In the field of cloud computing, great changes are taking place.
In the pre-cloud computing era, the server was a hurdle that every Internet company could not get around. At that time, almost all of our business had to revolve around groups of "iron boxes". We had to prepare an absolutely safe computer room and adjust the temperature of the computer room in a timely manner. Heat dissipation, but also equipped with a large number of software and hardware operation and maintenance personnel to prevent failures from time to time.
In the cloud era, all these troubles have been swept away. We have seen too many Internet companies rising because of this, and we have also seen a large number of traditional industries benefit from this, opening the road to digital transformation. Of course, cloud computing will not stop developing. Facing the gradually mature cloud industry, the cloud native concept is gradually taking shape. With the advent of the new era, more enterprises are also shifting their focus.
Faced with the turbulent market in the cloud native era, Tencent Cloud chose the path of self-development. In the past three years, Tencent's R&D investment has exceeded 120 billion yuan, and it has gradually established a complete self-developed system including servers, operating systems, chips, and SaaS. In November last year, Tencent officially released the distributed cloud operating system, Orca, for the cloud-native era.
Distributed cloud becomes an inevitable trend
The changes brought about by the cloud era are by no means the silent support behind the Internet industry. A series of Internet giants have also gained real money after transforming into cloud computing.
On March 23, Tencent announced its annual report for the year. The financial report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2021, Tencent’s total revenue was 144.188 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of 7.87%; for the whole year of 2021, Tencent’s revenue was 560.118 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16%. It is worth noting that in the fourth quarter of 2021, Tencent's To B business surpassed online games for the first time and became the largest revenue contributor. And more importantly, Tencent has once again determined the development focus of IaaS and PaaS to create value for customers and achieve high-quality growth.
If technology is the first element to support the development of cloud computing, Tencent's self-research and technology investment are also worthy of attention. It can be seen in the financial report that in 2021, Tencent’s cumulative R&D investment for the whole year will reach 51.88 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33%. The investment of more than 120 billion yuan in self-research in the past three years has also made Tencent's technical strength rapidly improved and made many breakthroughs in many core areas.
Last year, it released the sixth-generation 100G cloud server, which adopts a comprehensive self-developed technical architecture and has been applied in e-commerce, social networking, games and other fields; for the three scenarios of AI computing, video processing, and high-performance networking, Tencent launched a self-developed AI inference chip Zixiao, video codec chip Canghai, smart network card chip Xuanling; Tencent's self-developed Xingxinghai server has achieved full-platform and multi-scenario support, and its scale has grown rapidly. What is more noteworthy is that Tencent's technology system construction based on the whole chain ecology is also constantly improving, especially the industry's first global governance distributed cloud operating system Orca launched at the end of last year, which is used to support Starting from Tencent Cloud's distributed strategy, it builds ubiquitous cloud services through distributed clouds on the basis of hardware.
In the past, the term "distributed" was more used to refer to distributed systems in computer systems, but distributed cloud refers to clouds that are distributed in different geographical locations, and distributed cloud is a central The cloud architecture is derived from the user's side, providing public cloud services for users nearby.
This kind of service is obviously different from traditional hybrid cloud. The main idea of distributed cloud is to extend the products of public cloud to the environment required by users, so that equipment and resources are still managed, operated, managed and updated by cloud vendors in a unified manner without requiring users to Independent operation and maintenance. This is due to the existence of this characteristic. Gartner has listed distributed cloud as a strategic technology trend in the past two years, and pointed out in its report that the evolution from centralized public cloud to distributed public cloud has opened up a new era of cloud computing, and more critical. Also, it is expected that by 2025, more than 50% of organizations will use distributed cloud.
The boundaries of the cloud continue to expand
According to Liu Ying, vice president of Tencent Cloud, when Tencent Cloud started to do private cloud in 2016, it had decided to let private cloud and public cloud evolve with the same architecture, rather than being privatized separately. This path is the most user-friendly, but it is also really difficult. But once you get through it, every day will be happier than today. Therefore, Tencent Cloud uses the same path and the same set of architecture to evolve proprietary cloud and public cloud, which is different from other cloud vendors.
Since 2017, Tencent Cloud has extended the boundaries of the cloud for the first time with its experience in serving the pan-Internet and emerging enterprises. Adhering to the idea of "same source and isomorphism" for public cloud and private cloud, the capabilities of public cloud are exclusively To optimize the output, copy the public cloud product capabilities 1:1 to the customer's exclusive area, and hand over the management and control to the customer. This not only retains the flexibility and agility of the public cloud, but also increases the customer's control over data, and extends the public cloud into a proprietary cloud.
