Taobao Technology

No website develops overnight. As often as not, a website encounters various problems and faces pressure from its business along the way. However, it is these problems and challenges that drive the progress and development of technology which will in turn promote a greater improvement of business. Currently, the traffic of Taobao.com ranks within the top 15 worldwide and top 3 in China, with its system servers expanding from one to over ten thousand.

This book describes the development of the gigantic internet system that is Taobao, and the cause and effect of all the active and passive technological revolutions, told from the perspectives of the engineers. There are a great variety of stories here: a look behind-the-scenes, product experience, framework evolution, technical enlightenment, the growth of prominent figures, inside gossip, and failures as well as inspirational stories. The book is smoothly written with a humorous touch that is rarely found in technical writing, with these first-hand experiences giving the reader a sense of being part of this revolutionary development.

Zhao Chao joined Taobao in 2004 under the pseudonym of Ziliu. He had once become R&D Engineer, Project Manager and Test Manager in succession. Along with the extensive reconstruction of Taobao system and the rapid expansion of talents, he founded Taobao University of Technology in 2009, where a multitude of internal and external engineers have been trained. He is well known as "Principal." In 2011, he wrote his training courses into articles. His writing becomes unstoppable and contributes to this book which summarizes Taobao’s technology in the past ten years.