Rapid developments in cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), AR/VR, and other technologies are enabling new revenue streams in data streaming and other features. Internet-based companies are finding new ways to tap into short video, live streaming, and other income-generating sources. HUAWEI CLOUD delivers all the needed resources, functions, accelerations, and protections to ensure a top UX for all.
Internet-based enterprises previously had a simple requirement from public cloud providers: rent the general-purpose hardware to handle dynamic workloads. The whole starting point has changed in terms of how requirements are defined. Instead of deciding how much hardware is needed to handle current, spiked, and immediate-future workloads, enterprises are now thinking about the capabilities they need to satisfy their average and in-the-moment demands. The focus on hardware has shifted to capabilities — from hardware to vertical integration. In the Cloud 2.0 era, organizations need to use dedicated hardware yielding the needed high availability levels in processing massive volumes of ever-mushrooming data, powering the reasoning and training models in AI applications, and enabling the long list of other utilities driving innovation and growth.
New designs in platform are needed to gear into the shifts in perception – ones that allow for capabilities to be called up on a moment’s notice while keeping organization-specific data isolated. IT infrastructure must meet the 'More than Moore' requirements so that hundreds of industries, especially Internet, can mine more dividends from data. The physicality of industry is integrating with IT in deeper ways to improve productivity and socioeconomic benefit. HUAWEI CLOUD provides organizations of all sizes with the nutrient-rich soil to grow their profiles in a better connected, intelligent world to achieve precisely those objectives.
HUAWEI CLOUD launched the first Windows-based container service in China, helping Grasp Software, a leading financial software provider for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China, to quickly complete their architectural transformations. In the gaming industry, HUAWEI CLOUD C3ne instances yield a four-fold boost in acceleration for KingNet, a major game development company. The platform provides a high-availability (HA) two-site, three-center geo-redundant solution to prevent gamers from defecting due to service interruptions and unacceptable lags – because milliseconds often decide victory and defeat in those high-stake realms!
In the gene detection industry, Cloud Container Engine (CCE) in HUAWEI CLOUD helped X-Turing Biotechnology develop its GenoStack cloud platform that delivers a 30% improvement in processing of sequencing results. In the e-commerce industry, Huawei Vmall also runs on the cloud platform able to handle the unpredictable burst in traffic during product releases and flash-sale activities.
The Enterprise Intelligence (EI) suite in HUAWEI CLOUD is yet another engine driving upgrades across many industries. The suite comes complete with a host of AI applications, allowing everyone to get what they need and make easy use of cutting-edge tech all with the full assurance that their profile will remain fully secure throughout the entire service lifecycle. The EI suite has already demonstrated full viability at TukuChina.com, JoinTown, CDV Ecloud Cloud, and many other venues. The image search service in the EI suite greatly improves accountability tracing in upload of massive amounts of copyrighted images to TukuChina.com, with an accuracy rate reaching 99% for the most popular 5000 images.
In the Cloud 2.0 era, what changes and innovations do Internet services require from cloud service providers? How does HUAWEI CLOUD plan to deliver on these needs and continuously improve on its cloud-native offerings?
Changes and Innovations in Cloud Infrastructure in Cloud 2.0
Guo Tao, GTcloud
Embrace it or be pushed by it – cloud is here and isn’t going anywhere!
Development, testing, production, disaster recovery – cloud is a part of it all.
Solving the pain points in traditional applications and better supporting cloud native – cloud is resolving even the most irritating of bottlenecks.
HUAWEI CLOUD provides the needed payload, security, and supercharged efficiencies for the expanse of enterprise-level undertakings down to the refinements in boutique-like customizations to ensure success throughout the journey.
The new wave in mobile Internet has promoted cloud service providers to adapt and offer new innovations. Find out how Huawei recognized this early on and is reshaping innovation in delivery of services in Cloud 2.0.
