How JD’s Bare Metal Cloud Powered the 11.11 Shopping Festival’s Massive Traffic

Background

Facing hundreds of billions of visits and millions of concurrent requests during JD’s 11.11 shopping festival, JD Intelligent Cloud leveraged technical innovations to support massive concurrency and ensure stable operation.

Bare metal cloud hosts provide performance indistinguishable from physical machines. They were used in retail, advertising, recommendation, and search, reducing operational difficulty and improving overall resource utilization compared with virtual cloud hosts.

Cloud‑native technologies such as Kubernetes and containers are widely deployed across JD. Bare metal servers are compatible with existing cloud products, allowing them to be added to Kubernetes clusters for containerized workloads. The combination of bare metal + containers + K8s becomes the optimal solution for large‑scale cloud migration.

Challenges with Traditional Physical Servers

Previously, JD evaluated traffic needs early in the year, procured hardware, and waited for delivery, causing long lead times. Physical servers required days‑to‑weeks of preparation, manual network configuration, limited storage expansion, and lengthy recovery times after failures.

Advantages of Bare Metal Cloud Hosts

Performance : By removing virtualization overhead, bare metal hosts achieve near‑physical performance. Tests show CPU performance +2.7%, memory +24.6%, and network throughput +36% over virtual machines.

Automated Operations : Deployment and fault recovery can be completed in minutes, with the same automation tools and monitoring metrics as virtual machines.

Physical‑Level Isolation : Each host has exclusive compute resources, providing absolute tenant isolation and supporting nested virtualization.

Architecture

The second‑generation bare metal architecture includes a network data plane, storage data plane, and host control plane.

Network Data Plane : Supports VxLAN, flow tables, ACLs, and connection‑tracking offload, enabling fast packet processing via smart NICs and seamless VPC integration.

Storage Data Plane : Based on SPDK to simulate storage controllers, routing read/write requests from cloud hosts to backend storage pools.

Host Control Plane : Integrated with the cloud host management system, providing lifecycle management, one‑click deployment, network and storage configuration, and rich monitoring and recovery capabilities.

Compared with traditional cloud hosts, the bare metal solution offloads network, storage, and control workloads to smart NICs, reducing host CPU usage and improving resource utilization.

The latest generation also uses FPGA to accelerate virtio‑blk and virtio‑net, handling latency‑sensitive workloads on FPGA while the CPU processes complex batch tasks.