InfoQ's "Date with Geeks" column recently invited Zhu Shunmin (nicknamed Jiang He), general manager of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud network product line and head of the XG laboratory of Alibaba Dharma Institute, to talk about the economic recovery at the time, the cloud network How to accelerate the improvement of enterprise efficiency. The following is the content of this issue, and there are additions and deletions after editing.
The epidemic has changed the way of life of many people, and it has also changed the way many companies operate and their views on cloud technology. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than half of enterprises will spend more on public cloud computing than on traditional IT services.
The economy will start to recover in 2023, and efficiency improvement will become one of the main topics for many companies in 2023. As the first step for enterprises to go to the cloud, the cloud network will also face many opportunities and challenges. Then, what changes has the economic recovery brought to the cloud network, and how will the cloud network promote enterprises to improve efficiency and accelerate development?
Discussion on the Symptoms and Changes of Economic Recovery
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics on March 15, the overall economic operation has shown a trend of stabilization and recovery. Industry analysts are also generally looking forward to and optimistic about economic recovery. What impact will this change have on the cloud computing industry?
Zhu Shunmin: In recent years, the state has issued a large number of supporting policies related to the digital economy to promote the accelerated development of the digital economy. As an important foundation for the digital economy and industrial digitization, cloud computing is expected to benefit from economic recovery and the overall development of the industry. The cloud penetration rate of Chinese enterprises is relatively low, and there is still huge room for growth. Among them, pan-Internet companies have fully penetrated the cloud, while government enterprises and traditional industries have gradually become the main force of cloud migration.
As the economy begins to recover, many traditional enterprises and manufacturing enterprises have begun to pay attention to the theme of digital transformation; many overseas enterprises will consider how to build overseas infrastructure and realize interconnection at home and abroad. On the whole, everyone is more confident in the prospects of the national economy and the competitiveness of enterprises. As a member of the cloud computing industry, I can also feel the increasing attention of the cloud computing industry in this context. .
In the end, technological innovation must be implemented in business scenarios to show its value. Some changes in demand for cloud computing may be more obvious in industry scenarios. From the perspective of cloud or cloud network leaders, what changes and trends have you observed?
Zhu Shunmin: Internet companies, such as audio and video, games, online education, etc., are more sensitive to market reactions. On the one hand, they are more concerned about the rapid growth of their business, and then gain a larger market share by going overseas. At this time, you may pay more attention to flexibility, high concurrency, and global large-bandwidth interconnection; on the other hand, increasing efficiency and reducing costs is also a key consideration for enterprises.
For traditional enterprises, such as manufacturing, transportation and logistics, etc., they should still increase their efforts in digitalization and cloud migration, so as to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Moreover, with the development of international business of some traditional enterprises, the interconnection of global office branches needs to be considered. In general, it is necessary to deal with changes in the competitive environment such as economic globalization and business going overseas, and internally it is necessary to practice internal skills, and use some digital means such as cloud computing to increase efficiency and reduce costs, and enhance its own competitiveness.
Will these changes in turn affect the focus of cloud and cloud network developers and practitioners on products and technologies?
Zhu Shunmin: In the past few years, everyone paid more attention to cutting-edge technology. Now what customers need most is stability, and requires the business to be able to run stably and sustainably. The second is security. On the one hand, it is reflected in the security of the business system. It is hoped that the business system will not be hacked and removed from the database; on the other hand, data security is increasingly valued by enterprises; the third is the performance requirements of cloud products. Meet the needs. Finally, there is the key factor - cost. Alibaba Cloud has been constantly thinking about how to enable users to obtain more benefits in terms of cost reduction, such as using cloud computing and other technologies to help enterprises apply automation, intelligence, visualization and other means to actual business.
What are the changes in cloud network requirements in different industries?
If you summarize the annual keywords of many companies in 2023, "digital transformation" may be one, and "efficiency improvement" may be one. From the perspective of cloud network, how do you understand the relationship between technological advancement and enterprise development?
Zhu Shunmin: First of all, the technological advancement of Alibaba Cloud or Alibaba Cloud Network is obvious to all. Internationally, it won the first place in the cloud network field of Gartner's global product capability evaluation; domestically, it won the first prize of the National Computer Society Technology Invention Award and the Zhejiang Provincial Technology Invention Award. But there is no need for us to pursue the absolute advancement of technology. Appropriateness is competitiveness, and leading technology is to serve business needs. For example, network delay. I can give you an example. Many companies will think: Should I deploy my business system in the data center closest to me? But in practical applications, do companies really need to achieve such low latency requirements?
From the perspective of To C and To B, it is not the same. To C angle, VR glasses, especially 4K VR, and interactive games have very high requirements for delay. We once did a test, using 5G technology to support the communication of several VR glasses in the office, the delay of 5G is about 15 milliseconds. What is the concept of 15 milliseconds? 2 milliseconds can go back and forth 50 kilometers, and 15 milliseconds is more than 350 kilometers. In fact, in many To C applications, the delay requirements are not so high.
