Key Takeaways from Ctrip’s Second Investment Summit Technical Session

How much information can an eight‑hour intensive technical sharing session deliver? On December 3, the "Bloodlines Connected, Hand in Hand" Ctrip Second Investment Summit Technical Sub‑Forum was held at the Sofitel Shanghai Sheshan hotel, where senior engineers from Ctrip, Tongcheng, Tuniu, Tujia and other partner companies exchanged the latest internet technologies.

Topic 1: "Tech Infrastructure Supporting a Ten‑fold Business Growth"

Wu Qimin, Senior Director of Framework Development at Ctrip, explained that massive traffic and data growth demand high standards for data handling, development staff, and technical lines. Achieving ten‑fold business acceleration requires eight core middleware components: service framework, mobile gateway, software routing, real‑time monitoring, data access, caching service, job scheduling, and asynchronous message queue.

Topic 2: "Elong’s Automation System"

Dong Chunming, Senior Engineer and Distributed Architecture Lead at Elong, dissected Elong’s automation architecture across three parts – covered business systems, design philosophy, and structural composition. He introduced a service‑tree concept driven by service metadata rather than behavior, aiming for elastic scaling, cost control, and seamless migration across any cloud platform or IDC by 2016.

Topic 3: "Call‑Center Technology Rapidly Supporting Business Development"

Zhu Zhongyuan, Director of Basic Business R&D at Ctrip, analyzed efficient seat management, rapid response to business needs, and intelligent automation in Ctrip’s call center, humorously noting a goal to reduce manpower from 100 to 1,000 staff. Wu Yiting demonstrated the deployment and maintenance of large‑scale seats using the Ctrip VDesktop terminal.

Topic 4: "Ctrip Secure Development Lifecycle"

Ling Yun, Security Director at Ctrip’s Information Security Department, discussed the SDLC model, emphasizing the importance of early‑stage security involvement, “big‑picture, small‑detail” focus on core issues, and a simple yet effective automation approach: passive scanning and active perception, followed by real‑time monitoring to achieve risk visibility, proactive defense, and operational automation.

Topic 5: "Core Technologies of Tuniu’s Pricing Center"

Li Xiaowei, Senior Director of R&D at Tuniu, presented the pricing center’s calculation rules, deployment, storage, and compute architecture evolution, highlighting that pricing is not a standalone business system and that technical solutions enable price updates within 30 minutes, with price change magnitude serving as a KPI for accuracy.

Topic 6: "Achieving 99.983% Website Stability"

Shi Jiangsong, General Manager of Ctrip’s Technical Assurance Center, explained that website stability directly impacts user loyalty. He compared stability metrics from 2014 Q1 (99.901%) to 2015 Q3 (99.983%) and noted the challenge of reaching four‑nines (99.99%) with only 13 minutes of quarterly tolerance, stressing that practical, well‑controlled techniques are essential for medium‑to‑large companies.

Topic 7: "AB/Test Planning"

Yu Lei, Senior Data Analysis Manager at Ctrip, described how AB/Test is widely used to quantify feedback, reduce labor and technical costs across business units, and improve experiment independence, objectivity, and professionalism, while indicating ample room for future enhancements.

Topic 8: "Tongcheng’s Technical Upgrade Journey"

Wang Xiaobo, System Architecture Lead at Tongcheng, outlined the team’s overhaul of overall architecture and transaction systems, establishing middleware, information security, and operations upgrades, including high‑performance access queues, anti‑scraping middleware, data proxies, MySQL source modifications, service‑layer middleware, high‑throughput messaging, big‑data analytics, and highly available caching.

Topic 9: "Improving Stability of Ctrip Hotel Services"

Chen Ruiliang, Director of Hotel R&D at Ctrip, explained how the hotel service handles billions of daily requests, and how technical and process upgrades have raised online service performance and stability, achieving 99.988% availability, which carries significant economic and technical importance.

Topic 10: "Elong Wireless APP Vertical Componentization"

Li Deheng, Head of iOS/Android at Elong Wireless, introduced the vertical component architecture for Elong’s wireless apps, covering product, operations, payment, and membership modules, and detailed the development, testing, and release management processes that improve efficiency and quality.

Topic 11: "Wireless APP Development Lifecycle Management"

Li Li, PMO at Ctrip Technology Center, discussed challenges such as coupling and communication, advocating for organizational decoupling of wireless teams, multi‑department joint development, and end‑to‑end support across requirement, development, testing, release, and operation phases, culminating in a unique “version badge” system that boosts team morale.

The final segment featured live voting for the Best Dry‑Goods and Best Kung‑Fu awards, followed by Eric’s closing remarks emphasizing the value of diverse exchanges, continuous practice, and learning from mistakes. The eight‑hour session concluded with abundant technical insights.