Today's cloud is no longer the cloud of the time.
In the past golden decade, cloud computing has no longer been simply an underlying technology, but has become the basic capability of thousands of industries to digitally transform.
The cloud is like a fusion agent, big data, iot, blockchain, AI, all these emerging technologies can be integrated into the cloud, and provide any kind of technical services based on the form of cloud services. On the application side, everything is cloud, whether it is smart city, smart medical care, smart education, smart transportation, all the wisdom that serves the people's livelihood of the society must be transmitted through the cloud, and it is the cloud that makes the wisdom omnipresent and omnipresent.
Private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, enterprise customers do not care about these different cloud deployment models, but a consistent cloud experience, distributed cloud came into being.
Qiu Yuepeng, Vice President of Tencent, Coo of Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group and President of Tencent Cloud, released the distributed cloud strategy
At the recent Tencent Digital Ecosystem Conference, Tencent Cloud officially announced the distributed cloud strategy for the first time, and released the industry's first cloud-native operating system with global governance, Orca.
The "organism" of the cloud is giving rise to the distributed cloud trend
The cloud is evolving more and more like an "organism." From the physical dimension, the distributed deployment of cloud data centers makes them seem to be scattered between them, but from the data dimension, they are connected to each other, and from the dimension of enterprise business, they are coordinated with each other.
It is this "organic" cloud service form that allows enterprises to provide local cloud services to any node on the cloud through distributed deployment, which has gradually become a direction for enterprises to choose cloud services.
This is where the distributed cloud was born.
According to the definition of distributed cloud, a distributed cloud refers to the extension of public cloud services to different physical locations, while the ownership, operation, governance, update and development of services are still the responsibility of the original public cloud provider. The characteristic of distributed cloud is that public cloud resources are delivered in the near source, and the operation and maintenance is still the responsibility of the cloud service provider, so that customers can enjoy the same services as the public cloud locally.
Indeed, in the process of achieving cloudification, enterprises face huge challenges in organization, scenario, environment and resources. Relying solely on the central region of the public cloud is obviously no longer able to meet the business requirements of enterprises to fully cloud, and the distributed cloud is the concept of extending from the customer's perspective.
Because of this, Gartner has also included distributed clouds in the Strategic Technology Trend for two consecutive years (2020-2021). Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 50 percent of organizations will use distributed clouds in their chosen locations, enabling transformational business models. The application prospects are broad, and there is even the possibility of replacing private clouds.
From the background of distributed cloud, we can summarize two points: first, distributed cloud is most suitable as an extension of the public cloud in the hybrid multi-cloud dimension; second, different from the resource perspective of other clouds, distributed cloud is a management perspective, and more emphasis is on a consistent cloud management.
At the same time, based on these two points, Tencent Cloud Distributed Cloud, on the one hand, is a general term for Tencent Cloud's ability to provide a series of products for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios, aiming to provide users with consistent product services and experiences in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios. On the other hand, the officially released cloud-native operating system orca can uniformly dispatch resources such as servers and kubernetes clusters inside and outside Tencent Cloud, providing it with a simple and unified management experience and ultimate resource utilization.
A distributed cloud with one edge and one end
In fact, the key points of distributed cloud are nothing more than two: one is the consistent experience of all different nodes, and the other is to bring the business closer to the location of the cloud.
First of all, from the customer's point of view, the construction and choice of distributed cloud is indeed the trend of the times.
Hybrid clouds, which used to be regarded as "standard" by enterprise users, have always had management challenges. Some customers, private cloud in their own computer room management, public cloud choose Tencent Cloud. The private cloud is managed by its own software, and the public cloud is managed by Tencent Cloud's software, and the gap between the operational efficiency and experience of the two sides is clear at a glance.
According to Liu Ying, vice president of Tencent Cloud, "The hybrid cloud connects private and public ownership, but only ensures that it is connected at the network level." The Tencent Cloud Distributed Cloud, after connecting the public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud, not only completed the connection, but also solved the unified experience and unified control, realizing the unified architecture and the extension of the experience. ”
Therefore, the distributed cloud is the concept of the next generation of clouds, which is a more user-friendly and efficient cloud.
With the cloud-native operating system Orca, Tencent Cloud is able to extend the computing power and services on the cloud to any location that users expect. It is understood that Aichi single cluster supports 100,000-level servers, million-level container scale, the number of CPU cores managed is more than 100 million, on top of the powerful hardware infrastructure, Tencent Cloud will build ubiquitous cloud services through distributed clouds.
Second, from the perspective of cloud extension, distributed cloud is an extension and aggregate of public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds in the past, and an extension of the edge. This is also the basic definition that Gartner makes for a distributed cloud.
From the perspective of extension, Tencent Cloud's distributed cloud, in addition to the extension of physical nodes, also has an extension of cloud capabilities. This is to add such an important terminal scenario as the WeChat ecosystem to Tencent's distributed cloud.
For example, a factory collects data from the edge, analyzes it, and then uploads the data to the cloud for further storage/training and aggregation. At this point, the value of data has not been fully reflected, so through the WeChat ecosystem of Tencent Cloud's distributed cloud, enterprise managers and users can find the aggregated data through terminal interfaces such as WeChat Mini Programs and make decisions.
At the same time, based on the strong underlying technical support of Tencent Cloud, with the help of the micro-low-code platform, it can help enterprises connect WeChat and micro-micro ecology, help enterprise marketing and private domain traffic user precipitation, open up Tencent-based SAAS products such as Tencent documents and Tencent conferences, and provide users with integrated ecological integration capabilities.
Therefore, Tencent Cloud's distributed cloud is the only cloud in the industry that effectively combines the edge end, the cloud, the user terminal, and the three.
Tencent has WeChat and enterprise WeChat, around the ecosystem of this app, there are millions of developers, these developers are enjoying the low-code technology brought by Tencent Cloud, cloud-native technology, improve development efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. Therefore, Tencent Cloud's distributed cloud is a cloud that is truly cloud-edge-to-end integrated.
What is the strategic significance of distributed cloud for Tencent Cloud?
In fact, the deployment of a distributed cloud is not simple.
First, when cloud infrastructure and services extend from centralized distribution to the edge, integrated management capabilities are a test; second, the distribution of resource nodes brings new problems to centralized operation and maintenance and IT management; third, compared with traditional public clouds, users do not actually want distributed clouds to increase costs and thresholds for cloud access.
Tencent Cloud, on the other hand, allows users to enjoy the value of "one cloud, no difference, no barrier-free, and ubiquitous" through the cloud-native operating system Aochi orca, which supports the hybrid scheduling of servers, containers, and functions, and the WeChat ecosystem that connects C-end users.
As the standard for next-generation clouds, distributed cloud has long attracted the attention of many cloud computing companies, such as Google and Microsoft are actively deploying distributed clouds. So what is the strategic significance of launching a distributed cloud strategy for Tencent Cloud?
First, Tencent Cloud has two major directions of to c and to b. To c is Tencent Cloud's housekeeping skill, and to b is Tencent Cloud's future strategic focus. Customers such as government and enterprises, energy, medical care, and industry are gradually accepting the concept of distributed cloud, and for Tencent Cloud, to go deep into the market of industry digital transformation, it is inevitable to move towards distributed cloud.
Second, distributed cloud is the cloud from the customer's point of view, the inevitable evolution of enterprise cloud, and the next step of hybrid multi-cloud. As a top cloud service provider in the world, Tencent Cloud will definitely pursue leadership in the iteration of technology and services, and the strategy of distributed cloud itself also represents a kind of leadership.