On December 21, 2021, at the Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing Annual Summit, He Chuan, Senior Product Expert of Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing, delivered a speech entitled Open and Compatible Cloud: Compute Nest Helping Partners' Cloudification. He gave an in-depth analysis of Compute Nest, Alibaba Cloud's new product and enterprise application cloudification engine.
He Chuan, Senior Product Expert of Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing
In recent years, especially in the two years since the COVID-19 outbreak, capital markets have turned their attention to investment in business applications and business services. This reflects the optimism held by the capital market towards the business service market. At the same time, many industry reports show how the speed of enterprise application cloudification and the penetration rate of SaaS are increasing.
We found two trends behind these phenomena.
First, the transformation from consumer Internet to industrial Internet is an irreversible trend. The big picture and Alibaba Cloud's internal market research of our customer base show that the dividend of the entire consumer Internet has peaked.
Second, the transformation of traditional IDC-based IT systems to the cloud is an irreversible trend. Due to the maturity of the cloud platform and the out-of-the-box feature and advantages of cloud resources, many IT facility providers and enterprise customers began to build their IT systems on the cloud.
While the entire industry is undergoing major changes, Alibaba Cloud is thinking about how to serve customers better. In the era of consumer Internet, a majority of our customer base are Internet customers, which are characterized by technology-driven scenarios. Their vast majority of IT facilities are self-built, more based on the technical support provided by the cloud rather than relying on third parties to build business systems. Customer needs have changed in the industrial Internet era. Enterprise scenarios are diverse, but it is difficult for standard cloud products to meet their needs. Alibaba Cloud hopes to serve our common customers together with partners.
In some scenarios, Alibaba Cloud will stand behind our partners and help enterprise customers build IT facilities and serve their customers. This is the original intention of the Alibaba Cloud Compute Nest platform. We hope it can become a new engine for enterprise applications' cloudification. Passengers on a plane are concerned about stability, speed, convenience, and comfort during the flight.
In many business scenarios, what is this plane? It is the products built by our partners to meet the customer's business scenarios. Alibaba Cloud Compute Nest is the engine of this plane. An engine is essential for a plane to take off. Similarly, the engine for enterprise products is indispensable. It is crucial and needs to provide reliable support for the product.
After 12 years of effort, Alibaba Cloud has gained technical capabilities, including IaaS capabilities and PaaS layer products. Alibaba Cloud's PaaS products are built based on the IaaS layer capabilities. If Alibaba Cloud opens its capabilities to incubate PaaS products, partners can build their products based on the same IaaS layer cloud platform. This may help expand the SaaS market and serve customers with partners better.
Alibaba Cloud Compute Nest is not a brand-new product. It is the encapsulation and integration of the technologies and product capabilities that Alibaba Cloud has accumulated over the years. Alibaba Cloud has committed to lowering the threshold for product usage for many years. Compute Nest solves a diverse range of problems in the full-procedure process in serving customers, including delivery, deployment, O&M, management, and service upgrade through scenario-based encapsulation.
Alibaba Cloud has opened up the underlying technical capabilities accumulated over the past twelve years through the Compute Nest, including the service catalog. It includes the customers of Alibaba Cloud's entire ecosystem and the opportunities for customer acquisition in this ecosystem.
When we first started planning the Compute Nest, we received a lot of direct feedback from our partners. After abstracting and analyzing the feedback, we customers faced four major business challenges:
How does Alibaba Cloud Compute Nest help partners meet business challenges?
First, we need to ensure product service stability. We have a partner that did SaaS well at first. With the development of their businesses, their core customers have requirements for privatization deployment in IDC and on the cloud. Each user needs to build resources in their VPC. When customers reach dozens, their original organizational structure was unable to support their business, and this affected their business planning for the future. For such partners, the function of Compute Nest is to reduce their cost of serving so many customers.
The traditional privatization deployment is faced with the problem of data silos. Each step is separate from the other and cannot be predicted in advance. You can only locate the problem and do troubleshooting when users give feedback. Some monitoring data of the application layer can be obtained through SOS and other monitoring tools to do troubleshooting. Sometimes, it is difficult to determine whether the problem is at the application layer or the infrastructure layer. If you encounter network dithering, the situation will get more complicated.
After connecting to the Compute Nest, the underlying layer is a unified Alibaba Cloud platform. Alibaba Cloud can simultaneously provide infrastructure-level data monitoring information and other business information to partners based on the premise that user authorization is given. This enables partners to obtain three-dimensional protection, namely before, during, and after the event, changing from passive response to active prevention.
Another problem encountered by partners is how to select from dozens of Alibaba Cloud security products. They want Alibaba Cloud to tell them what product group they should use for a particular business scenario. Instead of telling them about these product portfolios, the Compute Nest helps them encapsulate these products based on a scenario.
In addition, many customers connect to the Internet on the cloud through the public network, which has security, latency, traffic, and bandwidth issues. Compute Nest helps partners and customers build a secure Internet on the cloud by building a unified intranet.
In terms of scale, the problem that partners need to solve is how to quickly and normatively make their services cover dozens, hundreds, or thousands of enterprise customers. The traditional delivery method is cost-intensive, time-consuming, and involves much duplication of work in management. Compute Nest enables the delivery of all standard products to be realized at a lower marginal cost, especially on the user end, allowing them to self-select. At the same time, it can also help partners achieve large-scale product delivery, thereby improving their service quality.
The last point is about the distribution of Compute Nest and how to get through multiple channels. Alibaba Cloud has many enterprise customers. SaaS partners need to think about small and micro-enterprises and how to reach the To B scenarios. Partners' products can be connected to all Alibaba Cloud ecosystems through the Compute Nest, thus reaching tens of millions of enterprise customers.
With a brand-new multi-channel distribution method, the original way of accessing different channels in different deployment environments and ways is no longer needed. The original access time of half a week or month shortens to a day or a half.
What kind of products can be connected to Compute Nest? Alibaba Cloud Compute Nest welcomes partners from all industries to deploy their enterprise applications and SaaS-based enterprise applications on the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
The cost for partners to connect to the Compute Nest platform is relatively low because partners are not required to make any changes in their application architecture. We set some standards on the service, and partners can access through Alibaba Cloud defined SPI. The business intrusion to partners is almost zero throughout the whole process.
Compute Nest has a complete business and market cooperation plan to support our partners, including the certification system and business training support provided when entering the platform. At the same time, a special cooperation support group is provided, where technical experts can answer questions to support the entire access process.
Our ISV partners, such as Chanjet, Shuyun, Avaya, and Fortinet, have settled in the Compute Nest and obtained licensing certification. In the future, Alibaba Cloud hopes more partners will connect to the Compute Nest to build a new ecosystem of enterprise applications in the cloud computing era.
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