JD International 618 Promotion: Technical Operations, DDoS Protection, and Performance Testing

“Opening red” and “618” are major annual tests for all JD staff, and JD International’s technology R&D department faces significant challenges due to isolated business distribution across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Hong Kong‑Macao, as well as newly launched projects like MCA (Ochama) and the B2B platform that will experience their first large‑scale promotion.

Ochama, a retail new‑business store targeting European middle‑class consumers, launched in the Netherlands on January 10, 2022, and its first major promotion runs from June 10 to June 18, offering nine days of discounts to guarantee the lowest prices in the Netherlands.

To safeguard JD International’s brand and the impact of the 618 event in the Netherlands, the international tech team collaborated with MCA, retail, and technology teams to refine operational plans, covering rule setting, configuration checks, risk assessment, resource evaluation, traffic stress testing, fault drills, DDoS protection, monitoring dashboards, and system inspections.

Operational linkage introduced strong marketing activities such as 1 € items, member discounts, and 610‑80 offers. The tech team focused on rule definition and configuration verification, identifying 24 risks across seven activities and creating a checklist to keep risks controllable.

Retail linkage involved joint reviews with risk control, omnichannel, infrastructure, and payment teams, establishing throttling and downgrade plans, synchronized on‑call schedules, and ensuring each subsystem had dedicated on‑call personnel for proactive detection, rapid response, and post‑event review.

Technology linkage included re‑evaluating the Dutch data center’s infrastructure, deploying Cloudflare with JD Cloud for DDoS protection, setting up a physical machine for traffic monitoring, and conducting pre‑event DDoS drills, resulting in a fully operational anomaly detection and mitigation service without impacting business.

DDoS attacks have grown rapidly, with TB‑scale attacks becoming common and attack vectors expanding to DNS, slow‑loris, APP, API, IPv6, and QUIC. JD International’s systems in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Netherlands are isolated with limited bandwidth, making them vulnerable; thus, DDoS protection is a top priority for the 618 preparation.

The chosen solution, after evaluating domestic strategies, is a Cloudflare‑based approach focusing on APP‑level DDoS mitigation, consisting of four stages: detection, response, routing, and adjustment, with capabilities for scalable protection, temporary policies, and real‑time traffic analysis.

During deployment, an incompatibility issue arose where an application could not respond to HTTP requests from the DDoS protection service; the team plans to use TCP‑DUMP on both application and load‑balancer sides to trace communication and pinpoint the root cause.

The Thailand site’s 618 strategy follows three pillars—attack, defense, and battle—by treating regular requirements as promotion‑level, implementing dynamic tabs, timed configurations, whitelist, throttling, and degradation mechanisms, expanding capacity, leveraging SOA for three‑fold traffic spikes, and conducting full‑link stress tests with force‑bot to simulate real traffic.

Performance testing for the 618 event focuses on accurately estimating maximum concurrent users by correlating peak TPS with unique IP counts to derive concurrency, then scaling TPS by this factor. The team refined a testing model that aligns with real‑world traffic, avoiding over‑provisioning and ensuring high availability, performance, and concurrency.

Real‑time monitoring utilizes Grafana and PFinder to track golden‑link TP99, availability, call volume, JVM usage, and MySQL queries, complemented by 24‑hour on‑call rotations, rapid incident response within five minutes for critical issues, and multi‑scenario backup plans (home, office, hybrid) to maintain system stability despite pandemic constraints.

Overall, JD International’s technology R&D department orchestrated cross‑team collaboration, rigorous risk assessment, DDoS mitigation, performance optimization, and continuous monitoring to ensure a successful 618 promotion across global markets.