Huawei Cloud’s New Year Defense: How SRE Teams Counter Massive Attacks

In the weeks leading up to the Chinese New Year, a covert group inside Huawei Cloud, dubbed the “blue‑team,” planned and executed more than twenty coordinated attacks aimed at disrupting the cloud’s network and services during the peak traffic period.

The attackers’ motivation was simple: the holiday surge in short‑video, social‑media, and selfie‑app traffic creates the highest load and the greatest risk of failure for cloud providers.

Huawei Cloud’s defense, the “red‑team,” comprised a highly trained SRE group that responded within three minutes of detection and repaired issues within eight minutes, preventing any lasting impact on customers.

Beyond reactive measures, the company operates a 24/7 “special forces” unit of hundreds of full‑stack engineers working in three‑shift rotations, ensuring continuous monitoring and rapid mitigation of any threats, even during the deepest hours of the holiday.

The SRE team has built an intelligent operations platform that automates incident detection, measurement, and resolution, handling over 160 billion monitoring metrics per hour, supporting 10 000+ users, and executing two changes per minute on average.

Through traffic forecasting, AI‑driven scheduling algorithms, and global resource orchestration (including the “Yao Guang” smart cloud brain), the platform keeps the failure rate below 0.01%, equivalent to less than 53 minutes of downtime per year, while nearly 1 000 personnel participated in the New Year defense effort.