Differences between China and the United States in cloud computing

To analyze the situation, the first thing we need to figure out is exactly what kind of stage the whole cloud computing is now and where will we go?

American cloud computing ecosystem

Last March, my biggest visit to the United States after visiting a number of cloud computing companies was that Amazon's IaaS services, such as AWS and RackSpace, have become ubiquitous and supported many PaaS platforms such as Engine Yard and Heroku for more XaaS The rising popularity of service companies and other start-ups in the social, mobile and other fields has provided the soil for a vibrant ecosystem that is driving the tide of innovation and prosperity in IT innovation in the United States.

Before the Spring Festival this year, I visited Iron.io outside of San Francisco. They specialized in the development of messaging middleware services and were still in the early stages of business with less than ten employees, but the technology was unique. The office is a incubator set up by one of the founders of Heroku, a small base that has settled in several companies that make third-party vertical services on Heroku. The large number of XaaS companies, often staffed by technical staff, are specialized and represent one of the most dynamic parts of the entire ecosystem. (This issue of Guo Lijing's "foreign cloud computing innovation and trends" made a more comprehensive introduction to this.)

While some of the major cloud platforms in the United States have experienced some incidents and problems in the past year, overall user satisfaction is high. It has become quite natural for SMBs and startups to choose IaaS and PaaS public cloud platforms thing. The government, from the beginning of Obama, has been pushing IT facilities to cloud computing as much as possible. While many large CIOs also like to cloud computing is not safe, can not talk lightly remarks aside, but on the other using Salesforce, Workday and other SaaS software to manage the most sensitive information such as customers and employees, the use of Yammer, Chatter and other internal collaboration and communication have been very common. Compared to the mobile Internet, a 700 million US dollars of Instagram people feel very happy, CRM, HCM, SaaS socialization companies valued at more than one billion US dollars abound, either IPO or obtain high valuation multiple rounds Financing, or high-priced threats such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and other companies to buy. Entrepreneurship has now expanded to medical, education, retail, payment and other fields. (This issue of Tan Lin "across the sea tide see SaaS" a very good analysis.)

When it returned to the United States in September, it was held at Salesforce's Dreamforce convention, where 90,000 people were said to be even larger than the rest of Oracle World. The momentum of cloud computing shocked the entire city of San Francisco, Nearly one night can not book hotel. I was able to see an advertisement from CloudExpo, another well-known cloud computing conference in the subway, which impressed me with the ecological awareness of the concessions of Dreamforce attendees.

US cloud computing has entered a crucial stage

In mid-November 2012, Amazon, the leader in cloud computing, held its first global customer and partner conference in Las Vegas. The focus of this conference Amazon is not a start-up company, but a larger corporate customers. Whether it's the products such as Redshift data warehousing released at the conference, integration with VMware images and Microsoft Active Directory, new capabilities like hybrid cloud support, various certifications from AWS, or NASA, NASA Duke, the United States government and other major customers, Amazon are all emphasizing business. Amazon's cloud computing unit recently started mass recruitment of sales staff, of course, is also targeted at large and medium-sized enterprise customers. In March this year, Amazon received the CIA's $ 600 million one-year bill, which should be the most landmark event in the cloud computing industry in the near future.

From the developer, the entrepreneur to the business, Amazon Cloud Computing seems to have entered the second and crucial stage: to get more cakes out of nearly $ 3 trillion worth of global IT purchases.

Unlike general IT exhibitions, booths of the traditional IT giant vendors are often not big in the partner exhibition area of ​​the conference, while the booths of some emerging cloud technology and service companies are stylish and eye-catching.

From this, cloud computing is actually the Internet company represented by Amazon through large-scale platform, its own technology and operational capabilities into a new generation of products and services, coupled with other emerging new ecosystem forces, and traditional IT vendors A process of direct competition. On the other hand, cloud computing will in turn promote the wave of innovation in all walks of life, and more emerging enterprises will be born to break the industry pattern and threaten the original leader's status.

Of course, the defensive traditional IT companies, its strength can not be ignored. Strong capital and talent pool is not at a disadvantage compared to the Internet and startups (He Gang, who has worked at both Amazon and the Microsoft R & D team, said that the main technical backbone of AWS is the kind of people Microsoft can Find hundreds), coupled with patents and customer inertia and other factors, the battle of cloud computing, the winner, in fact, hard to say. At the conference, Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix, the number one user of AWS, said: "We are still in the very primitive assembly language phase of cloud computing." However, the countervailing trend has become very clear. To survive, the traditional giants must learn or even surpass the challenger's play.

The gap between China and the United States cloud computing

In 2013, China's cloud computing in general is at what stage?

Overall, we are behind the cloud computing in the United States one stage, this gap is mainly reflected in three aspects.

First, our infrastructure and external environment are still relatively backward

Amazon's Lilian Shao wrote an article comparing Sino-US infrastructure, noting that the infrastructure in China such as computer labs and networks is very poor globally. Since there are monopolies in many fields, it is very difficult for them to find a computer room that meets the basic quality standards in China, which is basically impossible for self-construction. The network environment is even worse. The problem of interoperability between north and south (not only low bandwidth and high prices) has plagued the Internet for many years, Unresolved, BGP or even fiber optic interconnection are severely restricted. In her essay, she laments: "China's Internet operation and maintenance team may be the largest in the world. Operation and maintenance have even become the core competitiveness of many Internet businesses because of complex infrastructure and networks."

