On June 4, 2021 cloud Edge Collaboration Conference was held in Beijing under the theme of “Open a new era of distributed cloud”. The conference was hosted by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). Zhou Zhe, senior technical expert of Aliyun Edge cloud computing, was invited to attend the conference and shared aliyun’s exploration in edge cloud computing, introduced the interaction forms of edge cloud main products and how to evolve in the process of cloud infrastructure upgrading to provide the best business experience for enterprise customers.
Ali Cloud infrastructure upgrade
Long-term deep cultivation of marginal cloud field
Ali Cloud edge cloud node is a product and technology evolution based on the strong node network of Ali Cloud CDN and long-term technology accumulation. Ali cloud as domestic leading CDN service provider in the smart scheduling, topological perception, fault escape, distributed control, automation of installed operational configuration has a deep technical aspects, such as precipitation, combined with ali cloud flying miniaturization, integration of the operating system capacity and strong network of multi-point collaborative ability, realize from the CDN to product shape evolution at the edge of the cloud. Behind the change in product form is the change in customer requirements. New business scenarios and a large amount of data are generated in the cloud for enterprise applications, which has higher requirements on the response speed of cloud access delay, meaning that more computing power needs to be provided on the edge side close to users. As scenarios change and technologies evolve, the first is cloud native technology, which allows a large number of stateless services to be offloaded at the edge. At the same time, with the maturity of cloud computing technology, the corresponding resource isolation can be carried out, whether virtual machine, container or sandbox, with better resource isolation and delivery capabilities. Based on this, two systems are formed: CDN content distribution system and edge computing product system. CDN content distribution system includes static page acceleration, streaming media caching and accelerated live streaming, on-demand acceleration, dynamic acceleration for dynamic content acceleration, and security acceleration products for content security and network security. The edge computing system includes the edge cloud node that provides computing virtualization on the edge, view computing products that perform computing offloading on video images and edge caching, and other edge applications. At the same time, Ali Cloud has 2800+ edge cloud nodes all over the world to ensure that customer business can reach global users. Through the comprehensive cloud of CDN, CDN nodes are upgraded to edge cloud nodes so that customers can enjoy more edge computing services when using the original CDN resources.
Product matrix of Aliyun Edge cloud node service
When talking about the product matrix of edge cloud, Zhou Zhe said: In IaaS level, there is the standard Edge cloud node service ENS, which is a small distributed cloud node service. ENS base of edge cloud node provides unified resource construction, unified resource inventory, and unified external resource delivery capabilities, enabling various application scenarios to use ENS resources as unified operating systems. At present, ali Cloud edge cloud node service has built many application scene products, including CDN product system, cloud communication scene, view computing scene, cloud game and innovation scene jointly built with partners. The essence of Aliyun edge cloud node provides edge basic computing, storage, and network capabilities. Both the deployment scale and application scenarios are very different from those of public cloud center Region. The development space of edge cloud in the future is huge, and more industry understanding and cognition are needed to create product solutions suitable for users.
Abundant edge cloud product forms match the requirements of different scenarios
Technical characteristics of edge cloud node service
The technical characteristics of Aliyun edge cloud node service are divided into two layers: one is the technical reserve in hardware system, the other is the technical reserve in software system. There are multiple heterogeneous resources in the deployment process of edge cloud nodes, which requires compatibility and management of all heterogeneous hardware. Aliyun edge cloud node not only supports self-developed hardware systems, such as hyper-converged gateway and hyper-converged server, but also supports third-party servers with management standards. At the same time, a single edge cloud node may not meet the high reliability requirements in the network scenario of edge cloud deployment. The scenarios to be faced by the edge cloud can have certain disaster recovery capability and tolerance to nodes, and ensure certain availability to complete the deployment of edge cloud nodes. Finally, customer-oriented availability delivery needs to be coordinated through network, scheduling capability and upper management and control. In the software system, Aliyun edge cloud node service supports multi-point coordination and integration of cloud network scheduling and management. The Cloudlet node system supports multi-function fusion, including fusion computing, VM and container fusion, storage fusion, and security capability in Cloudlet. At the same time, it also supports millions of nodes, tens of millions of machines, and miniaturized node design of edge cloud, which are all requirements for complex networks and widely distributed coverage. Master’s management and control system can coordinate such large-scale heterogeneous resources and provide unified and standard services. The topmost BOSS system can be used in the “software + hardware” overall delivery service scenario.
Cloud network integration technology application
Zhou Zhe emphasized that the integration of cloud network is a very important technology point of edge cloud. The integration of cloud network is mainly manifested in the following aspects: first, the requirements for location. The edge cloud service itself is insensitive to location. Although the customer scene has strong demand for location, it must have location attribute. Second, the cooperation between nodes is completely based on the network. At the same time, the edge cloud carries the MEC nodes of the carrier and the connection relationship between the central Region and the local Region. This connection, data flow and application path routing are realized through the integration of cloud and network technology. Every single node in the network can be considered untrusted or offline in a short time, which requires the integrated scheduling capability of the cloud network to ensure the high availability of edge cloud node services. Relying on mature SDN technology on edge cloud, it provides high availability collaboration and cloud native network. Cloud native is an important technology direction driving the more layered development of cloud computing today. Because of the rise of cloud native technology and more and more people begin to put my past software, system, or platform to the cloud native way to evolve, the use of resource way began to be changed, it can be to spin off their stateful and stateless services, can also split their strong what is need to delay and terminal or edge to calculate forces can be done. Collaborative high availability is based on SDN. Regardless of node access in the field or in the edge cloud, the whole data flow can be completed seamlessly on the network.
Technology evolution for the future
For the future, Aliyun Edge cloud node services will continue to develop towards distributed deployment, node autonomy and collaboration, miniaturized computing and other directions, providing stable, reliable and secure services for industrial customers. Speech finally, gwendoline expressed the dreams of the future oriented: ali YunXiWang can and industry chain partners work together, through the depth of the products, technology, resource integration, common edge cloud applications of ecological construction, let more innovation and value of the enterprise application deployment operation on the edge of cloud node, push the edge of the cloud industry development.