Cloud services have emerged rapidly in a very short period of time, and have undergone important evolutions in the way individuals and business users use and operate computing.
The benefits of cloud services can not only improve the efficiency of enterprises, but also improve the flexibility of enterprises and the possibility of global collaboration through faster access to IT resources and the easy sharing of information, which have become the later promotion of enterprise innovation and growth . key factor.
Relevant data show that, except for Japan, the cloud service market in the Asia-Pacific region has experienced rapid development for several years. By 2015, sales had reached 5.8 billion US dollars, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 39%. Compared with the growth rate of the overall information and communication technology market in this region, which is only 7% in the same period, this data is really surprising.
After several years of development again, cloud services have now formed a certain degree of market maturity, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes the standard accepted by IT operations. Then, what changes will take place in the cloud service industry in 2022?
First of all, whether it is on the demand side or the supply side, cloud services will show the same development trend in 2022: they are extending from the basic resource layer to cloud platforms and cloud applications .
Last year, the "Digital from East to Computation from West" project was officially launched. On the surface, it is a cross-domain deployment of computing power resources, but at a deeper level, it is a broader infrastructure layout, with the purpose of serving the real economy and better moving towards digitalization. .
At the same time, DingTalk announced the "comprehensive PaaS" and JD Cloud launched the digital intelligence supply chain, allowing cloud services to further flourish in many industries such as finance and new energy vehicles.
In the past, Internet cloud vendors who were accustomed to pursuing scale have begun to reduce costs and increase efficiency; and many new competitive forces have added to the industry, such as Kuaishou joining the cloud battlefield, JD Cloud has also begun to exert force, and so on.
So, in the face of the changes and status quo in the cloud service industry, which ones deserve our attention? And what trends do these changes imply? And with the introduction of the Web3 cloud service concept, what kind of sparks will it collide with traditional cloud services?
Development status and inspiration of cloud service industry
Speaking of the development status of the cloud service industry, we have witnessed that cloud services have been favored by the market in recent years, but as enterprises' choice and deployment on the cloud become more and more complex, some new difficulties have also emerged :
- The brand influence of small and medium-sized enterprises needs to be improved
Compared with huge competitors such as Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, small and medium-sized enterprises still have a certain gap in terms of brand influence, financial strength, publicity, customer base and channel construction.
- The development of cloud computing technology requires continuous R&D investment
After more than ten years of development of cloud computing, technological and industrial innovations are constantly emerging, and new technologies, new products, and new models are constantly promoting the transformation of cloud computing. Maintaining the continuous innovation of technology and industry is the challenge faced by cloud computing manufacturers. It is necessary to study and judge the development of cloud computing technology and industry, and continuously increase and deepen the research and development of cloud computing cutting-edge technology and new technology integration.
- Cloud data center deployment structure is not reasonable enough
In terms of scale and structure, the proportion of large-scale data centers in China is relatively low, and the development scale of large-scale data centers is even less than the total amount of a certain foreign Internet company. At present, intensive and large-scale construction has not yet been realized.
- Lack of supporting resources for cloud services
Compared with developed countries such as the United States, domestic cloud computing service capabilities still have a large gap. The scale of the public cloud computing service industry is relatively small, the business is relatively single, and the construction of supporting environments is backward.
- Regulatory system and lack of talent
Information security laws and regulations and the regulatory system are not sound enough. In terms of data and privacy protection, security management and other aspects related to cloud computing security, China's cloud computing industry ecology has a relatively large deficiency. At the same time, there is a gap in cloud talents and a lack of mature business models.
The global economic downturn caused by the epidemic has affected the development of the cloud service industry. Looking back at the above five major difficulties encountered in the development of the cloud service industry in 2022, it is not difficult for us to think about the pattern, technology, and policies of giant players and emerging companies in the industry in the future. Important changes will occur.
So, what inspirations can we get from it for the future development of the industry?
- Cost reduction and efficiency increase may become the norm, and profit is more important than scale
A key change in the cloud business level of some vendors in 2022 is the transformation from an integrator to a willingness to be integrated .
Because although the number of integrators in name is good-looking, many of them are businesses with gross losses and gross losses. In the next year, major cloud service companies will give up the so-called competition for market share and pursue more high-quality services. , Can actually bring profit growth.
- Supply-side platform and application-side extension
In terms of service model, manufacturers need to transform from Internet thinking to a service model that is more in line with the habits of traditional industries; in terms of business model, they must use business scenarios as the starting point and business goals as the starting point to build a complete solution; in terms of channel access , It is necessary to give full play to the power of partners and ecological partners to achieve direct penetration and indirect impact on users in traditional industries.
Further upward, existing applications can be optimized, new applications can be incubated, and the digital base can be transformed downward to make the basic cloud more suitable for AI applications, forming a spiral and continuous evolution effect.
- It has become a consensus to go deep into the industry and embrace emerging industries
In 2022, almost all mainstream cloud vendors on the market are repeatedly emphasizing a point of view: To understand the industry better and go deep into the industry, they are all to help enterprises solve practical problems in digital transformation.
In addition to deepening the industry, cloud vendors have also accelerated the pace of deployment in certain areas and increased their deployment efforts. At present, cloud vendors have created rich value in digital industry, medical technology, robotics and other fields .
- Increased adoption of cloud-native production environments
At present, cloud-native mainstream technologies are transitioning from an explosive stage to a mature stage, and the speed of release and iteration of new businesses, new products, and new services is accelerating.
