Why is it so hard to land a "public cloud" in China?

"Editor's note" This article is in the United States and China's Internet and cloud services in the field has nearly 10 years of experience Lillian Shao should pingwest invited to write articles. From a professional point of view, why in the United States and many parts of the world has been widely spread, to help entrepreneurs very large "public cloud" services, in China is difficult to fall in the various dimensions of the reasons. You can contact the author directly lillianshao09@gmail.com

You often hear questions about why there is no reliable public cloud service in China. Internationally mature cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace are also difficult to transplant to China, but domestic and indigenous Aliyun and Sheng, even without policy constraints, are facing many infrastructure problems. I have always believed that China has the smartest and most talented engineers in the world, and that there will be no gap in technology for some time. But bricks, the establishment of "public cloud" services in China is probably the most difficult in the world. Here's a list of some of the differences I've observed.

Equipment Room Infrastructure

In the United States and Europe, the computer room is capital-intensive business, like real estate business, equinix,coresite, etc. are relatively large few. The room is a functional real estate, the earthquake, refrigeration, electricity and so on have different needs. There are strict standards and certifications for data Center building and maintenance, such as the TIER4 datacenter, which has a rigorous certification system for different levels and levels of data centers.

In addition, there are many management certifications, such as SAS, ISO 27000, and even environmental protection certification LEED certification. The building in accordance with the requirements of the computer room after the lease welcome. Can be a whole layer, can be half a layer, even a few cabinets can be. It is easy to find the right data Center for public cloud providers to see the market according to their standards.

Can not find it does not matter, cloud services companies have the ability to build the room according to their own standards, because only need to buy land, build house, apply for electricity can, large and small network operators will grab the cable pull in. All the rooms have meet me room,isp (Internet infrastructure service providers) are connected to the optical cable. and consider building a room in a place where wind, water and electricity are cheap and populated. The local government will also be very welcome. In addition, the foreign computer room is generally relatively new. IDC says the average life span of the room is 9 years, and Gartner says the 7-year data center is too old.

In China, the computer room is the first monopoly business, only a small number of companies with resources to operate. The state-owned telecommunications operators. China's computer room may be more than 95% of telecom operators to build. I haven't talked about the internet yet, so here we go, and we'll just talk about infrastructure. Operators can build hardware that looks like a decent room, and management has basically failed to pass any standard certification. The fact of the matter is that the Chinese market is basically looking for a certified data center through management. If these data centres are inspected on the ground, the security measures that can be seen are often not implemented in place. For example, a layer of the door is not automatically closed, and sometimes always open, belong to different customers in the cabinet can be opened at will. Also heard that some room staff can't help smoking in the room.

Maybe you're fed up. Operators, looking for independent operations like the United States data centers, the choice is really not much, the quality is more mixed. I have seen the basement of Beijing Oriental Plaza Room, the computer room from the security considerations in fact can not be built in the basement. But the room has many of the world's top 500 customers. I have also seen the room near the capital airport, from the safety of the computer room should not be close to the airport. Last month, a separate data center in Beijing, a power outage, caused several websites such as Amazon and Fank to interrupt hours of service. But there is no way that even Amazon China will have to lower standards to find data centers in China, which is the best option. On the other hand, Amazon China has set up a mechanism to regularly back up its domestic content to Amazon's cloud services, so it is the fastest recovery service on every site. In China, online business is probably the world's biggest challenge to operations.

Century interconnection is a few of the country through the ISO-certified independent operation of the data center. But they also rely heavily on operators on the Internet. See his web site says BGP (Boundary Gateway Protocol) Bandwidth full network of more than 400 Gbps. This could be the daily flow of some of the world's first-tier internet companies. And their cabinets have been in short supply. China's Internet development is very fast, the Internet room is basically scarce resources, even if such a problem, is still in short supply.

Self-building room? This is not yet heard in China-I mean really, like Google and Facebook, it's built from outside. Just a few years ago, I heard that a domestic cloud services company to use Wind in the Qilian mountain where the construction of IDC, and finally no results, and recommend this project people also left the company back to the United States.

Some people may say: China so many internet companies, in such room conditions are not all in the provision of services? We've also created so many good internet companies. The problem is that for cloud service providers, service building is provided to developers in the computer room and then to end User Service. The developer's own machine room is broken, can scold the room, cloud service provider's room power is condemnation, oneself is a person, scold nobody to use. and have the strength to do public cloud services are big name company, we cherish feathers, to do all to do high standards.

Network environment

The European and American networks are fully interconnected-the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has mandatory requirements. Operators have content, some have eyeballs, the reciprocal status of the free interconnection, called peering, not equal to the net between the settlement, called to buy IP transit. But the price is absolutely reasonable.

This year's market, 1Gbps around the bandwidth, no backbone of their own, and people everywhere peering together with the access, about 1 U.S. dollars/mbps. Tier 1 ISP, has a national backbone network of several, the price of 3-5 U.S. dollars/mbps. Customers with a lot of content, such as Facebook, Google, Netflix, and cloud storage and CDN services, can get a lot of free bandwidth, and only a small portion of it needs to be purchased. Once heard of a data is a famous American cdn,70% bandwidth is free to get.

