From SOA to cloud computing, the cross-thinking of China Mobile

At the fourth session of the China SOA Standardization Symposium, the relevant personnel from various industry experts, users and government were discussed about SOA standards and development. Du Yujian, SOA project manager at China Mobile Research Institute, has made a detailed introduction to the integration and standardization of SOA and cloud computing, as follows.

It's development box from the mainframe, personal machine damage and then to the change in cloud computing, we see a long time must be divided, the trend of a long time, from the mainframe, in fact there is a network, you call the appointment good time, stuffed into your card, get results. Later to the PC, the service from only a specific industry can be made available to everyone, and thus the Internet. Later, Internet change improved the synergy of our personal computing systems. Cloud computing is actually the third it revolution following the PC, the Internet. In fact, as early as the last century in the 90 's, put forward the concept of network computers, which is actually a prototype of cloud computing, people have not thought through the Internet can operate some things, the network of trust there are certain limitations, so, there is no cloud computing. By now, cloud computing is gaining ground, and now cloud computing will be a convenience for everyone, like infrastructure, water and gas, and more to the point that there will be only 5 computers in the world.

For China Mobile, we also have a different understanding of the use of large-scale Low-cost computing units through IP network connectivity to provide a variety of computing and storage services of IT technology. Through 5 features, we can see that China Mobile's demand for cloud computing. Large-scale, smooth expansion of the cross-regional is our hope to improve our processing capacity through cloud computing, we now China Mobile's data has reached 30 PD, most of the data is shared data, the existing traditional analysis of the processing architecture can be said to be far from meeting our business needs. For functional cloud, we hope to create our own functional cloud, to provide customers with a wide range of application resources. In addition, cloud computing also has some materialized calculations to achieve distribution. It's such a framework and architecture, the traditional way we all know more, this architecture brings about uneven utilization and waste, this is our understanding of cloud computing. From the perspective of cloud computing, in fact, from a national point of view, governments are also sparing no effort to promote the application of cloud computing, including our country. The US government has applied computing such as tax monitoring to cloud computing, the first government web site hosted on the cloud of work. We China Mobile also hope to be able to take advantage of some of our IT experience and some of our infrastructure advantages to provide relevant services to our Government's small and medium enterprises.

From the era of cloud computing, China Mobile as an information carrier, from three aspects to consider:

1. Network infrastructure.

Cloud computing is a network of resources to compute and store on demand. And cloud computing, from the network is our carrier's foothold. We need to constantly innovate technology and develop our network, from 3G to 4G, constantly broaden our bandwidth, increase the use of infrastructure;

2. Terminal infrastructure.

Now Apple, GOOGLE, Microsoft, the end of the cloud era of the role of a considerable number of disputes. As operators, the interests of consideration, we clearly believe that the terminal is the important platform for cloud computing, will be around the terminal to create our personalized multimedia information platform. 3, the application of infrastructure, this aspect of our telecommunications operators will cloud computing as we build our IT application of the core platform, the introduction of cloud computing to build a low-cost, highly efficient and scalable technology application platform.

Operators have the advantage of cloud computing services:

1, grasp the needs of customers. This is through the past for the group of customers, individual customers, a large number of business operations experience, can more effectively define the specific business needs of customers. On the other hand, we have a relatively rich enterprise information operation experience. Supported by the relevant departments, China Mobile will be the SaaS model, the experience of enterprise information to provide us with such a government or other large state-owned enterprises to use, in the future of this it in this Ms field of services will be directly to serve our other enterprises or the government. On the other hand, this service quality assurance. This is also a fundamental advantage, that is, for a cloud computing provider, a great trouble is the guarantee of SLAs, but the operator side has the advantage is to ensure the quality of the entire cloud services through End-to-end, truly for the cloud services to establish a quality assurance of telecommunications.

2, is the resource advantage, we from the capital and resources advantage, we can set up large-scale warehouse-type data center, to support the ability to have large-scale services.

From the standardization of Cloud computing, the current in the public cloud can be said to be, eight recount. In the private sector above is also the various vendors to provide different solutions.

From the operator's point of view, operators particularly like standardization, so, in the cloud computing domain, in fact, operators, not only to be a user of cloud computing and users, we also need to do a cloud computing services provider, so we China Mobile also provides a, A large cloud development project is also being built, through which the project is actually studied, primarily in IaaS and PAAs core technologies. At present we have a 1124 development platform (voice), we through virtualization, but also the classification of file systems, but also data warehousing, specific to the precise project application, will be the platform for the corresponding development. In fact, our results are also in a large number of pilots within China Mobile. Another is the construction of private cloud within our enterprise.

China Mobile in the cloud computing standardization work is also active participation, first actively participate in the National Information Technology Standardization Committee of the SOA standard Working Group, in this group we lead the standard cloud computing some work. It is also considered as one of the tasks of our China Electronic Society cloud Computing Commission. At the same time, we also carry out a number of academic research and other aspects of work.

