Edge computing becomes the next point of the explosion, who will win the cloud computing giant and the CDN giant?

At the recent Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Group senior vice president and president of Alibaba Hu Xiaoming announced that IoT (Internet of Things) officially became the main strategy of Alibaba after e-commerce, finance, logistics and cloud computing, and in order to do a good job of IoT Alibaba Cloud will invest in the emerging technology field of “edge computing” in 2018.

Not just Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing giants called "3A" by the media, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft AZURE, have strategically placed on edge computing. Edge computing is a concept proposed by IBM in 2012 until 2017. In the year of the year, the realm is really ushered in. In theory, edge computing and cloud computing are competitive. Why do cloud computing giants have strategic layout edge calculations?

Why is edge computing breaking out?

The form when information computing first appears is an edge calculation—each decentralized node is responsible for the maintenance of hardware and software, as well as the storage, calculation, and security of data. However, because of cost, flexibility, and scalability, the final information calculation is basically The centralized cloud computing center is responsible for letting the centralized cloud computing center be responsible for the storage, calculation, and security of all data, and the terminal is only responsible for I/O, that is, data acquisition, output, and interaction. The already popular cloud computing has become a huge information industry. The Deutsche Bank report pointed out that by the end of 2018, China's cloud computing market will reach 24.5% of the Western market, reaching a scale of 8.8 billion US dollars.

Edge computing becomes the next point of the explosion, who will win the cloud computing giant and the CDN giant?

However, no technical architecture is perfect. Cloud computing has faced many bottlenecks today and needs new technologies to break through.

First, cloud computing cannot meet the computational needs of explosive massive data. With the convergence of the Internet and various industries, especially after the popularization of IoT (Internet of Things) technology, computing demand has exploded. It is estimated that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the network, and the traditional cloud computing architecture cannot meet the requirements. With such huge computing needs, it is not realistic to expand in a short period of time.

Second, cloud computing cannot satisfy some emerging computing scenarios, especially IoT. The cloud computing approach is that the data is collected by the terminal and transmitted to the centralized cloud computing center. After the cluster is calculated, the result is returned. Because of the network delay, it takes a certain time, especially in the mobile Internet based on 4G network. For example, real-time speech translation, such as unmanned vehicles, has extremely high requirements on response time, and relying on cloud computing is not realistic.

Third, IoT generates a lot of "small data" that needs to be processed in real time, which is not suitable for cloud computing. In the Internet age, cloud computing and big data and artificial intelligence are trinity, so that Ma Huateng predicted that in the future, all walks of life will actually use artificial intelligence to process big data in the cloud. However, the Internet and the mobile Internet are user-generated data, while the IoT era has a large amount of data generated by machines, such as meter data, environmental monitoring data, and a variety of small data, many of which do not need to be uploaded to the cloud for processing. The terminal or the edge of the network can simply process the response, or the original data does not need to be uploaded to the cloud for processing, and then processed in the cloud and then transmitted to the cloud, thereby avoiding waste of bandwidth and storage.

In this case, the edge calculation appears. Its core idea is to transfer the storage, transmission, calculation and security of the data to the edge nodes for processing. Of course, unlike the terminal calculation before the cloud computing, the edge calculation is not to say Let the terminal be responsible for all calculations, but deploy the edge platform closer to the terminal. The terminal can communicate with it in various forms, which can avoid the network delay problem of the centralized cloud computing center. A large number of real-time calculations that require interaction will be completed at the edge nodes, and some calculations that require centralized processing will continue to be handed over to large cloud computing centers. For example, big data mining and large-scale learning will be completed by centralized cloud computing centers. Cloud computing division of labor to meet the explosive computing needs of the IoT era.

The biggest triple value of cloud computing is: low cost, scalability and reliability. It is suitable for computing requirements without real-time requirements, long periods (from acquisition to processing to calculation to storage to multiple mining), and edge computing. It is a decentralized cloud computing. In addition to the advantages of cloud computing, it also has low latency, high usage and security, and is more suitable for real-time and short-cycle computing.

After the outbreak of the Internet of Things, various intelligent devices emerged in an endless stream. They all have sensors responsible for collecting data and interconnecting. To respond, complex data processing is required, and edge computing will share some of the tasks. According to IDC data, more than 50% of data will need to be analyzed, processed and stored on the edge of the network in 2020. The market for edge computing will exceed one trillion, becoming an emerging market that is equally divided with cloud computing. The Internet and cloud computing are a natural pair. The Internet of Things and edge computing are also going hand in hand. It is because of this that Alibaba has announced its entry into edge computing while launching the IoT strategy. It is foreseeable that in the era of Internet of Everything, edge computing will definitely break out.

Each player competes in the edge computing market

Previously, "ABC" became the standard of technology giants - AI, Big Data, Cloud, and now it has to add two letters, one is I, IoT, that is, the Internet of Everything; one is E, Edge Computing, that is, edge computing. Players currently calculating edge calculations can be divided into the following factions:

Cloud computing giants: Edge computing has a certain impact on cloud computing, and there is also strong synergy with cloud computing. Therefore, 3A cloud computing giants are actively deploying to avoid being swallowed up.

