Talking about the four major trends of cloud computing

Trend 1: The pursuit of security is never-ending, and trustworthiness will become the standard configuration of cloud servers according to the seventh-generation ECS product manager, Alibaba Cloud's seventh-generation cloud server ECS is fully equipped with trusted chips. It supports virtual trusted capabilities and provides verification capabilities for core components in the instance startup process. At the same time, the trusted technology interface is open, allowing users to carry out secondary development according to their own needs.

Trustworthiness is a digital security protection technology. A set of benchmarks will be built in advance to define the required operating environment. When the user's system or software is started and running, if the current state does not match the benchmark, an alarm or interception can be issued.

Traditional computer security protection mainly collects a series of vulnerabilities or virus databases, and uses them as blacklists to detect applications, and if found, patch or antivirus in time. This method is post-event, and once the virus has mastered the authority of the operating system, the security software on the system may not be able to find it. Trusted computing has the characteristics of prevention and discovery in advance. The combination of the two concepts will make the security protection on the cloud more comprehensive.

Alibaba Cloud believes that trusted computing will become the standard configuration of cloud servers in the future due to the maturity of technology development, customer experience, and policy environment.

On a credible basis, Alibaba Cloud's seventh-generation cloud server ECS also supports encrypted computing capabilities, making running data available and invisible. In layman's terms, this is like building an encrypted safe inside the computer. No one can see the data inside, but the data can be calculated in the safe. This technology can be applied in finance, government affairs, blockchain, and other scenarios that require multiple parties to "share" data for calculation.

Currently, Alibaba Cloud ECS is the industry's first cloud vendor equipped with trusted computing and encrypted computing. Combined with Alibaba Cloud's native security capabilities, it provides comprehensive three-dimensional security protection.

Trend 2: Software-hardware integrated architecture becomes mainstream, and cloud-based experience is built the seventh-generation cloud server ECS, based on the third-generation Shenlong architecture, is equipped with the latest generation of Alibaba Cloud virtualization architecture for the first time, ensuring the high-performance, continuous and stable delivery of instances under extreme concurrency; the self-developed virtualized soft real-time scheduler realizes vCPU scheduling delay P999 has dropped by 20%, achieving extremely fast response to user services; the self-developed hot-upgrade hard-core technology of software and hardware collaboration reduces service interruption to zero, and truly realizes zero perception of underlying fault customer services.

The Shenlong architecture can be described as one of the black technologies of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud ECS has achieved continuous industry-leading performance, which is indispensable. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud officially released the self-developed software-hardware integrated virtualization architecture "Shenlong", and since then all cloud servers have been based on the Shenlong architecture. In 2019, the double 11 core business system will be fully migrated to the cloud, which will be hosted by Shenlong servers.

In the cloud-native era, the large-scale Internet has extremely high requirements for the agility and stability of the IT architecture, and often needs to meet instantaneous peaks. Based on the Shenlong architecture, the seventh-generation ECS can deliver 500,000-core vCPU in 3 minutes, which perfectly meets the user's demand for extremely fast and flexible resources such as containers, and is the best carrier for cloud native.

Stability is most tested under high-pressure conditions. Zhang Xiantao, head of elastic computing at Alibaba Cloud, once shared that compared with offline physical servers, the performance of Shenlong bare metal servers running containers is 20-30% higher, even when the CPU load is as high as 80%. %, it is still very stable, far beyond the reach of general cloud servers.

The high performance of the Shenlong architecture mainly comes from its software-hardware synergy design idea. The dedicated Shenlong chip is used to process virtualization and forwarding, which greatly improves performance. It is a virtualization architecture that is truly born for the cloud. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud judges that this technical architecture will become the mainstream of cloud technology.

Trend 3: Smart IaaS+ tools to help customers efficiently manage and use the cloud
In addition to improving the strength, stability, and security of the instance side, Alibaba Cloud ECS continues to optimize the overall user experience of using and managing cloud resources. Users can enjoy efficient and intelligent services no matter what type of ECS instance they purchase.

Looking back at the development of the industry, the cloud computing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service) layer originally only provided general infrastructure, and later began to form cloud server families for different scenarios. Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing has reached the third stage: Provide efficient, intelligent, and scenario-based IaaS+ service capabilities to help customers efficiently manage and use the cloud.

It is difficult for performance indicators to transparently transmit the improvement of user experience. Enterprises involve a series of operations such as migration, deployment, and operation and maintenance on the cloud. Easy-to-use automated operation and maintenance tools will greatly improve management efficiency. At present, Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing has provided a complete set of automated operation and maintenance suites around the entire life cycle of cloud servers to help customers build cloud operation and maintenance systems at low cost.

For example, the elastic scaling can realize automatic expansion and contraction, and improve the utilization rate of cloud resources; the resource orchestration service ROS helps a leading SaaS company shorten the deployment on the cloud from 2 days to 2 hours; the self-service instance health diagnosis function helps users quickly Locate cloud server problems.

The artificial intelligence technology that has emerged in recent years and the trend of cloud computing in the manufacturing industry have a strong demand for computing power on the cloud. Alibaba Cloud ECS self-developed Shenlong AI acceleration engine provides in-depth performance optimization for cloud AI training and reasoning, greatly improving the efficiency of cloud AI.

The latest seventh-generation ECS also fully supports the above capabilities, allowing users to enjoy the experience of "check-in with bags".

Trend 4: Ubiquitous, consistent experience on the cloud, edge and end

Cloud computing has become a trend in various industries, especially with the rapid development of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and 5G, the computing requirements of the edge are becoming more and more abundant, some require computing power closer to end users, and some It requires computing power to be closer to the data, so operations need to be performed at specific locations. Users' requirements for computing have expanded from "full coverage of scenes" to "ubiquitous locations".

As the cloud becomes more widely distributed outside the core data center area, we can definitely see the dawn of a new era: the age of the distributed cloud. Customers have more choice when choosing where to deploy applications, which can save data migration costs, meet extreme latency requirements, and improve user experience. A consistent experience is very important across all distributed deployments of the cloud.

Zhang Xiantao, head of Elastic Computing at Alibaba Cloud, once proposed the trend of distributed or cloud-edge-device integration in multiple scenarios such as media interviews and Yunqi conference speeches in 2020. Cai Junjie, Chief Architect of Elastic Computing, also analyzed the nature of distributed cloud in an in-depth article. The future of cloud.

To this end, the Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing Team has laid out the ability to cover all scenarios of "cloud, edge, and device", that is, "full coverage of computing locations", including Edge Zone, Hosting Zone, Partner Zone, and CloudBox. The seventh-generation cloud server ECS, which is the latest public test this month, will also support multi-location output in different forms, allowing customers to experience the high performance and intelligent operation and maintenance experience consistent with public clouds.

Under the cloud-edge-device collaboration system, Alibaba Cloud Elastic Computing has a series of new product deployment and operation forms to meet the diverse needs of customers and partners in terms of computing locations and operating models, and extend the public cloud to a wider space Here, work with customers to prepare for the advent of edge computing and 5G era.