Drawing from self-developed infrastructure upgrades, Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence unit of Alibaba Group, saw an 8% year-on-year (YoY) savings in computing cost per resource unit from April 1 to Nov. 11 (which is also the date of the company’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival).

“This year’s 11.11 pushes the new boundaries for Alibaba Cloud, from innovations in green technology to continuing to trailblaze in cloud computing,” said Allen Guo, country manager for the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “We know how significant 11.11 is in e-commerce and one of our yearly benchmarks is to make the festival as efficient and green as imaginable. We are looking to introduce more proven technologies that have successfully support this year’s 11.11 to Philippine businesses.”

In addition to its cloud computing solutions helping to reduce energy consumption, Alibaba Cloud’s five hyperscale data centers across China also doubled the amount of clean energy used to support this year’s 11.11 compared to last year. More than 32 million kilowatt-hours of electricity used by Alibaba Cloud to support 11.11 this year came from renewable energy, up by 30% on a daily basis average compared to last year.

Alibaba Cloud unveils financial services solutions
Alibaba Cloud launches open-source MaaS platform

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud’s Heyuan data center, the cloud company’s largest hyper-scale data center in South China, now runs entirely on clean energy. Alibaba Cloud’s self-developed immersion cooling technology has reduced the energy consumption of the data centers, with power usage effectiveness (PUE) reaching as low as 1.09 – a world-leading level.

Carbon management

Alibaba Cloud has also worked with Tmall to leverage the carbon management platform, Energy Expert. It provided online carbon footprint modeling, calculations and certifications for more than 40 brands in various sectors, including paper & pulp, food and personal care, to help them categorize low-carbon products, identify carbon emission resources and conduct informed sustainability practices to reduce carbon emissions.

Alibaba Cloud also leveraged its innovations to provide not only a seamless but also exciting shopping experience through utilizing high-performance computing and database products, or consumer-facing XR (extended reality) and livestreaming technologies.

This year’s 11.11 was powered by Alibaba Cloud’s dedicated processing unit for the Apsara Cloud operating system. The upgraded infrastructure system improved efficiency of computing, storage and network in data centers supporting the event, while also reducing network latency. With this new upgrade supported by cloud-native technology, ordering, pre-sale balance payment, and refunding could be launched simultaneously with an enhanced scalability and lower latency.

Alibaba Cloud’s cloud-native database products also significantly expanded the capacity of consumers’ shopping carts by more than double, from 120 items to 300. The ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair), a cloud-based in-memory database service for enterprises, supports new functions such as product grouping and sorting, enabling consumers to organize their shopping cart according to their own preferences. They could also make use of the ‘select’ function to enjoy cross-merchant discounts, to pre-order goods and use vouchers for a more rewarding shopping experience.