The Cloud 2.0 Era
The rise of intelligent applications is but a miniature of the change in application requirements in Cloud 2.0 – and more changes are coming! Live streaming is booming in China. According to the report "Market Prospects and Investment Opportunities in the China Live Broadcast Industry for 2017-2022", the number of subscribers of live-streaming entertainment apps in China reached 160 million in 2017, an increase of 45.5%[GV2]. People are always talking about the latest clip that went viral – it has become a way of life. At the 2018 China International Big Data Industry Expo, VR games were certainly the crowd favorite as evidenced by the long lines that extended throughout large courses of the venue as event-goers lined up to experience the thrill of what the new developments had to offer.
The cost-efficiencies, agility, and scalability of cloud profiles is compelling enterprise adoption and is taking place at the very core of organizations as they transform digitally and intelligently.
Cloud computing is naturally becoming the bedrock for e-commerce and portal websites as they accommodate the rapids of information and transactional data that must transverse their tracts. The emergence of cloud computing not only changed traditional IT procurement, deployment, and application models, it has changed the way people think. Cloud 2.0 in here – we have moved from the information era into the data era. Data is the new top strategic asset, the latest raw material, the driving energy propelling socioeconomic development. IT is no longer just a pillar in the enablement matrix – it is the driving force in value creation. Enterprises have moved their focus from effective utilization of resources to enabling IT to better support business development and innovation – from a cost utility to a value creator! Cloud 2.0 is answering that call. The emergence of AI, IoT, and the new wave in mobile Internet in Cloud 2.0 means IT infrastructure build and service models must keep pace with the times and become faster, stronger, smarter, and more automated.
Transformation from Resource-based Services to Capability-based Services
A songwriter from China once wrote: "It is not that I don’t understand, it is that this world is changing too quickly!" This classic lyric is apropos to describing the changes taking place with applications in the Cloud 2.0 era.
IoT is connecting people, things, and people and things. Information is being transmitted across physical and virtual boundaries, between humans and machines and between machines themselves, and across every type of terminal everywhere. Enterprises are tapping into the value of data and moving their focus from effective use of resources to improving operational efficiencies to produce more value.
This is an era of intelligence. AI is becoming pervasive because the compute power, algorithms, and data basis are all now available to support the new accelerator. Edge computing and intelligent device are also enable newfound levels of productivity. Users are using big data and AI technologies to efficiently process massive volumes of information and further explore the value of data to better support service developments and yield the improved precisions from data-driven marketing. Productivity is reaching never before dreamed of levels in this intelligence-enabled era.
Video has become the main traffic category, and the timing is perfect with the gearing up for 5G. 10 Gbit/s is no longer the upper threshold in video transmission. Mobile video and VR/AR applications compete with each other. The Internet has gone from being basically just entertainment to a vehicle in everything from lifestyle and education to medical care. The ever-escalating increase in data volumes, mixed data types, and other characteristics shaping the makeup present new challenges in finding faster, better, more economical ways of processing and analyzing the massive sets of information.
In the Cloud 2.0 era, new applications require new technical platforms. Enterprises need to have development, deployment, and operation environments featuring high flexibility, performance, and security with the complete set of related tools to ensure complete service assurance and optimal UX from the development to commercial use stages. The wide application of big data and AI highlights the value of data. Data is the driving force behind service development. The One Belt and One Road initiative has grown the stage for many enterprises relying on the timely response of infrastructures able to keep pace and ahead of the growing need for computer power and storage capacity. Some mobile Internet, social platforms, and other start-ups have their eyes on the global market from inception, and some have even achieved better popularity abroad than at home. Public cloud has become the obvious choice for many of these types of companies with the ability to go international and easily fuel ongoing innovation efforts.
HUAWEI CLOUD continues to innovate on all fronts to keep up with the new requirements raised by Internet users. Zheng Yelai, President of the HUAWEI CLOUD BU, once commented that compute, storage, network, database and other services in Cloud 1.0 focused on meeting high concurrency and elastic scaling requirements. Fulfilling these requirements relied heavily on high availability software and general-purpose hardware. In the transition from Cloud 1.0 to Cloud 2.0, the biggest change is that infrastructure must become application-centric and provide capabilities as services – not just a bunch of hardware.
