Review 2013: The Summer of cloud computing

Before 2013, there may be a wait-and-see or scepticism about the cloud, but after a year of development, cloud computing has completely landed: Big companies are busy with how to deliver faster, more stable and safer cloud services, how to snatch users in the cloud market, and small companies to consider how to use cloud computing to reduce their operating costs. How to make your system into a cloud structure; startups think about how to use the cloud to reduce upfront spending, and even how to use the concept of "cloud" to start a business and sell yourself in front of a VC.

According to Gartner, the global cloud services market in 2013 was as high as $131.7 billion, with an annual growth rate of 18%, and a 2017 forecast of $244.2 billion trillion, which would continue to grow by more than 15% over the next few years. At the same time, the market represented by I/P/S will also reach $33.3 billion in 2013, up 29.7%. There is no big change in the region's share of cloud computing: the US, 50%+, a slow-falling Western Europe and Japan accounted for 23.5% and 4.5%, respectively, and China accounted for 4% and continued to grow.

Focus on domestic, from the Ministry of Industry and Telecommunications Research Institute deputy Dean Liu Do that 2013 China's public cloud services market is about 4.76 billion yuan, the growth rate slowed down from 2012, but still up to 36%. The Ministry of survey also showed that 8% of the surveyed companies have started cloud computing applications, including public cloud services accounted for 29.1%, private cloud accounted for 2.9%, mixed cloud accounted for 6%, more than 76.8% of the respondents said will be more business migration to the cloud environment, domestic enterprises on cloud computing awareness and adoption of the year.

If 2012 is the spring of cloud computing, then 2013 is undoubtedly in the summer of cloud computing, where I will take you from the public cloud and the private cloud in two directions to review this "summer" story:

Public Cloud: Industry observation

From the above data, we can see that the entire international cloud computing market is a steady growth trend, but the geographical differences cannot be ignored-although the Chinese market has attractive prospects, but with the United States and other countries to contrast the gap is not small! At the same time, the boundaries of the academic classification of IaaS, PAAs and SaaS in the cloud-computing industry are increasingly blurred in the industry, with vendors constantly enriching their product lines by different means. AWS has not only been publishing PAAs platforms, but is also trying to be a master in PAAs; Big data originator Google, beyond the Gae platform, is pushing its PAAs platform gce;salesforce.com to integrate the PAAs platform through acquisitions Heroku; Azure across IaaS, PAAs and SaaS 3 areas, Shang build private cloud, public cloud, mixed cloud unified management cloud Platform. At home, the status of integration is more obvious, and the cloud ecosystem will gradually replace the traditional three kinds of division.

Foreign Industry Status

In the 2012 inventory, we have said that the field of IaaS in foreign countries is a "warlords chasing AWS" trend, but after a full 1 years, AWS seems to be drifting away! In this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant Department of Statistics, Amazon has a landslide advantage in market share, leased computing resources are 5 times times the other 14 suppliers in the quadrant, is again affixed to the cloud Overlord label. AWS offers a very large capacity, making it one of the few services available for batch processing, especially for those thousands of server loads that need to be opened in the short term. However, the cost of AWS to maintain its lead is also significant, and in response to capital spending such as Google Microsoft has been exhausted: in Q2 's earnings, Amazon from 2012 net profit of 7 million dollars to lose 7 million dollars.

Unlike the AWS, which distinguishes itself from its IaaS domain, the PAAs competition is clearly more intense, and each cloud provider is an odd recruit. First, Heroku iterative services to add new support; Secondly, AWS is not lonely. Add real-time attributes to its PAAs platform, adding support for Impala and kinesis services; Finally, Hadoop explorer Google painstakingly studied the Hadoop connector, And in January 2014 to open more efficient storage GCS than HDFS support. In order to get the lead in this field, each cloud supplier is "eight, recount".

SaaS, the most profitable area, has not been one of the more popular Amazon CTO Werner Vogels as one of the hottest areas of the 2014 year. When it comes to SaaS, the first thing we think about is the concept of salesforce--and the leader in the CRM market. Admittedly, Salesforce has won a glorious career in SaaS and became the first 2 billion-dollar SaaS provider in 2012, but the company's much-needed market has never lacked competitors, such as Oracle, deep accumulation and customer base, achieving a single quarter growth of 35% SAP: A strong foray into the SaaS market after the acquisition of the HCM supplier SuccessFactors and the cloud software operator Ariba; Microsoft, Salesforce's powerful competitor, lost CRM as "Jingzhou" and failed to catch the early episode in Cloud services, But only by looking at its huge customer base and azure ecosystem, "he's not an easy man."