But in To B scenarios, such as industrial scenarios, the delay of 15 milliseconds may still be too high. I believe that the interaction and control between machines in the future production line will require higher and higher communication delays. Although the technological change in the past ten years has been led by Internet applications, I think the future technological change will be led by industrial scene applications.
Enterprise cloud network first. However, the number of global data centers continues to increase, and cloud prices in many regions are becoming more and more expensive. Will this affect the choice of solutions for enterprises to build cloud networks?
Zhu Shunmin: I can talk about it from several aspects.
The first point is that the cost and selling price of Alibaba Cloud has actually continued to decline, because the servers, networks, and storage scales of Alibaba Cloud are getting larger and larger, and the more resources everyone shares on it, the more cost-saving dividends will be released. big.
The second point is that some companies think it is expensive after going to the cloud, but in fact they do not make full use of the advantages of the cloud. For example, we can use the pay-as-you-go model to adjust the cloud bandwidth and storage usage according to demand, which can save a lot of costs. When enterprises use cloud traffic, they can purchase according to bandwidth or traffic, and allocate and use traffic according to the demand time, which can also reduce the overall cost. This allows enterprises to use the cloud more flexibly.
For example, a company is doing a big promotional event, placing incremental access on Alibaba Cloud, and it takes only half an hour to complete the deployment. The event lasts for 1 hour and is released in the second half hour. It takes two hours in total. Just pay 400 bucks. If you do not choose cloud services but purchase equipment, the cost will be about 50,000 yuan, and the deployment time will be at least 7 days. As far as a single event is concerned, choosing cloud services saves at least 100 times in capital and 160 times in time costs. Therefore, each enterprise's business system deployment method is different, and enterprises must comprehensively consider the costs of various aspects. Many companies have full-time positions to optimize the operation of cloud resources to reduce cloud usage costs as much as possible.
From the initial focus on public network access capabilities to the present, has there been any change in the indicators that enterprises pay attention to cloud networks?
Zhu Shunmin: Most enterprise users will not clearly say which indicators to put forward special requirements, but excellent indicators are the guarantee of customer experience. For cloud networks, indicators such as ECS network scale, bandwidth size, number of concurrent accesses, and latency are all important indicators related to network experience, and they need to be paid attention to all the time. For example, elasticity, if you can achieve enough elasticity, or single-instance performance/bandwidth, ECS scale is large enough, etc., it means that the instance resources purchased by the user at one time can meet the business needs for a long time, then this elastic experience Just fine.
From the pursuit of higher performance to the hope that the cloud network will return to its original intention, what technical challenges will this change bring? The last time you were a guest on "Geek Date", we talked about the need for technical reserves to meet the needs of digital transformation. Is this reserve sufficient now?
Zhu Shunmin: From the original intention of returning to cloud computing, it is security, stability, performance, and cost. Alibaba Cloud Network strives to provide customers with stable and reliable global interconnection capabilities and create an easy-to-use access experience; scale, performance, and flexibility are all inherent capabilities; for example, enterprises need to build cross-regional networks when going overseas. If the enterprise does not design the network architecture or the redundancy is not well designed, the impact will be very large. We found that foreign users have a high degree of dependence on APIs. Such a situation is a fact that cloud vendors must accept, which in turn will put higher demands on cloud vendors.
Facing new challenges, we need to think about providing stronger product capabilities, not only with high performance and large scale; but to better meet the business needs of customers, that is, to return to the essence of the cloud, and to better understand the customer's business Scenarios; our product concept at the user level is to be simpler and easier to use, which can make users more efficient. Adaptive elasticity makes the network simpler.
Let me give you an example in life. For example, when we go to restaurant A for dinner, when we order 3 dishes, we find that the food is served quickly, but when we order 10 dishes, we find that the food is served very slowly. But when we went to restaurant B for dinner, we ordered 10 dishes and they were still served very quickly. This shows that elasticity has different capabilities for different cloud vendors. What Alibaba Cloud can provide is the super-large elastic capacity that supports Double 11 for many years. This upper limit is very high. We provide a one-minute rapid expansion plan for overseas companies with fast business growth; China Unicom Group provides cross-border dedicated line services on Alibaba Cloud, and after enterprises purchase from China Unicom, they can be activated within minutes. This is the embodiment of adaptive super elasticity.
Today, Alibaba Cloud users are spread across all walks of life, such as chemical consumer electronics companies in traditional manufacturing industries, which have relatively high requirements for the cloud. We have a customer who is an IoT platform, and the requirement is that the load balancing capability must be able to manage 100 million terminals concurrently. In response to this requirement, we overcome all difficulties and overcome all technical difficulties, and finally tested to 100 million concurrency. There is also a customer who requires a load balancer to support 1T traffic. It is true that you can split it into many load balancers, but the management will become more complicated for users. Ali has a saying: "Leave the complexity to yourself and the simplicity to others." Therefore, we increased the throughput capacity to 500G last year, and now we will release the 1T capacity soon. This not only meets the customer's business traffic requirements, but also makes the customer's network easier to use.