Resource-focused service delivery is rather easy to understand. It only has to answer how much resource is needed to carry a certain amount of traffic. So, what is the best way to understand the shift in focus from resources to capabilities and what is the subtle yet substantial difference between the two? It requires us to think about the capabilities needed to achieve goals and not the resources needed to prop up the back end. Consider the hotbed of activity in AI that is taking place right now. Cloud service providers are very active in finding ways to support the architecture, technology, and tools needed to implement this new accelerator. Intelligence should not be looked at as some new function or product – it is an overall "capability", a new force in production, a grand driver in industry development. Intelligence is like a gene fragment grafted into the IT infrastructure. Just as humans need to think intelligently, so does the IT layout. Addition of containers, microservices, DevOps, and the host of other utilities improves the overall capabilities of the cloud infrastructure. With these capabilities, cloud infrastructures are becoming more efficient, flexible, and suitable for new Internet services represented by intelligent applications.
As an innovator in Cloud 2.0, HUAWEI CLOUD has made considerable contributions to improving the flexibility of service delivery, yielding ultimate levels of performance while making full use of existing heterogeneous computing resources, and adopting new technologies (including containers, microservices, AI, and DevOps) to enable the transformation from resource-focused to capability-focused models.
Migu is an interactive entertainment platform that integrates tournament broadcast and archival recording, high-quality online games, membership benefits, extensive merchandising, and interviews/news on popular players and teams into its platform, becoming one of the biggest names in gaming. Applying the container services in HUAWEI CLOUD has allowed Migu to improve resource utilization by 100%, reduce the time needed to perform a system upgrade from two hours down to five minutes, and improved overall performance three times over with the deployment of bare metal containers.
VMs, object storage, networks, and databases are the most basic resources provided by cloud service providers. Enterprise intelligence, microservices, blockchain, and software development are capabilities provided by cloud service providers. The distinction is subtle yet clear. To empower is better than just doing something for someone. As the saying goes, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. For enterprise users, compute and storage resources are indispensable. However, enterprise must learn to think about the actual capabilities in application, development, testing, orchestration, and management they need and then power that on the flexibility of the cloud infrastructure. The Migu case is powerful reference.
Nutrient-Rich Soil for Native Cloud Applications
Every year, e-commerce retailers in each locale around the world must add more nodes in preparation of their annual sales events like Black Friday in the States or the November 11 shopping spree in China. Ensuring security is a top priority during these events that must handle incredibly high volumes of spiked traffic. In fact, traffic bursts are becoming something of the norm in e-commerce, leaving these retailers constantly considering whether their existing IT architecture can handle the heaviest of service loads. Earnings for many mobile Internet enterprises and game enterprises depends on keeping latency low and product iteration fast because ensuring optimal UX is the difference between life and death. So, these companies must constantly determine whether the existing IT architecture can enable accelerated iterations and agile development.
As more is learned, it is becoming apparent that only tooling like containers and microservices naturally adaptable to Internet services can meet the ever-changing requirements. Many in Internet have commented that container is able to fully match the dynamics of mobile Internet application scenarios. The flexibility to scale within seconds allows enterprise to easily cope with service peaks. Rolling capabilities into standardized modules helps accelerate application rollouts and improve resource utilization by 50% or more.
Most enterprises today have a hybrid environment with a mix of both traditional applications and a variety of cloud applications. Cloud is so subversive because it does not simply seek to migrate applications running on physical servers to VMs. Instead, it wants to enable a complete transformation, moving the IT infrastructure into a cloud platform. This also means that applications need to undergo fundamental changes as well. Cloud native applications need to run in a fully cloudified architecture and use the wide-open flexibility available in such platforms to supercharge development, delivery, deployment, and O&M models. The dynamic scheduling and intense scaling capabilities are able to yield unpresented business value.
Cloud native applications involve many new technologies, including container, microservices, DevOps, continuous delivery, and agile infrastructure. Many in Internet were born and grew right on the cloud. They are now using the new cloud infrastructure in the Cloud 2.0 era.