In SOA, China Mobile is still relatively early in thinking about SOA, and in 2008 it has actually begun to analyze the feasibility and the point of entry of SOA in the internal support system. In the 2009, we built a system platform in management information systems, our earliest attempts at SOA. In recent years, we have conducted some SOA attempts in this core billing system since 2011.

Overall, there are a few things that China Mobile can do to drive SOA:

1, business development needs;

New business needs to be carried out in the context of the traditional business slowdown mobile internet business, broadband business, such a business needs to have a large support system, our current boss system, the main goal is to achieve the province's customers and support for some Internet customers, We need a certain province of products to support the customers in other provinces, now we are each province of this different provinces, operators still have differences, which brings a provider's needs.

2, customer service;

Customer-oriented, now the concept of it construction, from the previous function to achieve the goal of construction, to focus on the customer as the core, to strengthen customer contact management and service request management, the long process of such a number of systems design optimization to put forward higher requirements, but also fine operation. Now this kind of operator reorganization, this kind of market competition is also more and more big, this kind of marketing time is also the request is higher, also needs our marketing case to have the fast rise ability;

3, fine operation;

We need to effectively improve it's regulatory capacity, China Mobile in the past is basically the reliance on it providers, the response is relatively serious, in this case to change providers, provincial companies will have various concerns. We are beginning to hope to be able to strengthen the technology requirements through SOA. SOA is also an important evolutionary direction for China Mobile as a whole it architecture.

Mobile is now characterized by three major support systems, each with a group and two architecture of the province, so it needs to be used with SOA to help achieve such application integration across provinces and across systems. In addition to the practice of SOA, we are in the management information system this is to go relatively early, through the construction of ERP projects implemented, in recent years, our practice is also in the core IT system to be applied.

There are three main areas:

Channel integration, channel integration to improve customer satisfaction, a customer can be through the telephone or online business hall or to the physical office to handle the transaction, in this case, through the SOA approach to this service integration. Another

Group customer support, marketing integration, under the pressure of marketing, to quickly integrate existing marketing channels, to provide new marketing case support.

Broadband business development, we need to improve the long process of such business opening and the usual ability. To penetrate our pre-sale, sale, the long process after sale. But from the present point of view our practice is still stuck in a post integration stage, because the objective situation is that we China Mobile's IT support system is a large number of legacy systems, you have to use this kind of construction, modular development to emphasize the concept of the pre-integration is not realistic, we generally say, OK, I tell you, We comb out how much integration is high, report out, in the future to achieve this level, we will again through the integration of the SOA approach, this is a relatively primitive way.

The integration of SOA and cloud computing is considered this way. First, the two aspects of China Mobile's work are more integrated. SOA and the so-called cloud computing two have services, but the two are different, cloud computing is the operation and delivery, is through the network on demand to provide customers. SOA services, however, emphasize how services are applied and how they are integrated in the most efficient architectures. So SOA is a situation where IaaS is a combination of the ability to improve overall it performance.

SOA solves the cycle reduction of the process I develop, in the actual system operations, we emphasize that under the architecture of SOA, the process of a rapid repurchase, to meet the new business requirements of the situation is bound to bring, some services to the requirements of the increase or decrease, in this case, in the case of traditional architectures, will bring some hot spots or low utilization.

This provides a support for this response through IaaS. Also, SOA and PAAs and SaaS levels, because we're not thinking about a lot here, but we think SOA at these two levels is a mutually stimulating relationship, not a mutual inclusion.

We're building a SaaS or PAAs, you can do an SOA architecture, but not necessarily. For example, in search engine research or in the analysis of some massive data, more attention is the implementation of a deformation calculation algorithm, and if the emphasis is a CLM (sound) or so some of the SOA architecture for the flow of the process, we can put the SOA this way, The capabilities of his existing ESB, or the ability of this model engine to evolve directly into a capability or to improve PAAs flexibility and scalability in this way, including SaaS. This is some preliminary thinking that can be developed between the two.

In addition, for standardization work, we make some suggestions:

1. It is recommended that the standardization work be carried out in a step-type development way. On the one hand, for example, in the level of IAAS standards, we can speed up some of the relevant processes, the formation of standards, to promote the development of industrial alliances, and jointly promote the market bigger and stronger. For SaaS or PAAs, it is still in the eight, innovative ideas continue to appear in the case, suggest or can give some framework, do some appropriate guidance, standardize work can be properly suspended.

2, standardization and open source work. We work through open source, to promote the prototype into open source to promote standardization of maturity.

3. As a user of SOA, the key expectation of standardization as an enterprise is to be able to focus on the technical reference implementation, focus on SOA, validate the feasibility of the technology and promote the industry's work.