- Domestic companies go overseas and compete with global cloud ecosystem vendors
In recent years, the pace of my country's cloud ecological enterprises going overseas has been accelerating. On the customer demand side, cross-border e-commerce, online games, short video and other businesses represented by the Internet industry continue to expand their overseas revenue scale, and the demand for overseas business expansion and cloud unified management in traditional industries is becoming more and more obvious, as well as the "Belt and Road" national policy Driving the trend of overseas trade, etc., have promoted the demand for overseas cloud node resources.
From the above analysis, the current traditional cloud service market has various problems at the technical and industrial levels, and there are still many defects and areas that need to be optimized.
But following the old maps of the past, we cannot find the New World . Perhaps the cloud service in the Web3 era can be the key to solving the problems of the existing cloud. So, what desirable solutions can Web3 cloud services bring to existing industries and future decentralized applications?
Web3 cloud provides a new solution
The fact that the amount of data is increasing geometrically is putting enormous pressure on the existing centralized cloud services. Problems such as high storage costs, easy data loss, and limited storage resources can no longer support the growing data computing and data storage. need.
Based on the weakness of centralized cloud, Web3 cloud service is taking a different path .
First of all, the concept of Web3 cloud services did not emerge suddenly. Decentralized cloud storage protocols such as Arweave and Storj have already entered the stage of commercial adoption.
Among them, Arweave has been attracting attention as a potential project in the storage track. Its characteristics of one-time payment and permanent storage can fully meet the development needs of DeFi and NFT; Build Dapp on Arweave to create a complete Web3 application ecosystem. In terms of ecological cooperation, Arweave has also established cooperation with many projects in the ecology.
Storj, as one of the first distributed storage systems, has gained huge traction since its launch in 2018. Storj was founded as a benchmark against Amazon S3. Compared with Amazon S3, Storj can provide the same service, but at the same time it can achieve low price, decentralization and privacy protection .
Storj has built a decentralized cloud storage network. Its main idea is to integrate idle resources to expand the ecology. Users can provide idle storage space to collect rent, or pay rent to rent storage space or small equipment. In addition, Storj can also be applied to video services, backup providers, and more.
However, compared with the development process of Web3 cloud storage service, the field of Web3 cloud computing service is slightly behind.
There are still many DeFi, games, and metaverse applications that need to deploy front-end and back-end on centralized cloud services such as AWS and Google Cloud while using smart contracts. This reality brings blockchain applications "system-level" risks such as vulnerability and data security.
Facts have proved that the realization of Web3 cloud storage alone cannot truly represent the overall development of the Web3 cloud service industry. People also need to realize real decentralized cloud computing services. And at the moment, it is very necessary and urgent to face the network computing power demand of big data computing.
So, how do projects such as Phala, DFINITY, and Akash meet the market demand?
First, Phala Network is creating a network that can be freely combined with smart contracts, storage protocols, or other decentralized data indexing services. By connecting the cloud computing power of many distributed devices on the Internet, it is guaranteed to achieve true decentralization at low cost and high efficiency.
The biggest difference between Phala and other cloud computing projects is that in order to achieve trust and encryption, Phala chooses to build based on the Secure Enclave trusted execution environment, which guarantees the security, confidentiality and privacy of all computing operations . At present, Phala has established cooperation with many well-known ecological projects, and is exploring metaverse, NFT and other fields and providing them with a wide range of cloud computing power services.
Secondly, the "Internet Computer" proposed by DFINITY is an advanced blockchain-based computing system designed to help enterprises get rid of their dependence on centralized server clusters.
In the past application development and deployment, there was a common limitation of high management costs. At this time, most enterprises will choose commercial cloud service platforms, but the later maintenance of these platforms will also cost a lot of money, and the "Internet The application of "computer" saves this part of the cost. In addition, DFINITY is also very friendly to developers and users. Technological innovation and more democratic governance have become the advantages of DFINITY.
Akash is a project that provides an open source cloud computing platform and a decentralized cloud market. Akash is a Cosmos-based proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain built with interoperability in mind using the Cosmos SDK.
The main goal of the project is to provide consumers with an alternative to centralized cloud providers, especially for the lack of cloud service provision for DeFi . At the same time, Akash also attaches great importance to the ecological cooperation sector, and is maintaining close cooperation with many cloud service projects in order to seek to increase fairness and efficiency for the industry.
Unknowingly, we have entered the development track leading to the era of Web3 cloud services, but for the entire industry just getting started, most of the Web3 cloud projects are still in the early stage of exploration, facing such an infinite possibility In this era, Web3 decentralized cloud services will inevitably receive more and more attention .
From Web2 to Web3, the degree of digitization will continue to deepen, and the volume of global data will continue to grow. Therefore, the future development of the Web3 cloud that abandons the disadvantages of centralization has naturally become a question that the entire era is thinking about.
What expectations do you have for the development of cloud services?
Undoubtedly, compared with traditional cloud services, decentralized cloud services are a subversion of the model and one of the important applications of blockchain technology .
Since the epidemic turned people's daily production and life online, cloud services are considered to be the last big business opportunity in the Internet industry in the short term, and the corresponding cloud storage and cloud computing sectors have always been popular in the cloud service industry. The focus of attention.
Perhaps in the current cloud service market, traditional centralized cloud service providers still occupy the mainstream position in the market, and even giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba occupy nearly 70% of the market share, but the cloud service The next ten years will certainly not be like the last ten.
We are witnessing a wave of digital transformation, and this wave of transformation also highlights a new fact: for the development of cloud services, we still have more room for exploration and opportunities .
Perhaps for a long time in the future, the traditional centralized cloud will not fade out of the market, but with the vigorous development of the Web3 decentralized cloud service ecosystem, the new model of mutual integration and interconnection between the two will further improve the efficiency of cloud services. To realize the accelerated integration and development of the digital economy and science and technology around the world, the future prospects are still worth looking forward to.
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