One cloud with multiple states is the future trend

Four major factors driving the multi-faceted development of public clouds

After more than ten years of development, more and more enterprises are migrating to the cloud. But in this process, we found that there is a product with great technological attributes and customer value, which is the public cloud.

Alibaba Cloud has been deeply involved in the field of cloud computing for more than ten years. In the past, when Alibaba Cloud worked as a public cloud, it mainly focused on the construction of large data centers. For example, we built public clouds at large central nodes such as Zhangbei, Heyuan, Nantong, Beijing, and Shanghai. These data centers can to some extent meet 60% -70% of computing needs. But with the continuous development of cloud computing towards depth, more and more customer demands have emerged, including policy factors, new user scenarios, data requirements, and business needs, which require public clouds to continuously extend outward from central nodes.

1. Policy factors: Data must meet compliance requirements, some require data to be located in designated data centers, while others require data not to be exported from the province. Faced with these compliance needs, it is actually difficult to meet them with public clouds.

2. User attraction: In the digital age, users' demands for experience are becoming increasingly extreme, and the speed of application response is required to be faster. Especially in games, virtual reality, autonomous driving, and industrial manufacturing scenarios, latency has become a key indicator, which requires calculations to be completed closest to the user.

3. Data gravity: With the booming development of industries such as video and AI, many companies have become data companies. These data need to be saved in the local computer room for various reasons. In addition, in the era of data explosion, with so much data being transmitted to the public cloud, the transmission cost is also quite high. This requires cloud computing to actively approach data for computation.

4. Business gravity: How to enable partners to play a mutually beneficial role on public clouds is an eternal topic in cloud computing, with numerous opportunities for business innovation; In addition, the business attraction generated by cost optimization requires public clouds to continuously achieve the ultimate cost-effectiveness.

In summary, the four major factors mentioned above require the development of public clouds towards multiple forms, including product diversity, deployment diversity, and ecological diversity.

The form is constantly changing, what remains unchanged is the inner: the divine dragon architecture

Of course, if the form changes again, the core remains unchanged. Alibaba Cloud has strengthened its leadership in the IaaS field through the Dragon architecture. At the Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Cloud released the fourth generation Shenlong architecture, with the biggest difference being eRDMA. This is the first time that the Shenlong architecture is equipped with the world's only large-scale elastic RDMA acceleration network, reducing network latency by more than 80% overall. The fourth generation Shenlong architecture brings computing architecture innovation, bringing cloud computing into the era of 5 microsecond latency for the first time.

In fact, RDMA is not a new technology or a new term. Many leading companies in the industry are researching various implementations of RDMA, but they are unable to apply them on a large scale. A scale of 1000 units requires customized applications and various optimizations to achieve.

Today, Alibaba Cloud adopts a design approach that integrates software and hardware, integrating the acceleration capability of elastic RMDA into the public cloud, moving RDMA from niche HPC applications to supporting general computing scenarios, and providing technical support for cloud native technologies such as Microservice, Serverless, and ServiceMesh.

In addition, the fourth generation DPCA architecture has significantly improved core performance such as basic bandwidth, block storage, and IOPS. In the database scenario, the fourth generation Shenlong achieved a maximum performance improvement of 60% for MySQL and a 130% increase in mixed read and write throughput for Redis; Nginx SSL connectivity improves throughput performance by 420% per second.

One Cloud with Multiple Forms, New Path for Enterprises to Go Cloud

Based on the Shenlong architecture, Alibaba Cloud public cloud is developing in more forms in terms of product, deployment, and ecology.

Multiple forms of products

Seventh generation ECS instance: Alibaba Cloud released the seventh generation ECS instance in February this year and achieved commercialization in May. The seventh generation ECS instances are fully equipped with hardware trusted chips, which is the industry's first security protection measure of Trusted Computing+encrypted computing. In terms of performance, the overall computing power is increased by 40%; In terms of usage elasticity, the seventh generation ECS instance has a maximum burst network bandwidth of 5 times, a maximum burst IOPS of 5 times, and a maximum EBS bandwidth of 4 times.

Cloud phones: Many users hope to have a demand for mobile app testing, especially for conducting mobile app testing or running cloud games on their PC desktop, which has given rise to cloud phone products. Alibaba Cloud has developed its own streaming technology, which reduces the overall end-to-end latency and provides an almost local experience of operating mobile phones.

Shadowless Cloud Computers: The 2020 Yunqi Conference released Shadowless Cloud Computers and continued to make greater innovations. The computer display in Hall B, C and D of this year's Yunqi Conference all used shadowless cloud computers, including the hackathon (live programming contest) in Hall D, which was built entirely on the basis of shadowless. Alibaba Cloud has leveraged its capabilities in distributed computing, storage, and networking over the past decade to build supercomputers. The Shadowless PTZ computer provides an upper layer SDK, and application developers do not need to pay attention to the underlying GPU. They only need to pay attention to how much computing power is required to complete the calculation. Perhaps 3D rendering used to take a week, but now it only takes 5 minutes to complete.

Deploy multiple forms

In terms of deployment forms, Alibaba Cloud provides four deployment forms: central region, local region, edge node, and on-site computing node. Based on Alibaba Cloud's Feitian technology base, it allows the public cloud to extend to any place that requires computing.

Local Region: Alibaba Cloud has gradually launched services for local regions across the country. In June, Nanjing became the first node to launch services, and now many cities in South Korea, Thailand, and China are gradually launching services. Alibaba Cloud hopes that through local regions, local computing can be completed nearby, reducing data transmission costs and application latency.

Edge cloud nodes: So far, Alibaba Cloud has covered more than 3200 nodes worldwide, and has conducted comprehensive cooperation with more than 100 operators on five continents. Through our edge computing nodes, we can better meet the computing needs of edge nodes.

On site computing nodes: Cloud Box is an ECS product based on on-site computing from Alibaba Cloud, which can achieve a completely consistent user experience for all edge nodes on and off the cloud, as well as local nodes. For example, for a factory or design institute, the required computing power can be standardized through one or two cabinets. That is to say, through such a cabinet, users can bring back a cloud from Alibaba Cloud and quickly deploy it where customers need computing power.

Ecological multiform

At the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Beijing in May, Alibaba Cloud released its Compute Nest product, which opens up more underlying IaaS capabilities and interfaces through the Compute Nest platform, including billing, operation and maintenance interfaces, and service interfaces. This helps more outstanding software companies transform their middleware products such as databases and big data into PaaS and SaaS, allowing them to focus more on core business innovation and quickly achieve cloud based upgrades without paying attention to underlying IaaS.

Figure: Partial Calculation Nest Certification Partner ISV Representative Group Photo

Public clouds are constantly expanding outward, and one cloud with multiple forms is the future trend. The true polymorphism of a cloud should be the same public cloud, and all interfaces, tools, consoles, account systems, etc. should be the same set. The infrastructure, technology stack, and operation and maintenance system should be convenient and completely consistent.