Alibaba Cloud Wang Jian: Operations can create true cloud computing

We are accustomed to using the "turning our hands to cover the clouds for the rain" to describe the volatility of developments. Indeed, today's cloud computing leads the industry on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is undergoing numerous changes. These developments and changes depend on the enterprise's understanding of cloud computing, relying on the enterprise's grasp of user needs, and relying more on the enterprise. Awareness of China's entire ecological environment. For the current chaos of cloud computing development, with the words of Dr. Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud, cloud computing is not an area where all enterprises have the ability to get involved. Technology is important, but practical experience is more important, and operation is the core of cloud computing. This has opened up our re-understanding of cloud computing.

Cooperative operation will become a new model for cloud computing development

User demand is a huge treasure of Alibaba Cloud

Despite the rapid development of domestic cloud computing platforms, manufacturers have stepped in, but so far, only Alibaba Cloud is the only cloud computing service provider in China that can cover all industry customers. It can be appreciated from Dr. Wang Jian’s proud words. This achievement is of great significance to the ability of Alibaba Cloud. Dr. Wang Jian believes that the needs of customers will be a huge asset of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud has collected the needs of so many industry users in the two years of development, and will provide tremendous energy for the future development of Alibaba Cloud.

Indeed, Alibaba Cloud is committed to being a platform-level service provider, and it is important to carry the needs of various industries. These customers who actively ask for demand have naturally become the huge treasures of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud has just communicated with Huatong Cloud Data. The cooperation of the center is a typical example.

Cooperative operation will become a new model for the development of cloud computing in China

When China's cloud computing companies and related departments are still rushing to build a variety of large data centers, Alibaba Cloud seems to have found its own development model, the cooperation between Alibaba Cloud and Huatong Cloud Data Center. In the middle, Alibaba Cloud provides technical platform support, while Huatong Cloud Data Center provides IDC hardware facilities resources, which provide a good combination of soft services and hard services.

Through the cooperation between Alibaba Cloud and Huatong Data Center, we have seen a new model for the development of cloud computing in China. It is reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the five ministries have recently introduced a data center management approach aimed at rationally arranging cloud computing resources and better. Release its ability to revitalize these assets. Alibaba Cloud has revitalized the excess computing resources in China through this new cooperation model. In the future, Alibaba Cloud can establish its own platform and cooperate with more IDCs to achieve common operations and share results. In contrast to the development of cloud computing in China, a data center is operated by two companies in different service areas, and there is no precedent for the model of mutual benefit. For this cooperation project, Dr. Wang Jian is hard to hide the excitement. In front of many media, he even used the words “a milestone in the development of cloud computing in China” and “witness history” to describe the pioneering work of this cooperation. . Even Dr. Wang Jian said: In China, if cloud computing does not adopt this mode of cooperation, it can't be done at all. This is not just a question of business model, but a question about the future development of cloud computing in China.

The uniqueness of China's cloud computing development

Dr. Wang Jian is deeply convinced that the cooperation between cloud service platform and IDC will be an important way of cloud computing. He even thinks that this approach may become the only path for the growth of cloud computing in China.

"Cloud computing can't be without a data center." When talking to the relevant leaders of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Dr. Wang Jian even used a very exaggerated number. China's 99.999% data center is not cloud computing at all, although it seems to be absolutely absolute, but China. The development of cloud computing is indeed the case. Dr. Wang Jian believes that a data center provides services by renting cabinets to customers. This model is not cloud computing at all. Only the data center and the cloud service provider, using a cooperative operation to provide customers with a holistic solution is the real cloud computing. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud, the role of cloud services, the important thing is that Alibaba Cloud has its own platform, and this platform has enough capacity to undertake the mode of cooperative operation, so Alibaba Cloud chose to cooperate with the data center to open new users. Service model. Although this model is in the early stages of exploration, it provides a good idea for the development of cloud computing in China.

Operation is the fundamental way to upgrade data center to cloud computing

Dr. Wang Jian believes that if China's cloud computing wants to achieve better development, it must solve many problems faced by enterprises. The final problem is that enterprises are not clear about their own division of labor, and they fall into a misunderstanding and think that they can cover from beginning to end. Every aspect of cloud computing. In fact, the cooperation between Alibaba Cloud and Huatong is precisely the model that the two sides have seen cooperation and win-win. For Alibaba Cloud, there are many advantages brought by cooperation. For example, Alibaba does not need to build a computer room, which saves the cost of dealing with various government departments and operators.

