Sina Cloud computing chief architect Conglei: Looking back at cloud computing

Recently, there are many industries in the industry, Daniel for the domestic and foreign cloud computing industry to do a variety of summaries, I savor, some strongly agree and some disagree, for "straight", writing this article.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is not a new technology, but also not the same as the mouth of the virtual, Hadoop and other fashionable words, cloud computing is the essence of human socialization of the development of the industry, cloud computing not only belongs to it, but belongs to the whole industry, I tell the story of a restaurant:

At the earliest, everyone was cooking at home, but it was difficult to cook, especially when they found that there were more people. So restaurants use a unified purchase, unified distribution, unified production, unified human resources, to provide based on shared food services, greatly reducing the cost, making people gradually feel that sometimes eating outside the cost is not very big. But guests at restaurants face two problems:

1, vegetables are afraid of more, so the merchant came up with a way, you can point half, you can pack.

2, vegetables are afraid of less, so merchants allowed to add vegetables.

Mapping this story to it, said that this is not half a dime relationship with cloud computing, nothing more than the original buy the server, changed to a unified by IDC to provide machine room rack machine, we use. Half of the dish is simply the use of virtualization technology, can be a number of large machines into small pieces to provide users. These are really not cloud computing.

Let's look at the problems the restaurant is facing:

1, the guest wants to order 1.25 to do? Sorry, only half of the sales, your remaining 0.25 to deal with.

2, after the food package home, after a day of heat is not that taste, and probably also carcinogenic.

If any restaurant can solve these two problems to customers, customers can arbitrarily point to any proportion, customers to pack the dishes home, but also to ensure that the quality of the dishes do not decline, then it will lead the industry innovation.

Back in the IT industry, the term to address both issues is "cloud computing," which provides various levels of finer-grained virtual computing, storage units, and you can order any number of meals. Cloud computing has clean-up function, can virtual machine is recycled and then clean to provide to the following, like to ensure that the quality of food packaging does not drop. Cloud separation technology to ensure that everyone clip a dish, do not worry about chopsticks to bring the "saliva spread."

The above story about this, basically is the IaaS did, can we play the imagination and then tap customer demand? What if the customer doesn't correctly predict how much they eat? If the customer eats to eat suddenly come again two friends, the vegetable suddenly insufficient to eat how to do? Now add vegetables need to wait time ...

Solving this problem requires PAAs because IaaS does not understand the user's business, and PAAs knows that the user's webservice, logs, traffic, and data throughput are at the PAAs level, and that it can change in real time as the business changes, and that the user does not need to care about it, to achieve real free movement As much as you want to eat in the restaurant, the food is done in real time, and then 100 friends, can also be provided in an instant, there is no one-second intermittent period.

Is there any need for users? Yes, users want to bring their own raw materials, with the cook of the restaurant to do; the user wants to make a good dish and send it to the home to eat; The user wants to cook his own specialty, other restaurants, and the user wants to bring his own specialty dishes to visit and use the restaurant for more people. These requirements are all in the "cloud" concept of the product corresponding. It can be seen that "cloud computing" is nothing but mining the needs of life, continuous user-friendly, reduce the cost of an industry trend just.

Who needs cloud computing?

This is actually very simple, want to "save money" and want to "easy" people.

Money

The whole environment to make people more need to save money, the overall economic form, some industries, the cold winter, the concept of green products are deeply rooted, even the government of the input-output ratio of further concern, these are given to the entire industry of cloud computing opportunities. More specific refinement, that is, those personal webmaster, personal developers, freelancers, small and medium-sized enterprises. In SAE, for example, an Android application of "palm precious Metal" was started at a very low cost to run on the SAE, SAE with his growth, from several users to hundreds of thousands of users, until recently the author has set up a company in Shanghai. Another example by Baidu acquisition of "What to see Tonight", the use of SAE prototype development and operation, completed the original user accumulation stage, SAE verified its success.

Just imagine, without a cloud computing platform, to help it complete the "0 cost start-up", then there will be a lot of small and medium-sized teams, companies die in the first bucket of gold to find the cost of the black hole, this is the same situation in the United States, Amazon AWS is hailed as the cradle of entrepreneurial projects, the reason is to save costs.

Easier

If you save money and some people do not care, then the easy is almost everyone wants things, of course, unless "easy" to hit his own job. The most immediate and easy to take advantage of cloud computing is developers, who used to be concerned with load balancing, distributed storage, and queuing services, which are now almost IaaS and PAAs. Save the people also have operations operators, cloud computing to bring them the benefits of unified management, operations, before they need to maintain a east, west maintenance of a virtual machine system, now only need to maintain a unified set. Cloud computing allows individuals and businesses to operate in a unified environment, the version of each public software, network configuration are centralized settings, system engineers do not have to think about how to expand, restore, migrate, these can be automatically completed by the program. If you use PAAs services, and you don't even need someone to know about Apache configuration, you don't need a system engineer to complete the operation of a large web site purely by a developer. For SaaS services, and even for some cases even developers are saved, the WordPress version has been able to build a very presentable cms.

For the SAE, for example, the need to save time is even greater than the need for saving, especially for enterprises. For example, there is a game developers, I asked why they do not deploy in IaaS, they answered "too much trouble, but also have their own management", yes, in the premise of meeting demand, who do not want to save trouble.

Other

Of course, there are people who use cloud computing for other purposes, such as the experience of a term, the cost of a small 99, but these are hard to endure in the long run.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)