How to grasp the opportunity and core technology in cloud computing era

Companies should be the most powerful catalyst for future cloud computing. The emergence and development of more types of cloud operators with sustainable business models is a decisive factor in the development of China's cloud computing market.

In China, IT companies have almost always won by localized services, with few Chinese companies with core technology and innovative awareness. The advent of cloud computing can be said to bring unprecedented potential opportunities for China's IT companies, for the following 5 points.

The "no Software" concept of cloud computing: Making brand-packaged software no longer important, people no longer need to buy windows software in batches (client browsers are enough), and no longer worry about piracy (or piracy); server-side databases, software and middleware only need one (multi-tenant model) That's enough (because Open-source software and middleware are maturing, this money may also be omitted); We have the ability and the manpower to maintain the server-side system.

Cloud computing "No hardware" concept: Make the brand server and PC no longer important, background hardware with DIY can, their own maintenance, client PC requirements are not high (running the browser's netbook).

Operation is our strength: in fact, the operating model is the strength of Chinese enterprises, the previous article summed up, Baidu defeated Google, Alibaba drove off the ebay, Sina, Sohu, NetEase drove away the Yahoo, and Shanda, the giant's business than abroad to do well, and so on, these advantages can be passed to the cloud.

The world's largest telecommunications operator: The Chinese mobile, China Telecom, with its client resource advantage, has the potential to become a large cloud computing operator, with large data centers and not all operating on a 7x24-hour basis, which can be packaged into cloud computing virtual machines and services for users with their idle computing resources.

Operation mode helps to grasp the core technology: based on the first "No Software" concept, enterprises can better digest and absorb foreign systems, especially software technology, to establish a long-term accumulation mechanism (which is most of the domestic it enterprises are not good at it), the full realization of its own, Do not have to go with the foreign enterprises brand-branded product sales (but also domestic enterprises are not good at); like Amazon's AWS, outsiders have no idea how it's done, nor do they have to sell it, just provide APIs.

According to the author's incomplete observation, the domestic enterprises to carry out cloud computing business about the beginning in 2007, when I was invited to participate in the world Information (CCW study) organized by the "China Software Operations Services Conference (SaaS in Chinese) monthly salon", and was fortunate to do the opening of the first speakers.

Alibaba software Interconnection (SaaS) platform was officially run at the end of 2007 and began to promote the country, once planned to invest 1 billion yuan. July 2008 Ali Software Management said: "5 years later, China's SaaS market will be larger than the traditional software market." However, by March 2010, Alibaba issued a notice: will be on April 30, 2010 to close the Ali software interconnection platform and terminate the provision of related services, Alibaba's first attempt to cloud computing failed, this may be Alibaba's first big mistake.

Alibaba's SaaS platform is based on Microsoft. NET technology, probably because the general manager is Microsoft origin, at that time Microsoft's PAAs technology is immature, and also because Alibaba is too early to hold high dozen, more momentum than hard work, it can be said that the SaaS platform Ali Software is not true based on multi-tenancy Technology SaaS, nor PAAs, can only count a variety of miscellaneous items piled up "fair". This coincides with Alibaba's tradition that they are typical business companies, not technology companies. This mode of operation, to the end of the precipitation of what technology. In fact, Alibaba has very good resources and strength, if according to Salesforce mode, oneself develop a set of platform, start from small place, steady dozen steady, Vitalize, will certainly have harvest, can even overtake Salesforce or Amazon.

As mentioned above, Ma Yun believes that if Alibaba does not do cloud computing, will die in the future. September 2010 Alibaba announced at its 10 anniversary party, will set up a cloud computing business of the new company "Aliyun", according to the relevant introduction, the future "Aliyun" mainly engaged in the development of basic technology, does not involve specific software products. If the news is true, Alibaba may have gone from one extreme to the other, perhaps missing out on the opportunity. However, MA may have other plans, he will not easily stop cloud computing, for example, in April 2010, when Ali software shut down, Alibaba also invested 100 million yuan, in Nanjing, Jiangsu set up the first cloud computing center, the intention is unclear.