Alibaba Cloud has defined the strategic layout edge calculation in 2018. The core strategy of the future is the “cloud + edge + end” trinity computing model. It has launched the first IoT edge computing product Link Edge, which can be used in AI practice. Already 16 chip companies, 52 equipment vendors, 184 modules and gateways support Alibaba Cloud IoT operating system and edge computing products.

Amazon AWS has also entered the field of edge computing, and Greengrass software released late last year "can seamlessly extend AWS to devices so that they can perform local operations on the data they generate while still using the cloud for management, analysis and long-term storage." .

At the end of 2017 at the Microsoft Build conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella officially launched the Microsoft hybrid cloud solution Azure Stack to the Chinese market, which can integrate cloud capabilities into the terminal, data can be processed locally, and then Aggregate analysis and decision making, which is an edge computing service.

Equipment giants: Just as cloud computing will produce IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, IDC, CDN, enterprise servers, and storage industries, edge computing will also form branches. At present, equipment giants such as Cisco, Huawei, and Dell are also actively deploying edge computing.

At the end of 16th, Huawei, Intel, ARM and other six companies jointly launched the Edge Computing Industry Alliance (ECC); Dell EMC's Micro Module Data Centers brought micro data centers to edge computing, only It occupies half of the standard parking space and features local computing, storage and networking capabilities to quickly process nearby data without having to return data to the data center and cloud service provider.

CDN Players: The core value of CDN is to intelligently distribute digital content to nodes closer to users, thereby improving overall distribution efficiency, reducing network latency, saving bandwidth resources, and its inherent edge node attributes, low latency. And low bandwidth, so that it has a first-mover advantage in the edge computing market, CDN itself is the prototype of edge computing. CDN players have become the core players of edge computing with their previous accumulation in edge nodes and edge technology. On the one hand, CDN players can further reduce cost and intelligent distribution by using edge computing. On the other hand, CDN players open up a series of services such as storage security based on data distribution.

Edge computing becomes the next point of the explosion, who will win the cloud computing giant and the CDN giant?

As early as 2003, IBM, one of the founders of the concept of edge computing, collaborated with global CDN leader Akamai on edge computing, which shows the strong connection between CDN and edge computing. Nowadays, China's largest and second-largest CDN giant, NetScience has also regarded edge computing as its core strategy. In 2016, it began to build an edge computing network. In 2017, it gradually introduced edge computing microservices, and will gradually open edge IaaS and PaaS services. In addition, CDN companies such as Limelight and CloudFlare have launched different edge computing services.

Who can win the trillion edge computing market?

The cloud computing market has created 3A cloud computing service giants: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Ali AliYun. In addition, the public cloud market includes players such as Google, Tencent, Jinshan, Huawei, and telecommunications, as well as vertical cloud service providers such as UCloud. These players are providing computing services to developers from all walks of life. Around the cloud market, there have been software and hardware giants such as IOE (IBM, Oracle, EMC), CDN giants such as Nets, and solution providers such as H3C.

Referring to the cloud computing market, the edge computing market will not be a big one, but in the end, every link, such as edge computing services, edge computing devices, edge computing communications, will take the majority of the market players in the field, the rest Players divide the pattern of the residual market. Of course, the edge computing service will take the biggest piece of cake, and communication devices and network services are all serving it.

Cloud computing giants and CDN giants have their own advantages in edge computing services.

The cloud computing giant regards edge computing as an extension of cloud computing. It is a sinking of cloud computing capabilities from the center to the edge. It is also a synergy of the IoT strategy. The idea of Alibaba Cloud is that the original data center will Continue to undertake a large number of computing tasks, "and some of the implementation decision-making and autonomous collaboration process will be transferred to the edge computing, forming a "cloud, edge, end" machine integration of the collaborative computing system. "The localization of AWS and AZURE in China is relatively slow. Alibaba Cloud is the super oligarch of China's cloud computing market. There are a large number of developers and industry customers. At the same time, there are various software and hardware technology reserves, which are extremely advantageous in the edge computing market. s position.

Edge computing becomes the next point of the explosion, who will win the cloud computing giant and the CDN giant?

The idea of the CDN giant is to extend the processing, computing, storage, security and transmission of more data from the original content distribution service. The technology on content intelligent distribution leads by focus, and seizes the opportunity of IoT outbreak to enter edge computing. In fact, one of the foundations of Alibaba Cloud's edge computing is CDN. The combination of edge computing and CDN can lead to chemical reactions, while CDN customers are also cloud computing customers. The CDN giant's edge computing is also based on off-the-shelf customers, and the CDN giant is more neutral than the giants such as AliYun. Nets is China's largest CDN giant, and its cutting-edge computing market is also a matter of course.

Edge computing becomes the next point of the explosion, who will win the cloud computing giant and the CDN giant?

In the long run, CDN giants and cloud computing giants are more likely to cooperate. Just like the relationship between cloud computing and edge computing, both computing have their own special scenes and rely on different technologies. IBM has long been working with global CDN boss Akamai, which has also moved from competition to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, where Microsoft Azure has integrated Akamai's CDN platform capabilities into its own cloud platform.

Of course, who will eventually become the "3A" in the edge computing market will need time to give an answer.