Alibaba Cloud Zhang Xiantao: Everything starts from the scene to achieve full-scene coverage of computing

On September 18, at the 2020 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba researcher and head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Elastic Computing Zhang Xiantao shared the latest developments in Alibaba Cloud elastic computing.

Picture: Zhang Xiantao, researcher of Alibaba Group and head of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent flexible computing

Zhang Xiantao revealed that currently Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing has achieved full coverage of computing capabilities, industries, and computing locations, and all scenarios meet the needs of users for comprehensive cloud access. "If we say that Alibaba Cloud has only done one thing in the past ten years, it is through continuous product and technology improvements to make the customer's business easier and more efficient to cloud, and to assist the customer's business in the final All-in Cloud." Zhang Xiantao said.

                                                                           **   通用计算、异构计算、HPC…实现计算能力的全面覆盖**

After ten years of development, Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing services have spread all over the world, providing cloud services in 22 regions and 63 availability zones around the world, and serving more than 1 million enterprise users; in China, more than 80% of Chinese technological innovations Enterprises are also using Alibaba Cloud elastic computing products.

After continuous technological evolution, the Shenlong computing architecture has become the basic architecture of Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing products, and covers multiple computing scenarios such as general computing, heterogeneous computing, and high-performance computing. That is, a dragon architecture can uniformly support multiple instance forms such as virtual machines, flexible bare metal, dedicated hosts, and flexible container instances, realizing comprehensive coverage of computing power requirements in different scenarios.

In order to better enable customer business to run on the Alibaba Cloud platform, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has also made in-depth optimizations in product capabilities for typical vertical application scenarios:

1. In computationally intensive scenarios, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team and Intel have made in-depth customization and optimization of the CPU. Based on Intel’s third-generation Xeon scalable processor, they have created a high-frequency HFG7 instance with full-core turbo frequency. The capacity is as high as 3.8GHZ, the computing power of the whole machine is increased by 160%, and the memory frequency support is as high as 3200MHZ.
2. In caching and other memory-intensive scenarios, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has launched the memory-enhanced instance RE6 and the non-volatile memory-enhanced instance RE6P. Among them, the non-volatile memory enhanced instance RE6P uses Intel's latest Optane persistent memory, which not only improves performance, but also better balances costs. In the Redis business scenario, the non-volatile memory enhanced instance RE6P performed outstandingly. While the performance was improved by 20%, the overall cost was also reduced by 30%.
3. In terms of network enhancement, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team launched the seventh-generation network-enhanced instance G7NE. The internal network bandwidth reached 64Gb, the number of concurrent network connections reached 16 million, and the network forwarding capacity reached 24 million PPS.
4. In high-performance data processing scenarios, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has launched i3 local SSD instances and D2S and D2C local HDD instances, which can be flexibly matched in data processing scenarios to meet the needs of customers for different business architecture solutions.

In addition to full coverage of computing power, Alibaba Cloud provides more flexible product sales and sound service tools. The Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has accumulated rich solutions for various industries such as new retail, interactive entertainment, and finance, and provides one-stop services for industry customers.

1. For the new retail industry, the Alibaba Cloud elastic team has launched a "preemptive low-cost optimization solution" for the new retail industry based on the preemptive instance Spot, helping users make full use of the price advantage of the preemptive instance Spot to cope with the passenger flow during peak business periods Compared with the volume-based example, it can save up to 90% of the cost.
2. For the mutual entertainment industry, the Alibaba Cloud elastic team has launched an operation and maintenance orchestration solution for industries such as mutual entertainment based on the operation and maintenance orchestration tool OOS. Because there are a lot of daily operation and maintenance tasks for applications in the mutual entertainment industry, OOS can greatly improve its operation and maintenance efficiency.
3. For financial institutions such as banking, securities and insurance, the Alibaba Cloud elastic team also launched a security-enhanced instance C6T, which realizes the credibility of the full link from the underlying physical machine hardware to the upper-layer virtual machine instance, and provides a complete set of monitoring and risk response solutions to help Financial institution users use advanced security features in a low-threshold way to increase business security and compliance capabilities.

For the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team, the goal is to go deep into the industry, deeply understand the needs of industry users, and continuously introduce products and solutions with industry attributes to help industry users achieve business cloudification more simply and efficiently.

                                                                       ** “云、边、端”计算位置的全覆盖，支持多种部署形态**

Clouds in various industries have become a trend, especially with the rapid development of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and 5G, the computing needs of the edge are becoming more and more abundant. Some require computing power closer to the end user, some It requires computing power to be closer to the data, and some require calculations at specific locations. The user's requirements for computing have expanded from "full coverage of the scene" to "ubiquitous location". To this end, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has also laid out "cloud, edge, and end" full-scene coverage capabilities, that is, "full coverage of computing locations", and launched a series of new product deployment and operation forms to respond to customers and cooperation The new requirements put forward by partners on the location and operating model of computing will extend the public cloud to a wider space, and work with customers to prepare for the advent of edge computing and the 5G era.

In response to changes in computing location requirements, the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has launched a variety of new product forms, including Edge Zone, Hosting Zone, Partner Zone and Cloud Station. These new product forms have 3 common characteristics:

1. They are all part of Alibaba Cloud Public Cloud;
2. They all use the 100% same technology stack as Alibaba Cloud Public Cloud, all based on Alibaba Cloud's Feitian operating system;
3. They all provide the same experience as Alibaba Cloud Public Cloud, and have the same product capabilities, Open API and management tool system as Alibaba Cloud Public Cloud.

The Alibaba Cloud elastic computing team has always been based on customer scenarios, using the technological dividends of cloud computing development, continuous innovation in products, and continuous pursuit of ultimate performance to better meet the computing needs of users and help companies focus more on themselves Business innovation, and ultimately achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase.