On July 12, at the opening ceremony of Discover Ant Summer Camp for Interns, Lu Su, the first intern of Alipay, currently Ant CTO and COO of international business Group, came to the scene and shared his growth story with Alipay.
Ants are the stage for young people
When I stood on the stage and saw everyone, I remembered myself more than ten years ago. I should have been the first intern of Alipay, but by today’s standards, I might not have had the chance to join Alipay at that time.
In 2004, I first became connected with Alipay because of a project on Taobao. 05 years to pay Treasure from Taobao in the peel out, become a real third-party payment platform. There were four engineers in the team, and I was one of them. Although I am an intern, I became the chief designer of this project because of my experience in the early development of Taobao and people’s trust in me.
At the end of the day, I had a nagging feeling that there was no problem with the system architecture, which was critical to the project. I took the code out and looked at the architecture from an objective point of view, and found that many of the problems my colleagues had reported did exist. I sat back and thought, in such a critical system, I had used so many unproven technologies, and it was unknown what would happen once it went live.
In the early hours of that morning, I made a decision that I was going to completely overturn the system and start over. Feeling cornered, I wrote a prototype of the system overnight. The next morning, my supervisor and I called the project team into a meeting. One: admit mistakes. The system has made big mistakes. Second: and we discuss how to do? At this time whether to overturn the system to do a new architecture; Third: since much of the previous work was done on the old architecture, I was responsible for moving the old architecture to the new architecture. In order to keep up with the schedule, people are going to write new features. Then I wait to be judged…. But to my great dismay, they all said, “Support the new architecture! This project must succeed!”
Later, the project was successfully launched in May, laying the foundation for alipay’s future development. After this program, my internship is almost over, and I officially joined Alipay in July.
The ant is the stage of the brave
After I joined Alipay, I wrote codes day and night. In the early stage of Alipay, the transaction volume was rising every day, and the system also needed to grow rapidly. In 2007, we made a decision that we had to overturn the system made in 2005 in order to support the development of Alipay.
At that time, the project was called “Account Phase III”, which is one of the most famous projects in the history of Alipay. It had to be rewritten with a new business architecture and a new business idea, launched in October and released in December.
On this project, we made a big mistake: we used the latest technology. Middleware was all written with middleware, and as a result, all systems had to be rewritten, and billions of pieces of data accumulated over the years had to be put into a new format.
When we were about to launch, the technical director of Alipay asked us whether we could launch this project. After evaluation, we felt we were not quite sure. A week later, when they asked us if we could do it, we said, “A bug is a disaster.” After so many iterations, our CTO finally said, “No, we can’t wait any longer,” so we launched at midnight on January 22nd.
There were two things that we didn’t think of after we sent it. First, all the demands of users and merchants were pressed for a whole day, which completely exceeded the capacity of our system. Second, the system kept reporting errors: “Wrong money, wrong trade.” I was almost mechanical, constantly restoring systems, constantly solving problems. At that time, there was only one voice in my mind: “Alipay is over, Alipay is over.” Back then, if there was a real problem, Alipay might really be over. But as we digested the user’s needs, the system stabilized. Look, all the alarms are false alarms. It’s a procedural problem, not a system problem.
However, this project shows that we were really brave at that time. A lot of decisions were made that, from a professional point of view now, may not have been right. But we rushed over, because this brave decision, laid the foundation for the development of Alipay.
The ant is the stage of the dreamer
By 2009, we had a major change, double 11! In 2009, the promotion did not have too much feeling, that is, after the double 11, trading volume rose by 30%. At the beginning, we didn’t have much preparation for singles’ Day in 2010. But after midnight, the business volume increased several times, and everyone was very nervous. No one dared to rest that night, and by 8 o ‘clock in the morning, we saw that the trading volume had been rising several times the daily trading volume, and we knew that the day would not pass. Because our system is not designed for that kind of volume. That day we basically did a few things: one, put all the machines where they were needed most, and two, kill all the servers we could kill, and focus on payment.
After that project, a huge project was launched, which was called Alipay’s third-generation cloud payment architecture at that time. The core of the project was how to put the technical architecture on the cloud, and transform the ROI, IBM minicomputer, Oracle database and storage into a truly cloud-based architecture. This project has been under way for almost three years, and this is May 2013, when we took the last minicomputer off the production line. At that time, I felt that the team had a very clear dream for the future: to build their own platform and build their own core database.
Nothing can be done without a dream. From 2009 to 2019, we have been able to stand loneliness and injustice. Now our self-developed database has been able to bear all the business. It’s used by many companies in the market, and it’s really innovative in many technical metrics, and it’s a database that defines the future.
Ant Financial has come so far because it believes in young people and gives them a very good stage to become successful and define the future. Because of our courage, Alipay still faces many challenges today, but as long as we are together, as long as we have courage, we can certainly overcome them. It is also because of adhering to the dream, as long as we believe in our dream together, there will be miracles, in this process we have created a lot of miracles.
We look forward to more young people with dreams and courage to join us and define the future together!