On this basis, first of all, the technical BGP (Boundary Gateway Protocol) is the universal standard, only in the DNS service such cloud services and CDN will use the basic services, Anycast is a universal technology. Full-network CDN node, will only give an IP. Whether it's a cloud service or a CDN, except for a very old service provider, almost every other household is anycast. Second, the network is very convenient to use, I can open 1G port, can open 10G port, can buy hundreds of Mbps, can also be used to pay according to the flow rate-because the network is free interconnection, then a few can get the national network coverage, any one of the computer room has its own meet me reactiveness. Hundreds of ISPs, even the world's ISPs can be connected, in this room, do the interconnection.

And the room and the room within the communication is also free, pull optical fiber to achieve good. So AWS EC2 can launch the concept of multi AZ-the same region, the introduction of more than two independent room, the application framework can be deployed in parallel in two rooms, but two rooms are optical fiber direct connection, comparable to the same computer room intranet speed. So the user can completely zero cost to do a number of room deployment, not afraid of a single room fault.

And China's Internet environment, at least what I see is quite bad. Even if the Asian network is rife with monopolies, the situation in China is very bad. There is very little interconnection between the two major operators, and I am too lazy to go to the cnnic to check the bandwidth of the latest two interconnection, because the fact is that the lice on the bald, this bandwidth is purely decorative. In charge of the Ministry of the Web site published on the interconnection of the guidance price is 1000 yuan/mbps, which can be equivalent to 160 dollars/mbps Ah, this is a people all over the world seem to be extremely shocked by the number!

Even if negotiated, the price of interconnection is actually still very high, because the price of BGP in the Beijing market is 100 dollars/mbps. In Taiwan, the Chinese telecom is one of the largest, the government to the Internet interconnection guidance is 5 beautiful and ah/mbps. In Hong Kong, as long as there is an ISP license in Hkix, free and Hkix exchange of traffic, and all operators in Hong Kong free interconnection.

The direct result is that China has two separate nets. Obviously the operator builds the room only own network to be able to connect, China's engine room does not have meet me reactiveness. Because most rooms have only one operator's network. A small number of major customers need to be interconnected, the operator will be able to bite the bullet to another family in the high price of the line to come in, of course, customers pay.

This situation brings endless trouble to the online business of the whole country. Almost all of the Internet business on the scale of two operators need to replicate two of the same system, and then use the load balancing technology to the telecom's computer room, unicom to China Unicom. This duplication of construction does not know how much revenue has been paid to operators, and how much of the legendary GDP has been created, but it has also largely raised the threshold of the Internet sector and limited innovation. China's Internet Operation team may be the largest in the world. Yun-Wei has even become the core competitiveness of many Internet businesses. Because the infrastructure and the network are too complex.

Want to use BGP to realize automatic interconnection? BGP is strictly limited by operators, not just price. Operators in the two or three-tier cities are basically not open BGP. The price of BGP in Beijing is as high as $100/mbps and Shanghai is more expensive. If you want to buy more, you may not buy it. There are many kinds of network access modes, such as false BGP, double line, multi-line and so on in the Chinese market. In this case, most of the business can only take static bandwidth. Technology such as anycast is simply impossible to talk about in China.

Overseas cloud service providers, even if they have the opportunity to do some service in China, can only be isolated from global networks in network scheduling. For example, CDN, has contacted a number of overseas CDN companies want to put CDN point cloth to China, sorry, do not say that the problem of regulation, technology can not be done.

The interconnection of optical fibres is also tightly restricted, and in Beijing, for example, most operators do not allow fibre access because they are worried that you will pull in another band. So you want to pull the fiber is very difficult between the two rooms, which directly led to the establishment of the Chinese like AWS in two of the computer room to backup the concept is basically impossible. Currently in the country has launched a "public cloud" of the home has not been able to successfully provide this function.

Policy control

Finally, the policy constraints, in fact, I think it is okay. A foreign company that can nominally authorize its own brand to provide services to Chinese users in a business-licensed company in the cloud can be a data center license, but the ICP license is also possible, Because hosting services in China have been thousands of service providers with an ICP license.

The uncomfortable part: the control of online content contradicts the spirit of the cloud. The value of the cloud is that you have good ideas that can be online anytime, encouraging innovation and trial and error. But our provisions on ICP record is entirely in the spirit of better kill 1000, not miss a spirit. For example, for the record, the site owner will be photographed by a service provider providing server hosting services.

The internet is borderless, even in the domestic network, a Shanghai company to the content host in Beijing is also completely possible, then you can only find a way to Beijing to take photos, or the service provider to the photo of the background cloth sent to Shanghai. Do not say that completely do not understand this set of foreign service providers, the domestic cloud service providers in the beginning also on the record of this piece is also very headache.

But there is no doubt that China is a huge market with the best engineers and entrepreneurs who are most eager to succeed in the Internet arena. Microsoft's ability to start providing business in China is a big concern, and there will be more and more companies, both domestic and international, trying to provide cloud services in the Chinese market. China's Home-grown cloud services companies have long been accustomed to such an infrastructure environment, not afraid of the difficulties arising therefrom, but it is easy to fall into the trap of resources, mistakenly think there is a good room, get cheap BGP resources are not afraid of competition.

Cloud services have never been limited to resources overseas, we are constantly improving the ability to operate products and resources, from IaaS as the basis, integration of open source things, plus windows,oracle,sap and so on, with coverage of all aspects of the application of the product portfolio. But in the face of the Chinese market, foreign cloud services companies must face up to the constraints on resources, must find those who have resources to make compromises in the business model, or even the luck to start the service, also faced with the risk of expansion.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)