The future trend of train booking: openness and cloud

Whenever the 51, National Day, Spring Festival and other major public holidays, the rush to buy train tickets became a kind of fashion activities, whether it is billionyearold old lady, or 97-year-old young people, have to get up early to the railway station, the sale of the ticket, watching the queue of the Dragon step by step to maneuver is simply worried, It's like being in a slaughterhouse and waiting for the neck to be stabbed.

The Ministry of Railways sympathize with everyone's hard work, so launched a telephone booking and network booking, the former fair, the line busy who can hit, it is to spell time to spell luck. and the network booking due to frequent "refused to land" and by everyone's frequent spit, after a year, the Ministry of Railways still said "we have the ability to solve the problem."

In the long run, in a vast population of large countries transport resources must be scarce resources. Since there are always people destined not to buy tickets, we need to consider how to optimize the purchase of tickets, rather than let everyone after a try to prompt "failed".

Openness-focus on core Services

The Ministry of Railways can recruit the most qualified Internet companies or traditional channel giants to join the booking service through open tendering. The Ministry of Railways is seeking service rather than making money, so the only thing to do is to provide a strong and stable API, all the booking service providers can use the API to complete inquiries, booking, refund process.

The advantage is clear that the Ministry of Railways can put aside the pure web business it is not good at, focusing on providing back-end service support to consumers, and not paying for additional web traffic.

At the same time, open booking service API, also can drive related industries to upgrade, the introduction of market-oriented competition, conducive to consumer purchase experience promotion.

Cloud computing-Resilient upgradeable

At present, there is no mature cloud service for large service, but Aliyun, Sheng, Tencent has been doing some attempts to open its own large number of computing resources to everyone.

With cloud computing services, the Ministry of Railways is able to support more robust API services, supporting flexible expansions without buying expensive hardware, and leveraging the resources of Ali and Tencent, the internet's big companies, to host large bursts of access to ensure that services are not down.

Ensuring fairness and introducing queuing system

Are you trying to log on to 12306 sites and then tip the number of visitors? This is 12306 in order to avoid excessive server pressure, it limits the number of users logged in at the same time.

But a negative question is whether it's just luck to log in, because every second there is a user logged in. Maybe someone landed two times to buy tickets successfully, someone from the early brush to the end of the notice is still unable to log the hint information.

A good idea is to introduce the queuing mechanism of online games and release them according to the order of access. To ensure the stability of the service at the same time, to provide users with a more fair ticket purchase process.

In the long run, the 12306 current way is unable to solve a vote difficult to ask questions, these trends will be validated, may be gradually applied to train ticket booking service in 3-5 years. Of course, these are only soft improvements, improve consumer experience, more need to rely on flexible holiday system and railway network development.