There are few companies in the country that have the strength to do cloud computing like Alibaba, other possible Baidu and Shenzhou digital, Baidu's technical advantages are relatively obvious, but also the largest number of small and medium enterprises users, Ali Foreign trade enterprise users, but the basic domestic enterprises are few, Shenzhou Digital also has a certain amount of online customer resources. I remember SoftBank in 2007 investment 20 million and Shenzhou digital cooperation set up a magic code online, SaaS business (in fact, like Ali Software, doing software fairs and distribution, not really SaaS or PAAs, but also not like the App Store is no hosting pure software download site), God code online than Ali software relatively low-key, but the final fate is basically the same.

As shown in Figure 11-40, a group of consulting agencies published in recent years the cloud computing manufacturers business reports, each have omissions, put together to complement each other.

June 1 SaaS Vendors world rankings

▲ Figure 11-40

Some of the companies in Figure 11-40, we mentioned in the 7th chapter of SaaS Technology, most of the same as Ali Software, God code online, starting with SaaS, a few PAAs and IaaS. According to the analysis, most of the small and medium cloud computing companies are having a hard time, except for a handful of highly industry-specific SaaS businesses. Does cloud computing conform to China's customs and traditions? Or is it too early? After all, this model was invented in the west, whether it will work in China, and when it will work, no one can say clearly. For example, the Chinese people are accustomed to buying houses or housing, and generally is to buy a new house, not accustomed to renting, the Chinese people like to "own", like their own decisions, when the boss, no matter what the boss, better do not do the head of the Phoenix, and westerners such a desire not so strong Many Chinese are "too smart", and generally less willing to cooperate with others than Westerners, especially to fully recognize the work of others. From this point of view, cloud computing may not be in line with Chinese habits and culture at the moment. But people still have an advantage, is like the fashion, like the Joneses, you Americans have something we must have, but also better, this advantage is conducive to increasing domestic demand and external demand, prosperity of the economy. So, cloud computing we have to go on, but also to catch up with and beyond the level of foreign countries.

Cloud computing has made the world even more flat. Despite the principle that cloud computing is as safe as depositing money in a bank, but the biggest difference is that domestic banks and other financial institutions are regulated by the official institutions, such as the CBRC, the central bank, but currently for a large number of Third-party cloud computing platform providers and service providers are still lack of relevant authority oversight. "For small-and medium-sized enterprises, putting the core IT applications on a third-party cloud platform is as risky as handing over their lifeline." Ni said the lack of third-party authorities to effectively monitor the data security of the cloud computing platform is the cause of the development of cloud-related industries such as SaaS in China and the difficulty of developing cloud computing giants such as Salesforce and Amazon. "The biggest gap is not in technology, one of the important reasons is that the integrity of the system and the relevant regulations and the construction of the country still lags behind the developed countries."

However, China's cloud computing is not no bright spot, Jinshan, Qihoo and other information security enterprises to create a "cloud security" has landed in the Chinese market flowering. At the end of 2010, 360 company president revealed that 360 "cloud security" data Center on the user scan file query volume of more than 30 billion times a day, a significant refresh of the previous trend by science and technology to create the 5.5 billion world record. In addition, Jinshan, rising are also in the cloud security areas have achieved better results. Security experts say this marks a sign that Chinese security companies have reached international levels in the use of "cloud security" technologies to address Internet security issues.

In addition, Sina launched the beta version of the Sina app Engine in 2010, as shown in Figure 11-41, as the first cloud computing PAAs platform to provide commercial operations in China. SAE and Gae mode, SAE based on lamp technology (as shown in Figure 11-42 as its software architecture), currently has more than 5,000 active developers, and support Sina Weibo more than 70% of the application development.

▲ Figure 11-41

▲ Figure 11-42

Finally, talk about the domestic cloud computing, have to say Baidu's "box Computing" and China Mobile Sutra (bigcloud).

Box calculation is August 18, 2009, Baidu chairman and chief executive officer Robin Li at the 200,900-degree technical innovation Conference put forward the new technical concept. Some people say that the box calculation is a replica of cloud computing, but Baidu said no, since Google's CEO proposed cloud computing, Baidu seems to have a response. From the Baidu Box Computing system architecture (shown in Figure 11-43), it differs from Google's Gae, not a NIST-defined SaaS or PAAs, or IaaS, but rather around how to better improve the "search" level of Baidu's main business, It should be said to be a pragmatic rather than ambitious plan, and did not run behind Google, but it should also be a kind of cloud computing, it is worth affirming. Like Amazon's AWS, Baidu does not have the technical details of the public box calculation.

