Text丨Intelligent Relativity
Author丨Shen Lang
In the era of digital economy, application modernization is becoming a consensus. In the "IDC FutureScape: Global Cloud Computing 2022 Forecast - China Enlightenment" report released by IDC, application modernization ranks first. At the same time, IDC also predicts that by 2025, the digital economy will generate more than 500 million new applications/services, and 90% of applications will be cloud-native applications.
So far, application modernization has become a key question that modern enterprises and cloud vendors have to explore and answer. The outbreak of market demand has led cloud vendors to think about it. Among them, AWS believes that building application modernization requires rethinking the application architecture model, operation and maintenance model, and software delivery model. Microsoft believes that the core of application modernization is to widen the gap with traditional applications in three aspects: application model, development practice and technology selection, and provide users with tangible value.
Based on more than 30 years of digital practice and experience in serving millions of enterprise customers, Huawei proposes that application modernization is guided (basically) by agile delivery of software, and realizes cognitive reshaping, architecture migration, and technology migration from infrastructure to applications. In general, combined with the understanding of domestic and foreign manufacturers, application modernization will be a completely subversive technological change.
However, often the more such technological changes, it is not easy to actually implement them. How to bring an abstract concept to the ground, and then provide concrete value for the enterprise? Gao Yuan, director of Tianyancha Research Institute, mentioned in the exchange with "Intelligent Relativity", "Application modernization is a relatively top-level concept. It does not specifically refer to certain specific technologies. For companies with different business forms, it can have Different connotations." In Tianyancha, application modernization is regarded as an IT architecture revolution.
Obviously, different connotations lead to different implementation paths, which invisibly increases the practical difficulty of applying modernization. Especially for Chinese enterprises, the more complex their environment and digitalization process are, the more difficult it is to advance application modernization. Nevertheless, from the current enterprise practice, we can still discover some commonalities of application modernization, and sort out a clearer path.
01. Dismantling the application modernization of Tianyancha: an IT architecture revolution
In the Chinese market, Tianyancha is a company with a relatively good degree of application modernization at this stage.
Who is Tianyancha?
As a typical Chinese Internet company, Tianyancha has been committed to building an open data platform with technology to serve hundreds of millions of people. After 8 years of development, Tianyancha has collected more than 300 million social entity information, served more than 300 million users, and has become the No. 1 in China's business query industry. To put it simply, this is an IT company that was born on the Internet and grew on the Internet, and its business system has strong digital attributes.
With the continuous growth of Tianyancha, the business needs continue to enrich, and the IT architecture has also evolved into more and more complex, and exposed a series of more typical technical problems, such as the longer response time of demand development and the continuous increase of traditional operation and maintenance costs etc. Although these problems have been continuously optimized in the past, they have not been fundamentally resolved. Tianyancha has begun to realize that it is time to carry out a comprehensive application modernization change.
After comprehensive consideration, Tianyancha, with the support of HUAWEI CLOUD, carried out a subversive transformation and upgrading of the traditional IT architecture. After one year, two stages and three nodes, this application modernization project was basically implemented, including the overall infrastructure transformation and migration, collective migration of traffic entrances, and normalized data migration.
The key reason why Tianyancha calls it an IT architecture revolution is that based on the infrastructure of Huawei Cloud, combined with the business characteristics and development ideas of Tianyancha, the overall IT architecture has been re-planned and realized to usher in a new life. For example, in terms of data services, Tianyancha relies on the Huawei Cloud big data platform to establish a unified data processing link including real-time data processing and offline data processing, which improves data development efficiency by 30%; based on the streamlined business data model, the data Development efficiency increased by 30%, and algorithm processing efficiency increased by 22%.
Similar technological transformation and application reshaping also occur at the levels of data governance, application architecture, and infrastructure, and then revolutionize and comprehensively upgrade the enterprise IT architecture. From this point of view, the technical products and solutions brought about by HUAWEI CLOUD's in-depth understanding of the technical system play a huge role and are a strong support for Tianyancha to complete the application modernization. It can be seen that cloud vendors can provide effective assistance to the development of enterprise application modernization, making the upgrade road smoother.
02. Application of modern enterprise practice: a global technical thinking
Judging from the results of Tianyancha, application modernization is bound to be a technical upgrade, but at the same time, it does not just focus on a single technical application. In the process of communicating with Dean Gao Yuan, he emphasized more than once that application modernization is not just the application and breakthrough of a certain technical point.
Through Huawei Cloud's technical solutions, we can also find that what current cloud vendors provide is not just the application of a certain technical capability, but the overall solution output based on the overall judgment of the enterprise's business needs and technical characteristics. Among them, three technical considerations are used to construct the basic system of applying modern enterprise practice.