Kubernetes is the first core project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to have widespread commercial success. As the largest particle physics research center in the world, the European Nuclear Research Center (CERN) has tremendous computing requirements. The collider generates data into the PB range every second. To better process and analyze data, CERN has built more than 210 Kubernetes clusters to manage the infrastructure comprising 320,000 cores and more than 10,000 hypervisors. According to a CNCF survey, creating a Kubernetes cluster on two or more cloud platforms has become a common task for many Kubernetes users. That is to say that Kubernetes-based container services are becoming a standard on cloud platforms, and cloud service providers must be able to support cloud native applications.
Cloud native architectures accelerate product iterations and support the rapid development of Internet services. Kubernetes+Docker, microservices, and serverless are the three major focuses for HUAWEI CLOUD in cloud native tech. HUAWEI CLOUD entered these areas early on and is able to provide top-notch products and services in these categories.
Huawei is one of the earliest practitioners of Kubernetes. Upon inception of the community, Huawei participated as a founding member and was later given platinum member status. While using Kubernetes to solve its complex IT problems in its internal platform, Huawei actively feed back to the community on ways to improve. Huawei contributions to the Kubernetes community rank number one in China and the fifth in the world. In 2017, Huawei became the only vendor to earn a seat on the Kubernetes Steering Committee. In addition, HUAWEI CLOUD was amongst the world’s first Kubernetes-certified service providers. HUAWEI CLOUD has released numerous industry-leading container services and microservices. In particular, it was the first in China to offer a bare-metal container focused on performance. It was also the first in-country vendor to release a Windows container that supports Windows Server. The cloud arm is also credited with releasing the world’s first Kubernetes serverless container service.
Cloud Container Engine (CCE) in HUAWEI CLOUD is causing quite the sensation. It has been fully vetted by customers in a span of industries, including gaming, biotech, e-commerce, ERP, and Internet, helping them successfully adopt cloud to meet the agile innovation requirements of their particular use cases. The latest Windows container service provided by HUAWEI CLOUD has been applied to the management software for Grasp, a major ERP service provider in China, helping it quickly complete container-based reconstruction for its .net applications.
According to Zheng Yelai, President of HUAWEI CLOUD BU, Cloud Service Engine (CSE), the enterprise-class microservice engine, was first tested in the parent company’s consumer cloud that carries services for hundreds of millions of Huawei cellphone users. Based on the new-generation microservice concept Service Mesh CSE provides the CSE-mesher feature, which solves the complexities in communication in the cloudified architecture of traditional distributed systems. Compared with the open-source Istio, CSE delivers higher performance, reliability, and convenience.
Running Kubernetes at the core, an overall service framework at HUAWEI CLOUD has come into place. The framework includes 16 cloud application services, including CCE, microservice engine, function service, APM, API gateway, and middleware series products, to cover the move to the cloud and ongoing refinements in continued operations thereafter.
Serverless applications have been widely used in the public cloud field. The Huawei Cloud Container Instance (CCI), a Kubernetes-based serverless container instance, is yet another breakthrough from HUAWEI CLOUD in the container field. It further simplifies container deployment processes and reduces resource consumption and O&M costs in cloud environments.
HUAWEI CLOUD is geared for cloud native developments from its strategies to markets, technologies to platforms, functions to tools, and from its solutions down to its industry applications. It fully supports cloud native applications and is committed to being a leader, innovator, and enabler in the cloud native domain. Huawei is promoting establishment of technical standards in the cloud native domain and helping the community benefit from its years of accumulation in the native cloud field and its influence in containers and microservices.
Focusing on the Base
In the Cloud 2.0 era, HUAWEI CLOUD is providing the rich soil in which content and applications for Internet services can thrive. HUAWEI CLOUD does this by providing full-stack cloud services so enterprises can build upon this powerful cloud computing foundation. It also provides big data governance, intelligence suites, and the whole matrix of resource and capabilities for the advancement of the Internet ecosystem.