Behind the technological improvement is Alibaba Cloud's continuous improvement and pursuit around stability, security, performance, and cost.
How can the cloud network accelerate the improvement of enterprise efficiency?
Different companies in different industries have different needs for cloud networks. In the context of economic recovery, which companies have you observed to make some moves first?
Zhu Shunmin: We see that the proportion of traditional industry users on Alibaba Cloud is getting higher and higher, which shows that the international competitiveness of our current enterprises is greatly improved. In addition, we have seen that Internet companies are also actively going overseas, and overseas resource requirements for Alibaba Cloud are increasing.
What difficulties and pain points do these enterprises often encounter when trying to build a secure, stable, and efficient cloud network? From the perspective of cloud network, does Alibaba Cloud have some relatively mature ideas to help enterprises improve efficiency?
Zhu Shunmin: I also think that the network is very complicated, and its connection characteristics that extend in all directions bring complexity. Enterprises who want to improve efficiency can start from the three stages of "network construction-network utilization-pipeline network".
In terms of network construction, if you need to be able to quickly open the network to cope with frequent business changes, and need to be able to quickly open up resource nodes, it is best to choose a cloud service that is simple in configuration and can automatically build a global network with one click. In terms of network use, not only high-quality, low-latency, and large-bandwidth cloud network services are required, but also stability and reliability. Taking bandwidth demand as an example, enterprises' demand for large bandwidth generally fluctuates with time, and the cloud network supports time-based adjustment of bandwidth demand, which can support enterprises to use the cloud more economically. In terms of the pipe network, once a network problem occurs, not only can it be quickly located, but also the solution can be quickly fed back. This requires the network to be observable and intelligently diagnosable.
We are also thinking of many ways to make the cloud network easier to use. First, we will make the product design simpler, and you don't need to have a lot of professional network background to build the network. Second, we are also gradually providing network operation and maintenance products (NIS network intelligent analysis system) on Alibaba Cloud, which are now provided free of charge to Alibaba Cloud customers. This means that we present the status of resources such as virtual machines on the network and the status of network connections to users to provide observability.
We have an internal "wiping zero campaign". If you have a problem with Alibaba Cloud, you can submit a work order on Alibaba Cloud. Our hope is to reduce the number of work orders to zero. It seems that this goal cannot be achieved, but Alibaba Cloud is using this goal to guide itself, providing users with capabilities such as product experience, service quality, and observability as much as possible, and improving the usability and ease of use of Alibaba Cloud.
On the other hand, it is true that for the cloud, it is difficult for us to meet all the needs of users, because there are so many types of users, and the ways, scenarios, and demands of using the cloud are different, so we will also cooperate with some ecosystems Partners, such as companies that research network security and load balancing companies, join forces.
Here I would like to remind you that as a user, you must think clearly. First, do you have the ability to build all end-to-end capabilities? Second, when you cannot build it yourself, you must think about who can help in this field today. You go and fix it.
To make the network easier, do we have some results so far?
Zhu Shunmin: In fact, today you will find that you don't need to think so much about using cloud networks. The threshold has been greatly reduced, and business flexibility has been greatly improved. Customers can save more time and focus on their own business development without having to worry too much about IT operation and maintenance.
For example, through our technical cooperation with EMQ Yingyun Technology, we have created a billion-level IoT connection platform to meet the global IoT terminal connection and management. Building a large-scale distributed IoT MQTT message server based on our NLB products can support concurrent connections of billions of IoT devices and a large throughput of hundreds of Gbps.
We assisted BP in building a global network to support the rapid development of its business in the Asia Pacific. During this process, the customer used our cloud network products to create an enterprise-level cloud network in China and the Asia-Pacific region, supporting efficient business growth and reducing resource usage costs through refined operations.
In the field of audio and video live broadcast, we provide customers with cloud network intelligent observation and operation and maintenance services. With the help of NIS instance self-diagnosis and path connectivity analysis, some network anomalies were found and repaired. Business traffic analysis can find some NAT abnormal access traffic, etc.; path analysis can cover every node in the network, quickly locating the problem of network failure .
The above examples are all examples of making the network simpler. The essence of the cloud is actually a mode of resource sharing among enterprises in the whole society, which can avoid a lot of waste of resources caused by your own efforts.
Alibaba Cloud continues to pursue technological progress around the requirements of stability, security, performance, and cost. We have never stopped the pace of technological breakthroughs, because we believe that going to the cloud will never stop. The cloud will definitely become a social-level infrastructure for the entire industry, and the scale will become larger and larger, and will continue to raise higher requirements for technology. Require. In response to the needs of the development of human society in different periods, technological change will be an eternal theme.