First, overall program capability.
For most companies in China, years of development have accumulated a large amount of data, service modules, basic tools, etc., and when faced with all-round upgrades, it is often difficult to let go of these. Then, as a provider of application modernization solutions, HUAWEI CLOUD needs to answer not the question of whether "I" (referring to HUAWEI CLOUD) and "you" (referring to enterprise customers) use this technical product, but how to cooperate with enterprise customers to jointly Discover the pain points and needs, and then combine its own technical products and services to provide a relatively complete technical solution.
In fact, among the enterprise groups that "intelligent relativity" has contacted, many enterprises are also facing a situation similar to that of Tianyancha. Although the early local optimization can alleviate certain problems, it is ultimately a temporary solution, not the root cause, and needs to be carried out once. Comprehensive application modernization. Then, in the face of such demand changes, the overall solution capabilities provided by cloud vendors are critical.
Second, multi-dimensional integration of technology, experience and business.
From the perspective of "intelligent relativity", cloud vendors, as providers of application modernization solutions, are also practitioners of application modernization. Such a dual identity is very important to the current corporate practice. Cloud vendors with dual identities better understand the needs of enterprise customers, and can also combine their own project experience with technical products, and then provide integrated services with the business of enterprise customers.
For example, HUAWEI CLOUD, relying on its own years of experience in microservices, jointly researched and proposed a service governance solution based on the business characteristics of Tianyancha. The layered architecture, including tools, has increased the efficiency of new feature development by 43%.
Third, the concept of open source and open technology growth.
In the introduction of Dean Gao Yuan, Tianyancha is currently doing normalized data governance on Huawei Cloud. For many enterprises, this will be a normal trend. There is a necessary understanding that application modernization is a long-term evolution process. Enterprises and cloud vendors need to establish an open source and open technology ecosystem to cope with future development Certainty.
Simply put, application modernization requires focusing on the future and preparing for future technology adjustments and upgrades. In this regard, Tianyancha uses Huawei Cloud RDS, MRS, CSS and other platform capabilities to replace non-standard components to ensure compatibility with the open source ecosystem. Enough room for technical upgrades.
From the application modernization trend revealed by Huawei Cloud's thinking, it is not difficult to see that the direction of application modernization in the current enterprise practice has been focused, and most of the leading solutions in the industry are all-round technical thinking. In addition to the overall solution capabilities, it also requires the multi-dimensional integration of technology, experience, and business, as well as the construction of an open source and open technology ecosystem.
03. The inevitable thinking of modern enterprises: where is the boundary of application modernization?
From today's perspective, IT investment and the evolution of IT architecture have greatly promoted the vast majority of enterprises. The value of IT is unquestionable. This is the standard configuration of modern enterprises, and the essence of application modernization is Advanced upgrade of IT architecture.
Then, for modern enterprises, application modernization is not a question of whether to do it, but a question of how to better practice and implement it. Once this point is clarified, the perception of the overall market will rise to several levels, and the issues that enterprises need to think about when choosing cloud vendors will also change.
Specifically, there are two cognitions that need to be clarified by the enterprise itself.
First, application modernization is a technical issue, but it is not limited to technology. It is correct to pay attention to technology, but it cannot stop at technology. The key to the choice of a cloud vendor depends on its understanding of technology and its application and service model.
One of the things that surprised President Gao Yuan about Huawei Cloud is its "partnership" service model. Different from the "shelf-style services" provided by conventional cloud vendors, that is, to put their own products and solutions on display for enterprise customers to choose and buy, the "partner-style" services provided by HUAWEI CLOUD, through joint enterprise customers to set up expert groups to in-depth Within the enterprise, we jointly make top-level design and specific implementation for the application modernization of the enterprise. To this day, HUAWEI CLOUD still has a fixed number of technical experts stationed in Tianyancha to provide relevant services.
Second, the result orientation of application modernization is to transform the present and shape the future. As mentioned above, application modernization itself is a long-term matter, so enterprises and cloud vendors must look at this project reform with a long-term perspective, leave room for future development, and not narrow the road.
For example, HUAWEI CLOUD, while providing IT structure reform for Tianyancha, has also transformed its IT process, including internal IT management process and cooperation between departments and roles, etc., paving the way for long-term operations.
04. Epilogue
The main purpose of revolutions in the course of human history is the liberation of productive forces. In today's digital economy era, the rise of the application modernization trend has a clear meaning behind it, which is to liberate the technology, business, process and even human productivity of enterprises through technical architecture upgrades. From this point of view, subversion is inevitable, and for enterprises and cloud vendors, a thorough understanding is critical.
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