Zheng Yelai recently offered this analysis: Mobile Internet has fully tapped into what is called the demographic dividend over the past few years. Now, this industry has to explore how to tap dividends from data to retain customers. This requires that the cloud infrastructure not only provide VMs, storage, and elastic capacity expansion resources, it must also be able to efficiently process applications and deliver AI utilities and other intelligence functions in support of operating the data. More and more enterprises are starting to build their own e-commerce platforms, extending their chain from production to distribution/circulation and the entire scope of logistics. These means that unprecedented changes are taking place in the applications.
HUAWEI CLOUD integrates IaaS and PaaS, further consolidating the cloud computing base. HUAWEI CLOUD is a full-stack cloud computing provider and the only one with the ability to grow its own chips, hardware, software, and services. It has launched more than 120 products in 16 service categories. Gartner named HUAWEI CLOUD the top cloud vendor in Cloud IaaS and Forrester named HUAWEI CLOUD as the leader of full-stack public cloud platforms in China. These are just a few of the acknowledgments HUAWEI CLOUD has earned in recognition of its numerous breakthrough and continued commitment to providing the most comprehensive portfolio in the industry.
With the technical advantages amassed over the last 30 years, Huawei is able to mix and match from the wide arsenal of products and solutions in its catalogs to meet specific user requirements. In terms of computing and storage, Huawei Kunlun mission-critical servers boast the highest performance in the industry. The bare-metal servers provide 32 TB of ultra-large memory. In addition, Huawei provides high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, including heterogeneous computing and ultra-high IO EVS+100G IB networks in addition to its recently launched OBS 3.0 – the new generation of object storage. Huawei has powerful R&D capabilities in chips and can provide GPU+FPGA heterogeneous computing services featuring strong performance. In terms of security, Huawei offers traffic cleaning and protections able to handle TB range loads[W3]. In terms of native cloud applications, containers and microservices can help users smooth out their move to the cloud without having to make changes to their applications. Customers can also choose multi-level dedicated cloud solutions (dedicated resources, full-stack dedicated cloud, and hybrid dedicated cloud) to suit the particular requirements for gaming, social media apps, e-commerce, and video entertainment.
The purpose-built container solution for gaming offered by HUAWEI CLOUD combines the proven elements in its mature container technologies and brings in all new game development capabilities. At the GMGC conference held in April this year, Huawei showcased the DevCloud solution customized for the game industry, covering the entire lifecycle of game development, launch, and an ongoing live operation. The one-stop DevOps R&D platform helps game development teams build precise processes with vastly enhanced agility.
In the video field, the Media Convergence solution continues to gain popularity. From ingestion, transmission, and storage to analysis, mining, and broadcast, HUAWEI CLOUD can efficiently process massive volumes of video and direct data to where it needs to go. For example, in the ingestion stage, 30% in bandwidth or more can be saved using FPGA hardware acceleration technology. In the distribution and broadcast phase, HUAWEI CLOUD CDN provides a full-stack solution with more than 100 technical patents in content delivery network. With nodes located throughout the country, nearest-access response is assured to improve UX with service availability improved to 99.99% or higher.
Many customers have commented that the container service console in HUAWEI CLOUD is the easiest, most comprehensive, and most logically clear console service they have ever used. The same applies to the entire HUAWEI CLOUD running on the hallmarked reliability of Huawei hardware.
The cloud computing base is only the first step. HUAWEI CLOUD is also committed to delivering the intelligence capabilities Internet-based service providers require.
Cloud service providers can now provide the level of computing power needed to run AI. One of the connotations of digital transformation is to realize intelligent transformation at the enterprise. To secure business opportunities, enterprises need in-depth market insights, precise customer positioning, and efficient supply chain supports. The prerequisite for all this is intelligent capability, which is why the table is set for AI to explode.
In the post-Moore’s Law era, traditional x86 architectures cannot meet the requirements in AI. Heterogeneous computing based on various computing capability units such as GPU, FPGA, and ASIC is emerging. The IT infrastructure of the data center must provide heterogeneous, cloud-based, and edge intelligence capabilities to provide sufficient computing power for intelligent applications at the on-premise, cloud, and end layers.
