China's public cloud service providers up and down quest

Despite the development of the past four years, China's public cloud service market still faces great risks and uncertainties. But China's public cloud services are still struggling to keep up with stringent regulatory policies and barriers to interconnection.

At the end of 2012, an article published in the Science and Technology blog Pingwest Chinese Network called "Why the public cloud landing in China difficult?" Article on Weibo on the introduction of fever. From three aspects of computer room construction, network environment and policy regulation, the author analyzes the reasons why the booming of the United States and the world, and the public cloud service that enters the universal period, is difficult to actually fall in China.

In fact, 2013 is expected to be a special year for China's public cloud market to make a breakthrough. During the year, the enterprise-class public cloud service, which was run by Microsoft in partnership with the century Broadband data center, is expected to operate officially, while Amazon, the world's most successful public cloud IaaS (infrastructure services), accelerates its process. Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Service, hereinafter referred to as Amazonian AWS) are expected to open in China during the year, driven by policy positives and other factors, according to sources.

International cloud services Giants will undoubtedly enter China's public cloud market, but also will drive the public cloud service level of the overall promotion. China's public cloud market has been heating up over the past four years, with large internet companies, IDC (Internet Data Center) and telecom operators showing a degree of enthusiasm for participation. However, from the overall development of the market, especially in contrast to the private cloud market performance, China's public cloud market is still immature, and has a high degree of uncertainty in the development stage.

High risk and hard to see high yield

Liu Liming, a senior cloud computing expert, summed up the problems facing the current public cloud IaaS service in the Chinese market in a personal blog published in December 2012. In the past four years or so, he argues, Chinese companies and start-ups have made a lot of effort, but the real environment in the Chinese market has led to a breakthrough in public cloud services.

Senior Cloud computing expert Liu Liming

Liu Liming in the blog pointed out that the factors leading to the current situation, including the different backbone network operators between the poor network connectivity, backbone operators and Third-party Independent IDC enterprise business relations are not standardized, China's human (including Junior technical personnel) the cost is relatively low, Government and state-owned enterprises do not have strict financial control and capital use efficiency objectives, Internet services, strict regulatory system, and industry monopolies.

Liu Liming has a long working experience in the public cloud IaaS service area. He entered the IaaS industry in 2008, successively served in the century interconnection Cloud Express line, net silver interconnection and other companies. During the internet banking connection, he initiated and operated the new IaaS service Linkcloud. In addition to the factors listed in the blog, Liu Liming said in an interview, the public cloud service providers in the technology accumulation, product building and profit-making goals, as well as the lack of general credit and trust mechanism of the business environment is also the main reason for the public cloud services into a dilemma.

Open source Cloud important promoter Chiang Ching Field has been involved in the Tianya cloud computing platform planning and implementation, but also joined a to provide public cloud services as the ultimate goal of the entrepreneurial team. At present, Shingino is the director of customer achievement at Eucalyptus company, responsible for the delivery of private cloud projects in China. Combined with his work experience in the field of cloud computing, Shingino that the current domestic public cloud market still has a high level of unknowable and uncontrollable factors.

Open source Cloud important promoter, Eucalyptus company Customer Achievement Director Xianqing Wild

"From the perspective of service providers, the traditional IDC, large internet companies, as well as small start-up companies in the same competition, it seems to be a great situation of flowering, schools of contention; However, from the perspective of the specific product, most of the so-called ' Cloud computing ' products are basically still in foreign countries five years ago, the level of virtual mainframe, ignoring the user experience has become a common feature of the whole industry, and from the perspective of service quality, most of the services providers do not provide SLA (Service level management) guarantee for the product, the whole industry lacks quality evaluation and quality control system generally. Chiang Ching-ye said.

He believes that, in the overall maturity of the industry is low, some of the larger service providers began to seize the market through price war. This led to the public cloud market in a short period of time reduced to the Red Sea, the public cloud services reduced to cheap beauty synonymous, but also let the public generally believe that the use of public cloud services there is a greater risk.

Chiang Ching-ye also pointed out that because of the vicious competition between national policy and operators, the interconnection between data centers is still very prominent. This has allowed the public cloud service to be downgraded to an expensive, low-cost hosting of a VPS (Virtual Private server), which is unable to support the pressure of large Internet applications and to become a hotbed of new applications and new business models.

Based on its long-standing understanding of the Chinese public cloud IaaS Service Market, Liu Liming a number of personal predictions in January 2013. He predicted that in 2012, the Chinese market in the number of cloud hosts about 70,000 units, 2013 cloud host number is expected to break through 100,000, to 2015, the number of cloud hosts may break through 200,000 units. Revenue, Liu Liming's personal forecast is 2012 IaaS industry overall income of about 250 million yuan, 2013 industry revenue is expected to exceed 350 million yuan, and 2015 revenue is expected to break through 700 million yuan.

If this data is compared with the global IaaS market, it is at least possible to see that China's public cloud IaaS service is far from reaching the real market outbreak point. According to Gartner's report on the global public cloud services market, which was just released at the end of February 2013, the total revenue of the global public cloud market in 2013 is expected to achieve a total revenue of $131 billion, of which IaaS occupies 5.5% of the market and market revenue is about 7.2 billion dollars.

Liu Liming that the gap between the Chinese market and the US public cloud IaaS market is actually gradually widening. "China's public cloud IaaS services are mostly facing problems such as insufficient investment in research and development, limited bandwidth and IP resources, unpredictable price costs, and lack of access to administrative licensing." But only licensing, network connectivity, IP resources, product quality, service system, such as a series of problems to solve and improve, the public cloud market will truly prosperity. "he said. He also pointed out that it is these market congenital problems, leading to the current public cloud market has not been the absolute leader, which means that there are still many opportunities to join the market, and cost-effective, enterprise-oriented public cloud IAAS services are still expected to rise.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)