And quarter Xinhua article in this article, "IaaS difficult landing in China," also believes that, on the one hand, the domestic understanding of cloud computing is not clear and rational enough, the first is too high, quickly converted to a data center investment boom, and then found that applications with On the one hand, government regulators such as the filing of websites and the flexibility and quickness of cloud computing completely run counter to the principle of cloud computing. In addition, cloud computing often involves telecommunications value-added services, qualifications have become entrepreneurs in this area stumbling block.

Second, we do not have Amazon or RackSpace yet

Judging from the development of the United States, reliable IaaS is crucial for the overall start-up of cloud computing. Write here, whim, in a CIO micro-group asked: "We all used the domestic public cloud?" Some students immediately responded: "The cloud is there now fly it?" Indeed, the cloud platform to put it plainly It is also a kind of product and solution to the user, in the end is good or not, there is no more choice of the provider, it is the basic premise that the enterprise user considers adopting.

However, in China, it is precisely lacking in enough cloud platform. Liu Liming commented at the end of last year domestic IaaS manufacturers, came in the first camp is Aliyun, Wan network and Shanda. Today, however, million net has been incorporated into Aliyun, Shanda cloud computing significantly changed the meaning of internal services, Ali cloud became a dominance.

Third, we do not have GAE nor Engine Yard and Heroku

The gap between China and the United States in PaaS is more reflected in the market. PaaS Sina Cloud, which operates earlier in China, has experienced rapid growth over the past few years. Although the number of users has increased rapidly, its revenue is limited due to the limited number of users, mainly developers and start-up companies. Currently, it is also considering restructuring. In addition the PaaS platform is basically a subsidiary of the various business giant only.

And while I visit Engine Yard this year, Bill Platt, their senior vice president of operations, is proud to say that the company is growing very fast with monthly rates of growth. Users, in addition to start-up companies, SaaS companies, software development companies, e-commerce, mobile, games, etc., large and medium enterprises sector is also very large. I ask which competitors are mainly worried about. He said that the biggest enemy is that customers are used to getting all their own decisions, but not too much competition with other PaaS companies because the market is too big. For Amazon is also PaaS development, he believes this one is not easy to do, the short term is difficult to pose a threat. 80% of their IaaS tier is placed on Amazon and another 20% is targeted at the more demanding customers at the Teremark's Miami data center, telecom operator Verizon, which has the highest level of security and is home to the National Security Agency's data center .

PaaS itself is more like developer-oriented development tools and middleware in the past. Due to the widespread existence of pirated thinking, this market has never been formed. Therefore, the difficulties encountered by PaaS are inevitable.

Cloud computing on China's significance

Cloud computing is actually a great opportunity for China. As we all know, the leading force in China's IT industry is foreign. Domestic enterprises, regardless of core technology, research and development strength, corporate mechanism and strategic vision, are lackluster. The only internationally competitive Huawei and ZTE, the main advantage in the telecommunications industry, business IT field if the original pattern step by step, to go a long way. National ministries and experts for the CPU, operating system, database and other core technologies lack of headache, nor is it a year or two. Although after years of huge investment, but with little success.

However, cloud computing has inspired technological changes and the focus of competition in the industry has shifted to data center computing and to new types of human-computer interaction and intelligent algorithms. From the beginning of the chip, computing, storage and networking hardware and software, server-side operating systems and infrastructure software, client devices operating system and so on, have undergone a disruptive change, open source software and open technology dominates.

In these technical fields, the domestic industries, especially Internet companies and some innovative and pioneering enterprises, have greatly narrowed the gap with the international giants compared to the past. The open source technology and openness, but also to us to continue to narrow the gap and even later came home, creating the opportunity. At present, in some core open source softwares such as Linux, MySQL, Hadoop, and OpenStack, many domestic technical personnel have entered the stage of the international community and are playing an increasingly important role.

However, this window of opportunity does not last long. Microsoft and Century Internet jointly let Azure landing in China, Amazon and other foreign cloud service providers are expected to follow one after another. In fact, Apple's iCloud has already entered our lives through tens of millions of terminal devices. Cloud computing is essentially global in nature, that is, the best technology and services that can take the world without human intervention. And human barriers are getting harder and harder and less violating the trend and outdated.

Cloud computing in turn will lead to large-scale innovation, speed of innovation significantly accelerated, new technologies, new ideas and new services after another. Believe that often go to Silicon Valley students, should be able to deeply feel this.

In addition, cloud computing is directly related to big data. As a strategic resource for the new era, data means property ownership and sovereignty and may eventually play a decisive role.

The ultimate success or failure of the competition will be in the construction of a large ecosystem. Whether our ecological system is healthy, whether it is conducive to innovation and entrepreneurship, and is conducive to the full development of personal talents will play a decisive role. And the responsibility of building this ecosystem is in government, in industry, in every company, and also in everyone. We need to have a more long-term perspective.

From this perspective, there are actually very few domestic companies that currently have the hope of becoming cloud computing platforms and becoming ecosystem-led companies. I have a view that cloud computing is a masterpiece project. Only the highest-level decision-makers in the company can clearly understand the key issue of cloud computing, have the determination to invest for a long time, have a truly open mind and have an ecosystem awareness. Only this business It is possible to develop and ultimately gain the trust of our customers. Of course, it is also an indispensable condition to build the technology, operation and financial strength of a platform ecosystem.

China needs more ecosystem-conscious businesses and individuals. What kind of thing to do, in the end what to do bad thinking, we must change. At any time, such down-to-earth enterprises as LinkCloud, Ucloud, Seven Bulls, Take, Surveillance Po, stdyun, Huayun Internet, Spruce Internet can have a more relaxed and suitable environment to grow more smoothly. China's cloud computing There is hope.