Domestic Industry Status

IaaS, and no oligarch. In the 2013 China cloud Computing list, we have counted the domestic 15 cloud platform and 64 cloud Host + cloud storage, but can not ignore is, before the service launches, the real IaaS has been brewing for 5-6 years, until 2011 before and after the real IaaS service. Perhaps some people may mention that the century interconnection has launched its own IaaS beta in 08, but after 09 years of restructuring, the dissolution of 11, until the end of 2012 is not really "entering"-announced the cooperation with Microsoft, to help Azure landing in China, fully respond to the sentence-up early, catch the late episode. After years of brewing blowout, domestic suppliers will undoubtedly their own characteristics of the incisively and vividly, one of the most promising is undoubtedly Aliyun and Sheng, the former rely on a large financial resources, the latter is to the cloud characteristics as far as possible, but in AWS, Azure and other internationally renowned service providers after landing in China , the formation of the oligarchy is increasingly distant.

PaaS, gradually open. Even from the international market, PAAs lags far behind SaaS and iaas:2012 years, with PAAs earning only 1.2 billion dollars, One-twelveth of SaaS (14.4 billion USD) and one-fifth per cent of IaaS (6.2 billion dollars). Even in the 2013 PAAs has been a significant development, but compared to the other two areas are still weak, this is the same in China: Although Tencent, Baidu, Sina, Aliyun and other major cloud providers have issued PAAs services, but the share of the market is not big, slow to promote.

SaaS, Nuggets hotspot. SaaS can be said to be the most mature cloud services in the country, in the 2013 China cloud Computing list, we counted 175 cloud application service providers, can be said to be flowers. 800 customers, Kingdee, Ufida, Yun Zhishong and other enterprises have formed a solid market pattern, some of the company's cloud services turnover of more than 100 million yuan.

Domestic cloud event, AWS Landing in China. For the cloud computing sector, the comparison of AWS in China, whether it is the balance of treasure, or Baidu's 1.9 billion dollar mergers and acquisitions 91, are just gossip of the conversation. As a global dominant cloud supplier, AWS will be the impact on the domestic cloud market is self-evident, the domestic cloud suppliers have also sacrificed a "price war" this magic weapon, Jinshan Cloud is a unique introduction of the "mining" service. Here, I can only hope that AWS can overcome the "acclimatized" this problem, to bring a more prosperous cloud ecological environment. (PS: More details to visit Amazon AWS Landing China, cloud computing industry Circle Collective exerting force)

Private Cloud: Open source System

By 2013, the debate over the private cloud and the public cloud is over, and it is no longer a "public cloud" or a "private cloud", but a "public cloud" and a "private cloud"-a hybrid cloud. Gartner predicts that by 2017, mainstream companies will have a hybrid cloud defined as a policy-based service delivery platform spanning both internal and external cloud resources. Here we look primarily at the open source platform for PAAs and IaaS:

Open source PAAs platform

The PAAs platform, which is designed to improve development efficiency, makes writing programs for data centers as simple as writing desktop programs. With the maturity of PAAs products, the implementation of similar ubiquitous platforms will be further enhanced on the basis of open standards, as companies want to meet the need to build cloud-based mobile, social and analytical applications while avoiding the constraints of a single vendor. Here we will focus on two open source Paas:openshift (from Redhat) and cloud Foundry (from VMware) two systems:

Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is the industry's first open source PAAs platform for VMware with Ruby, supporting multiple languages (Ruby, Java, Javascript, Python, PHP, and so on) and development frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, Spring, Nodejs, etc.), can integrate a variety of back-end services (Mysql, MongoDB, Redis, etc.), supporting a variety of cloud computing platforms (including Vsphere/vcloud,aws,openstak), to enhance the productivity of developers, accelerate software development deployment.