▲ Figure 11-43

Sutra is the cloud computing platform that the China Mobile Research Institute is developing and experimenting with. The research and development of cloud computing, launched by the China Mobile Research Institute in 2007, released the "Big Cloud" 1.0 system, which consists of 1000 CPUs and 256 nodes, May 21, 2010. At the end of 2010, the system can realize the key functions such as distributed File system, distributed mass Data Warehouse, distributed computing framework, cluster management, cloud storage System, elastic computing systems and parallel data mining tools. In particular, the large cloud 1.0 consists of large cloud data mining systems (BC-PDM), massive structured storage (hugetable), large cloud resilient Computing Systems (BC-EC), large cloud resilient storage (Bc-nas) and large cloud parallel Computing (Bc-mapreduce) 5 products. According to China Mobile's plan, the Big Cloud 1.0 version focuses on the management and sharing of massive data, from 1.0 to 1.5 to focus on key technologies in the computing/storage resource pool, with emphasis on real-time transactions and cloud computing capability opening in the 2.0 to 3.0 release phase. The overall technical framework of China Mobile Sutra, as shown in Figure 11-44, belongs to a cloud computing PAAs platform.

▲ Figure 11-44

Looking closely at the Big cloud technology architecture, it is easy to see that the China Mobile Research Institute basically copied the Apache Hadoop system from the bottom up, like the 9th chapter of Hadoop, which was based on three papers published by Google, and then realized Google App some of the functional modules (some of the module names have been modified, such as BigTable was changed to the Hbase,gfs HDFs, etc.), China Mobile Almost "conditionings" did the same job, for example, BigTable was changed to Hugetable,gfs, Hyperdfs, and so on. But Hadoop explicitly says that they are using Java to recreate the Gae function module on their own, but the authors speculate that the China Mobile Institute is a "big cloud" system that is modified and supplemented by the code that uses Apache Hadoop directly. To do so itself is justifiable, reasonable and legal, is a clever way, why should like Baidu to do their own set? As I have summarized the "five reasons" mentioned in the reason, if the Mobile Institute of the Apache Hadoop technology to understand ( Do not appear ophone the problem of Android, you need to dive under the heart to the next point of real Kung fu, rather than market speculation, this thing should be less difficult than the ophone, to make good use of, set up a long-term accumulation machine, gradually become their own can fully grasp the system, The long term becomes the core technology we own. Many foreign it giants, such as IBM, often use this approach.

According to the previous "five reasons" analysis, telecom operators in the field of cloud computing has a great opportunity. China Mobile wants to use the cloud computing platform as a provider of information services. At the same time, like IBM's Blue Cloud, the vast majority of China Mobile employees themselves as "private cloud" of the "Big cloud" users, this can make Sutra as soon as possible to mature. It is worth noting that, as previously analyzed, the Apache Hadoop system has a narrower application area, developed by search and internet portals such as Google and Yahoo, not a general-purpose cloud computing PAAs platform, Force.com, Azure, PAAs middleware, which is launched by enterprises such as Oracle, Redhat and IBM, is the common PAAs platform. To do this kind of middleware is more difficult, this does not know how Mobile research institute is considered, whether through argumentation.

But China's mobile cloud, like Aliyun, is now a research and experimentation project with no clear business model and business goals, perhaps a lesson from the failure of "big projects" such as Ali's software and the Magic Code online. But with China Mobile's facilities and client-resource advantages, China Mobile should be able to do some immediate, hands-on operations like At&t and Verizon, especially in the area of IaaS. Figure 11-45 shows the at&t synaptic hosting Business system architecture diagram. In addition, China Mobile seems to be more concerned about mobile cloud computing, but on the server side, mobile cloud computing and the general cloud computing technology is not very different, mainly to clarify the business model and business model problems.

▲ Figure 11-45

Despite the efforts of companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and China Mobile, cloud operators, especially IaaS operators, are still the weakest link in the industry. According to the previous analysis, in fact, China does not yet have a heavyweight cloud computing operators, the formation of small and medium-sized cloud computing operators are few. We urgently need to make a breakthrough in this area, to create at least one of the successful typical cloud computing operators, to boost confidence and drive the development of the entire industrial chain!

(Responsible editor: admin)