On Nov 17th the 2nd day of QConSF 2015, Dr. Gang He, VP of Technology of JD.com, has given a presentation "JD Internet+ transformation". JD.com is a leading e-commerce platform in China, and is a typical business that transformed from a traditional commerce (an asset-heavy business which runs its own logistics, warehouse, delivery and after-sale services) into an internet-based commerce site (while still owning its heavy assets).
JD.com had moved all their internal businesses onto their private cloud by 2014, and has been working on making their cloud platform public to help other traditional businesses including manufacture, agriculture and logistics industries. This article is a summary of JD cloud development in recent years.
Moving all internal businesses onto private cloud
Before 2013, JD has been applying an SOA architecture style onto their business systems for several years. The rise of OpenStack gave them an option for a more managable infrastructure, and was absorbed into the JD technology stack. JD also experimented with CloudFoundry since its early days and made products using it. While new stacks were being introduced at the base level, applying SOA to business applications was still ongoing work and would remain as the focus of JD’s technology strategy.
By the end of 2013, most internal businesses in JD was running on a shared cloud storage system, a shared middleware platform and a shared automated system operations system. Some new businesses have adopted a cloud database and virtualized machines, but this was not so common for existing businesses.
Making an internal cloud public
JD started making some of their cloud services public in Aug 2014, including their IaaS, PaaS and MBaaS offerings. On Sept 18th of 2014, JD published several industrial-oriented cloud offerings, including E-commerce Cloud, Logistics Cloud, Finance Cloud, Data Analysis Cloud, and an updated IaaS platform. The industrial-oriented clouds focused more on industrial-specific processes and could be bought as public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud options.
During early 2015, JD has decided to stop new user registration for its PaaS and MBaaS to better focus on IaaS and industry-oriented clouds. On Oct 20th of 2015, JD announced their IaaS updates including better auto-scaling, docker support and a new datacenter. JD also announced an initiation of "Internet+ Innovation Alliance" to better spread cloud and data technologies to traditional industries, especially to help traditional industries utilizing the value of data (logistic data, transaction data, user profiles, etc).
JD IaaS now runs one of the largest docker deployment in China, with over 100,000 Docker instances running during the Nov 11th Online Shopping Festival. JD’s image system, product pages, cache system, login system, mobile business, O2O business and many other businesses are now running on these Docker instances.
Summary
JD started from traditional industries and moved to the internet world, it uses internet technology as an extension of its existing offline businesses and successfully built a large online platform. JD uses and builds cloud technologies because cloud can help their business grow faster. They have a distinctive perspective among cloud service providers and their experiences are worth noting. We hope you could get something new from the China Tech Day event!