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Person of this issue: Guan Tao, head of Alibaba General computing Platform
Here is Guan Tao:
School years: Got a pass, but probably wasn’t your idea of a straight-a student
Maybe I’m not the kind of student you think I am. I love reading, but I also love playing. I think interest is the most important thing. With school experience, I barely passed the exam all the way. Middle school to high school is recommended, high school to university because of math competition recommended nankai University, read the computer major. I chose computer because I love playing games since I was a child, and I am also able to modify the archive while playing, so I became addicted to computer. Later, I was recommended from Nankai University to Tianjin University for my postgraduate study. I led my supervisor to take the lead in the research of network, and also went further in the field of computer through him.
Besides games, I also love sports. After work, I don’t have much time to play games, but I keep doing sports. When I was in Microsoft, I also served as the chairman of Microsoft China Tennis Association and won the champion of Microsoft big division tennis league. I love snowboarding very much, and I have always been driving to different snowfields on the last day of every year.
Starting out: One of the youngest technical managers at Microsoft, leading a multinational team is more challenging
After graduation from graduate school, I got the offer of Microsoft and worked for 6 years. My first project at Microsoft was infrastructure, mainly responsible for distributed systems. At the time, the volume was still large, and the team had thousands of machines to lay out. The most important test is the ability to expand the system, and this experience has become the foundation for the gradual improvement of the later.
The second project was to do the search background. At that time, the search technology in the whole industry was just starting, which can be understood as a process from 0 to 1. Later, the search background also became one of the most important search architectures in Microsoft background.
Once you’ve done those two storage layers in the background, you start moving up, doing big data, more computing. That’s the third project at Microsoft: Interactive queries. From taking the lead in this project at the beginning to experiencing various system upgrades and updates, more than half of Microsoft’s teams have been using this system since then.
As a senior employee in Microsoft, I decided to work in the counterpart team in the United States for two years as I was adjusting the organizational structure. During this period, I continued to do interactive query and optimization promotion, because I started to lead a team in Microsoft early, and I also led a team in the United States, but this time it was a multinational team. At that time, I accumulated a lot of experience in team management, including how to lead a multinational team and how to communicate with remote teams.
Ali people: From Microsoft to Ali, the return of faith in technology
I have worked in Microsoft for nearly 10 years, both in China and the United States. I led a team in the field of interactive big data computing, which was quite handy at that time. Microsoft is also a big job, you can move to a variety of different jobs and positions within the company. Before, there was also some change every two years or so. In the past decade, local companies represented by BAT have also developed rapidly, and they have been curious about which technology, style and cultural characteristics drive BAT. So at that time, I had the opportunity of Ali, and I was curious to have a deeper understanding, which could also be regarded as making a bigger change.
In terms of the nature of the work, they are both big data engines (with big differences in scale). Besides, Ali has investment in internationalization and also needs transnational experience. Previous technology, engineering and management experience can be reused.
In addition, WHEN I was very young, I once went to Zhongguancun to play. There are two billboards left a deep impression on me, until now I remember, one is the association of “human association, the world will be how”, one is kingsoft software “struggle for the development of domestic software”, these two advertisements reflect… After ten years of turning around, I returned to Alibaba to do general computing platform, which is also a struggle for domestic software.
At Microsoft for nearly 10 years, is on the core project dig all the way, is also on the comparison in the industry leading technology forward, the domestic has the BAT also accelerated the development of many places speed beyond such foreign company Microsoft, Google, as ali established branch in Seattle, ali technology has tended to favor, plus technical line and it also matches themselves, He joined Alibaba, where he became the 22nd employee in the Seattle office.
I’ve been taking teams from Beijing and the United States. This time in Ali, I call it “Cross-strait, Three-place work” (Cross-strait, Beijing, Hangzhou and Seattle). It is true that the work is busier, and many meetings need to take care of the time difference between the two sides, but it is also necessary. The team setup in Hangzhou and Beijing is very neat. Seattle is our overseas R&D center in the past two years, especially the “Cloud Valley” in Seattle, where the three giants of cloud computing in North America are all present. We hope to further enhance our competitiveness through the introduction of overseas talents. This requires more investment and is worth the time and communication costs.
As the three teams fuse and mature, things are going well. Some advantages of r&d globalization have been reflected, such as 24-hour global event cover on duty, domestic and overseas customer and partner meetings, which can be attended nearby (for example, the cooperation with Intel America team was completed by students in Seattle).
Responsibility: At Ali, it’s a big uphill battle
In Ali, I have a feeling that there are more things to do than people. It’s like leading a war team to fight a big, long, hard battle. As for the computing platform, you can imagine an aircraft carrier with a very complex system and a long cycle. Each transformation of this aircraft carrier costs a lot, but if the transformation is in the right direction, the combat capability will be very strong. Computing platform for Ali, is a similar existence.
Ali is in charge of the team with the entire computing platform. Before, each business department of Ali would build its own data platform, but now it is unified under a unified big background. The computing platform is the unified platform and also the data center of the whole Alibaba. More than 95% of alibaba’s internal data is on this platform, with more than 10,000 people living every month, that is, one out of every four Alibaba employees uses this system, and about 3 million views are read every day. When the data of so many business lines of Alibaba are aggregated together, the data has the characteristic that one plus one is greater than two. All these data together are also one of the biggest data values of Alibaba. If this platform does not work, for example, the merchant orders, merchant statistics and commodity dimension information of Alipay will be missing, and the impact is very difficult to imagine.
When I came to Ali, I was working with other architects to overhaul the computing platform, doubling its performance. Many people may not have a clear concept of doubling. For example, if the performance is improved by 5%, the budget can be saved by 100 million yuan. Then doubling the budget is actually saved by 2 billion yuan.
The most typical application of computing platform is the annual Double 11. During the Double Eleven, our team will work for 48 hours. On the first day, we will support real-time flow and interactive query, and on the second day, we need to support component information without interruption. Every year, at the end of The Double 11, the computing platform will also face the biggest flood peak of the year, and the amount of data will increase by three to five times. It is a very tough battle to test the capacity of the whole data platform.
Vision for the future: Make computing platform alibaba’s “hydropower and coal”
For the future of computing platform, it is hoped that it can be popularized as “hydropower and coal” general infrastructure. The specific direction, one is to have originality and deep cultivation, to be able to change from business to a state of deep cultivation in a certain field, to create industry influence. Secondly, ecological online there are so many place worthy of our study, is also worth to integration, hope can make it closed source system with open source very good interactive platform, ensure data resources are unified on the basis of the existing resources system can keep the core ability, such as safer, more efficient, more powerful advantages, also can support open source ecosystem system better, To find the joint in the middle. I am also very confident that we are on the right track. I hope I can lead the carrier of Ali Computing platform to go further.
As far as I am concerned, I also hope to improve the combat effectiveness of the aircraft carrier of computing platform, build its influence in business, scientific research, universities and other fields, and build it into the best computing platform in the world with internal and external business orientation.
Related content:
Guan Tao’s personal blog
2. Alibaba Big Data – player community