Compared with Openshift,cloud foundry, there is a better dynamic expansion capability, and as OpenStack is accepted by many traditional software, such as IBM, Cloud Foundry is also rising. IBM believes that Cloud Foundry will become the de facto open standard. And in 2013 6 announced that it was working with pivotal to further develop this framework and establish an organizational management model for the community.

OpenShift

OpenShift was Redhat launched in May 2011 (late Cloud Foundry one months), Cloud Foundry's powerful competitor, providing Cloud foundry similar features in the framework, programming language, and applications. Contrast Cloud Foundry,openshift provides Jenkins to support continuous server integration, however, both maturity and heat are weak.

Flynn, written by Docker in go language, is expected to be released in early 2014. Flynn uses a fully modular design of components, and any one component and module can be replaced independently.

Summary: Although the current open source PAAs has been greatly developed, but there are many areas that need improvement, such as security, statistics, monitoring, visual console, manual control deployment machine, environmental differentiation, process support, log view.

Open Source IaaS Platform

Openstack

OpenStack, an Open-source IaaS platform developed by NASA and Rackspace, is based on the Apache 2 protocol, which allows it to deploy, manage IT infrastructure, and build public or private cloud services. Although less than 4 years since July 2010, OpenStack has made incredible achievements in the open source cloud platform's talent War: Communities in 132 countries, 13504 people, more than 6000 developers, 298 support and institutions, with 8 platinum members , 19 Gold members, 54 sponsoring companies, 217 support agencies (as of December 31, 2013). In addition, OpenStack more beautiful as a "new era of Linux," by many vendors, including the traditional server giant IBM, where we cite the OpenStack Foundation director Du Yujie after the Hong Kong Conference on the "Hundred Schools" summary of the status quo:

But seemingly disregard family is in fact tide surging, the deepest feeling is the Hong Kong Summit exhibition area everywhere in the Redhat partner brand, can be said to occupy to high point, exhausted various means of tricks. If the narration is accompanied by the following:

RedHat: We have the mainstream influence of OpenStack community, we will conquer the OpenStack world like the conquest of Linux. Canonical: We are the first operating system manufacturer OpenStack deployed, synchronized with the OpenStack release cycle. RackSpace: We created the OpenStack myth. Mirantis: We serve the most OpenStack customers. Cloudscaling: We offer more options for OpenStack customers (AWS). IBM/HP: We are ibm/hp, we have made a lot of contributions to OpenStack (but I also know that you are offering OpenStack to sell more Xxx,unix times you did that). Orcale: We are also "advocates" of the open source movement, do not believe? Look at the Java and mysql! in our hands. PS: In the original, Du Yujie did not summarize the database giant, but the small part thinks maybe so? ）

Du Yujie later summed up the "arms" of the Warlords:

Redhat as a veteran Linux manufacturers, hand Libvirt, KVM and Gluster, recently Cloudform also played a model, not to mention Openshift,ovirt and so on baby. Libvirt and KVM are not around, so canonical very early and inktank, of course, is trying to hope through the integration of Ubuntu and Ceph to fight Rehhat Glusterfs. And SuSE is still clinging to Microsoft's thigh, I do not know if you want to bypass the Redhat via Hyper-V KVM. In fact, Redhat also not idle, plumgrid to add people can not help but guess whether to VMware NSX + vcenter poses a threat?

Summary: There are so many help, OpenStack mature want to be unhappy, however, no matter in any field, open source to enterprise production environment has a long way to go. Because of open source, OpenStack gained such high popularity, also because of open source, OpenStack is also the best fishing point. Therefore, no money, lack of technology to be cautious.

Cloudstack

Cloudstack was originally developed by Vmops Company, Vmops renamed Cloud.com. In May 2010, Cloud.com also released the open source version and Enterprise version of Cloudstack. At that time, the open source version adopted the GPLV3 license, the Enterprise version retains about 5% of the private code. After the 2011 cloud.com was bought by Citrix for 200 million dollars, Cloudstack began its stride. In April 2012, Cloudstack was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, Cloudstack's Open source and enterprise version of the total elimination, Cloudstack has entered a high-speed development period.

Summary: Although OpenStack occupies the climate, geography, people and, but the current cloudstack maturity is still higher than the OpenStack, so if you are a short-term project can choose the former, long-term maintenance or choose the latter is better.