Skillful application of big data and AI is required if any kind of intelligence matrix is to be brought into the organization. In terms of big data governance, HUAWEI CLOUD can process 10 trillion records within a short period. The wide-open capabilities of the platform and the ability to process massive volumes of data within seconds has brought more than 1000 customers into the Huawei camp, including China Merchants Bank, Pacific Insurance, Shanghai Stock Exchange, and other industry benchmark customers.
The launch of HUAWEI CLOUD EI provides powerful tooling for enterprise in achieving their agendas. The suite combines powerful data processing and AI platforms to provide enterprise with actionable insights in decision-making. In the e-commerce field, application of the EI suite has improved accuracy in sales forecasting from 50% to 95%. In the social media domain, HUAWEI CLOUD EI improves accuracy in content review to 99%. In terms of intelligent customer service, EI enables accuracy in semantic identification to reach 99%. The examples of the immense improvements go on and on. HUAWEI CLOUD adheres to strict service boundaries in which it pledges to not monetize customer data. Customers can rest assured that their assets will remain in their full charge. However, this does not mean that Huawei does not understand the dynamics of data and how to mine it – the reverse is true. HUAWEI CLOUD helps enterprise make use of its big data +EI utilities to enhance their service innovation efforts.
In the Cloud 2.0 era, blockchain technology is revolutionizing Internet services. In March 2018, HUAWEI CLOUD officially launched its Blockchain Service (BCS) developed on the backbone of Huawei’s accumulation in core technologies like distributed parallel computing, container, data management, and security encryption. Huawei BCS can be deployed in five minutes and can be connected in just one click.
Zheng Yelai recently commented that HUAWEI CLOUD provides cost-effective cloud computing infrastructure services, high-speed networks, and device-cloud collaboration capabilities for Internet customers and those in gaming, e-commerce, entertainment, and social network operation. Customers can pick and choose from what they need to fulfill their profile requirements. HUAWEI CLOUD provides DevOps software development services for game developers; a neutral platform for e-commerce customers with support for hundreds of millions of concurrent operations and smart storefront, intelligent recommendation, and intelligent customer service utilities; efficient cloud-based video processing capabilities, VR, and animation rendering services for customers in the entertainment industry; and provides sensitive information detection and intelligent content recommendation utilities for operations of social platforms. HUAWEI CLOUD offers the most comprehensive portfolio of tech in the industry and unmatched customization flexibility to match the specifics of the customer’s profile.
Full-Dependability of HUAWEI CLOUD
HUAWEI CLOUD provides the broad field of capabilities in which customers can grow, accelerate, and optimize their profiles. Huawei’s partners provide the regionally-specific services, applications, solutions and so forth needed to adopt to geo-specific requirements. Huawei and its partners work closely together to provide customers with the solutions and services able to meet the requirements of different application scenarios. HUAWEI CLOUD is attracting more and more users with its demonstrated commitment to helping customers make use of the innovations in its cloud infrastructure and cloud native technologies to solve the IT and business problems they are coming up against.
Huawei has been providing leading edge technologies and services for decades. With its proven practices in the computing, storage, and network fields, Huawei has continuously enhanced its capabilities in algorithms, chips, and software and hardware integration to now offer the optimal cloud infrastructure.
Future-ready cloud infrastructure is one of Huawei's directions in its long-term strategic investments. Cutting-edge technologies like big data, AI, containers, microservices, and block chains are all getting the R&D resources needed to ensure HUAWEI CLOUD remains a strong player both now and well into the future.
Trust is the basis for cooperation between cloud service providers and customers. HUAWEI CLOUD sets strict service boundaries and does not cross the line, pledging to not monetize customer data, target industry applications toward local markets, nor make equity investments in application partners. This stance allows users to adopt HUAWEI CLOUD with the full confidence that their interests are protected and it also gives partners a more level playing field. HUAWEI CLOUD is only interested in earning the proper price point from its service delivery and performing its role in providing the basis for cloud application, intelligent enablement, and the means to effectuate the digital transformation agenda for enterprises while allowing the symbiotic ecosystem to
