply to replace human judgment with artificial intelligence to complete the expansion and contraction of the server.
Previous practices by several large technology companies around the world have shown that the rational allocation of computing resources is indeed an effective way to achieve "green computing", such as Google's server utilization rate has reached 60% after technological innovation. The latest calculations of the Central Joint Certification Center also confirm that Ant Group has achieved remarkable carbon reduction results after applying this technical system. Although there is still a gap with companies such as Google, He Zhengyu, head of ant group's trusted native technology department, also said that he hopes to increase ant's server utilization to more than 60% in the next few years.
03. Green mission of science and technology enterprises
In the era of digital economy, big data has become an important means of production, and computing power has become a new productive force. In the past, in the stage of rapid expansion of the industry, most enterprises relied on the extensive way of increasing servers to solve the demand for computing power, but now that they have entered the stock market, refined operation has gradually become the mainstream of each company to maintain growth and continue to tap potential.
On September 22, 2020, China clearly proposed the "carbon peak" in 2030 and the "carbon neutrality" goal in 2060 at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Subsequently, on March 12, 2021, Ant Group also announced its carbon neutrality target, committing to achieving carbon neutrality in operational emissions (Scope 1 and Scope 2) from this year, achieving net zero emissions by 2030, and regularly disclosing carbon neutrality progress from 2021 onwards.
Ant Group serves hundreds of millions of users, processes and calculates massive amounts of data every minute, and will produce billions of lines of code every year. Massive data samples and scenarios are themselves test fields for technological innovation. After its own practice, some of Ant Group's self-developed technologies are still being open sourced to the outside world. For example, the core technology implemented by Ant Group in offline hybrid deployment - the strong isolation technology of Kata security containers, its Kata Containers official website shows that users include Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, IBM, AMD and other companies.
2021 is known as the first year of carbon neutrality, in the process of the whole society moving towards carbon neutrality, Internet technology enterprises with their unique industry volume and technical advantages, shoulder their own decarbonization development and empower the green mission of energy conservation and carbon reduction in various industries. Ant Group has taken a solid step in this process, and from a realistic point of view, more enterprises can only maintain the long-term survival and healthy development of enterprises and society by unswervingly going on.