Spring at China Scale: Alibaba Group (Alipay, TaoBao, and TMall)
So What Does It Take to Operate at China Scale?

The challenges inherent to building enterprise applications that meet China-scale demand are unparalleled. One exemplary Chinese organization using Spring heavily to solve very unique challenges is the Alibaba group. Alibaba is itself an online auction site, like eBay in the west. The Alibaba group in turn owns a few other online service companies, like Alipay (a secure transaction processor, like PayPal in the west), TaoBao (a comparison shopping engine, like Shopzilla in the west), and TMall (an e-tailer, exposing the catalogues of merchants, like Amazon in the west).
From the InfoQ article, "on 11 November, 2012 (the Double Sticks promotion day), Tmall and Taobao witnessed 147 million user visits, purchases of 30 million people and nearly 100 million paid orders. At 0:00, more than 10 million users were concurrently online." The "double sticks promotion day" is celebrated as a sort of day to honor the single people out there. People make blind-dates, attend speed-dating events, and - somewhat like cyber monday shopping in the US - look for good deals from merchants. TaoBao reported USD $3 billion dollars for a single 24 hour period…