However, as scenarios continue to increase, the unique needs of many users continue to change, and digital transformation needs continue to deepen, which makes public cloud and proprietary cloud walk on two legs still insufficient. How can the technology and capabilities of the cloud help traditional industries undergo digital transformation? As a central cloud, public cloud is difficult to cover users' low-latency access requirements, while private cloud requires a lot of local management and control, and it is difficult to cover IT operation and maintenance costs. Edge computing can meet the latency requirements, but it is difficult to provide rich cloud products. ability.
Therefore, after analysis, Tencent Cloud believes that these difficulties should be solved with new technologies and new forms, in order to better help traditional industries accelerate digital transformation.
Since 2019, Tencent Cloud has been accelerating its attempts to expand the boundaries of the cloud, and has invested a lot of resources to standardize, lightweight, and natively cloud cloud products and services, and make cloud management and control more remote and intelligent.
First of all, Tencent Cloud breaks the boundaries of geographical locations, so that the cloud is no longer exclusive to the center and large customers. Through a lot of research and development, Tencent standardized infrastructure and service capabilities, and exported Tencent Cloud's product capabilities to the outside world, and then launched local dedicated cluster CDC products.
Second, Tencent Cloud breaks the boundaries of product capabilities, allowing the edge to have full cloud product capabilities. Tencent Cloud uses CDC as the base of the distributed cloud, and builds an edge availability zone close to users in a suitable location. Through CDC, it covers all cloud products and services, broadens the product capability boundary of edge nodes, and makes the coverage of hotspot areas more and more. The wider it is, the product capabilities of the edge are gradually enriched.
Third, Tencent Cloud continues to break the boundaries of availability zones, so that availability zones can also be exclusive to users.
Including financial and government affairs scenarios, customers need an exclusive and controllable cloud, so Tencent Cloud launched the proprietary cloud TCE before.
Now customers have infrastructure, and users want to use the infrastructure with the help of cloud capabilities. There is no strong demand for autonomy and control. Tencent Cloud has launched CDZ, an exclusive availability zone, which once again expands the boundary of the availability zone, which is equivalent to moving the availability zone. Go to the user's home and use the cloud to empower the traditional IDC, and naturally have upper-level capabilities.
Fourth, Tencent Cloud breaks the boundaries of infrastructure forms, allowing customers' stock equipment to be cloudized. Through technological transformation, Tencent Cloud enables customers to entrust all existing equipment to Tencent Cloud's special area, access to Tencent Cloud's VPC network to obtain comprehensive cloud capabilities, and launch the cloud entrustment product CHC.
Distributed cloud operating system makes cloud everywhere
Since its launch, the value of Tencent Cloud's distributed cloud operating system, Aochi, has been repeatedly mentioned, and Tencent Cloud also uses three ubiquity to demonstrate the charm of this operating system.
The first is the ubiquity of computing power. The cloud computing power and services on the cloud can be exported to IDC and edge computer rooms through the Aochi system. Aochi provides a unified management experience, which can extend resources to the geographical location of users. , you can also migrate the SLAs of product capabilities and services on the cloud.
Secondly, access is ubiquitous. Aochi provides powerful access capabilities. Users can schedule various services through the Aochi scheduling system, and extend to the user's geographic location to provide services for users. For example, middleware services, big data services, and database services can be connected to the large system matrix through the Aochi system and expanded to different geographical locations of users.
The third is that services are ubiquitous. At present, Aochi is the only operating system in the industry that supports servers, containers and cloud native. It can meet the extreme demands of enterprises for performance. It has incorporated container-centric cloud native technology into it. Manage resources from the bottom, and facilitate the deployment of business and applications on the top.
Of course, in addition to these ubiquitous capabilities, Tencent Cloud Aochi has also integrated with the upgraded Wechat, cloud development platform, and WeChat, which enables the distributed cloud to finally integrate the enterprise's user end as well as the cloud and the final terminal. The three are connected, so that the data collection and analysis can be smoothly linked to the on-site storage on the cloud, and the display management data flow to the mobile phone or WeChat terminal.
Aochi is like the transportation hub of Tencent Cloud. Tencent Distributed Cloud can break the geographical boundary, product capability boundary, availability zone definition boundary, and infrastructure form boundary to build an indistinguishable, barrier-free and ubiquitous cloud. , covering all-round cloud locations, expanding cloud services in all fields, and covering the needs of consumer Internet and industrial Internet.
From the perspective of today's technological development pattern, cloud native and distributed are also the future trends. The development of infrastructure, cloud technology and cloud native has made the hybrid cloud 1.0 into the distributed cloud 2.0 era. In this era, Tencent's distributed cloud operating system, Aochi, will undoubtedly play a greater role. Tencent is also continuously launching relevant innovative self-developed products to promote the process of digital transformation and accelerate corporate innovation.