From the perspective of cooperation, Alibaba Cloud does not even do other business. For example, Alibaba Cloud never thought about doing network disk. More importantly, Alibaba Cloud believes that true cloud computing relies on operations rather than purchase. This is very different from the past ideas. In the past, people generally believed that they built a data center, bought a server, and then purchased some VMs or other software to build a cloud computing platform through integration. This idea is wrong.

"Cloud computing is operated by operation. The real efficiency is achieved by operation. Once the operational attributes are added, the division of labor will gradually become clear," Dr. Wang Jian said. For Alibaba Cloud, the cooperative operation can reflect the two competitive advantages of Alibaba Cloud:

First, Alibaba Cloud has its own platform, and this platform does not require Licence fees, which saves a lot of customer costs. I believe that everyone knows the cost of Licence. If your company purchases VM or other vendors' services, as the company's business grows bigger and bigger, the cost of Licence will be more and more, so this is the choice for Alibaba Cloud. The customer is a good news. Second, it fully reflects the operation and maintenance capabilities of Alibaba Cloud. For the data center, even if you get the platform of Alibaba Cloud for free, it is useless, because Alibaba Cloud's operation and maintenance capabilities are not brought along with the software. This is the core competitiveness of Alibaba Cloud. The operation capability of the entire platform is Most needed in the data center.

Dr. Wang Jian said frankly that many companies believe that Alibaba Cloud's two advantages can also be their own, but they do not know how high the threshold of these two advantages.

Summarize the three major changes in Alibaba Cloud in 2012

2012 is a very crucial year for Alibaba Cloud. At the 2012 Alibaba Cloud Developers Conference, Chen Jinpei, general manager of Alibaba cloud computing business, also said that 2012 is the first year of cloud computing practice in China. Computing is no longer an illusory thing. As of November 2012, tens of thousands of websites, games and applications have gathered on the Alibaba Cloud platform to support hundreds of millions of users directly or indirectly, including Alibaba's own Ali. Finance, poly stone towers, etc.

It is reported that the Ali cloud cloud service product line includes three parts: elastic computing, storage and database services and large-scale computing. Elastic computing includes four products: cloud server, software load balancing (SLB), cloud monitoring and cloud shield; three products under storage and database services, respectively, open storage service OSS (unstructured basic storage service, with massive space) , flexible extension), open structured data services OTS (mass structured and semi-structured data storage services) and relational database services RDS (relational data storage in the cloud); large-scale computing for open data processing services RDPS It can process large-scale structured data offline and process PB-level data every day.

After the growth in 2012, Alibaba Cloud has undergone major changes in its technical capabilities, platform services and operational philosophy. Dr. Wang Jian believes that the changes in Alibaba Cloud are mainly reflected in three aspects:

1. Alibaba Cloud knows more about customers. At present, the customer category can completely cover Alibaba Cloud's understanding of cloud computing, and has learned cloud computing from customers. The size of the customers varies, reflecting Alibaba Cloud's comprehensive operations and service capabilities.

2. Think of cloud computing as a service. There is a certain threshold for technology, but in 2012, Alibaba Cloud's very big progress was to make cloud computing a service. Different from other companies to talk about cloud computing, and then encourage users to buy equipment, Alibaba Cloud believes that cloud computing is not a business to buy equipment, but a real service.

The concept and ability of cloud platform operation and maintenance have also changed: Taobao’s single-unit scale is large. In the past, everyone thought that the operation and maintenance of Taobao was more difficult than the operation of Alibaba Cloud. In fact, it is more difficult to operate Alibaba Cloud than Taobao. For example, Taobao can send users The notification is closed to the service to support the operation and maintenance. However, as a real-time online service, Alibaba Cloud cannot decide at its own time when to close the service, otherwise it will have a serious impact on the customer.

3. Cloud computing is a practical problem, not a theoretical one. Only by doing its own practice and gaining the trust of customers, the so-called security problem will not be ignored at all, because the essence of cloud computing services is more efficient than the original service. safer. Just as we save money to the bank is safer than putting it under our own pillows, we need everyone to change their way of thinking.