On July 1, 2021, THE GIDC Global Internet Data Conference was successfully held in Shanghai with the theme of “Gathering shadows, Integrating Networks and Gathering Life”. The conference, guided by the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology and hosted by ADid.com, invited experts from the government, industry and other fields to carry out in-depth discussions on hot industry topics such as “new infrastructure”, “green data center”, “cloud network synergy” and “cloud side synergy”, and promote the healthy development of cloud computing industry in the 5G era. Luo Xiaofei, chief product architect of Ali Cloud Edge Cloud, was invited to attend the meeting and shared ali Cloud’s exploration and thinking in the field of edge cloud, and how to help enterprises enhance value from product evolution, technological innovation, scene application and other aspects.
The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan clearly states that “cloud services and edge computing services should be developed together”. The large-scale commercialization of 5G technology will further accelerate the integration with cloud computing technology. Edge cloud is the extension of cloud computing capability from the center to the edge, so as to meet the service requirements of customers in different industries, such as low latency, large bandwidth, and nearby data computing.
Definition and morphology of marginal clouds
When it comes to the definition and understanding of edge cloud, Luo Xiaofei thinks that there may be differences in the definition of edge cloud from different industry perspectives, but in the end, there is no conflict in the integration and solution of customer business problems in customer business scenarios. In terms of resource form, edge cloud is a large-scale distributed computing node. In terms of service form, edge cloud is a manageable, secure and easy-to-use distributed cloud formed by all nodes cooperating with each other. The edge cloud node of Ali Cloud builds a distributed miniaturized cloud computing platform close to the customer side based on the technical architecture of Feitian kernel. Feitian is a large-scale universal computing operating system independently developed by Aliyun that serves the world. It supports various forms, including central Region, local Region, edge cloud node and field computing node, so that customers can share all products on various forms of cloud.
Edge cloud is the accumulation and precipitation of Ali Cloud’s long-term investment in technology, products and resources
Luo Xiaofei believes that Ali cloud edge cloud is a long-term accumulation of precipitation in resource construction, technological innovation, product building and other aspects. Ali Cloud started to build CDN nodes early, with more than 2800 nodes covering the world. Technically, edge cloud nodes are different from central regions in that they are closer to users, have lower latency, and have higher cost. However, single node stability is not as high as that of central regions. CDN itself is a typical edge cloud business scenario. When customers choose Ali Cloud CDN, they choose a stable and reliable cloud service. The intelligent scheduling, topological awareness, fault escape, distributed control, automatic installation operation and maintenance configuration, multi-point coordination and other capabilities accumulated in the process of serving customers can be further applied to edge cloud technology scenarios to achieve high stability and high availability of edge cloud services. In the content distribution scenario, CDN mainly consumes the downstream bandwidth. Idle computing resources and upstream bandwidth provide the possibility for the comprehensive upgrade of edge cloud computing, so as to carry more services requiring computing at the edge. Aliyun Edge cloud supports the edge cloud native capability, so as to realize the deployment of different applications on the edge. Typical services include CDN, view computing, cloud terminal, cloud desktop, cloud games, etc. Edge cloud node ENS provides unified resource building management delivery capabilities, enabling partners to use ENS resources as if they were unified operating systems.
Flexible product delivery patterns meet different scenarios
Ali Cloud Edge cloud supports one-stop solution and integrated solution, one-stop solution is to precipitate on the base of edge cloud node, which has now been relatively common product capability. The integrated solution is the concept of cloud connected nodes, which supports the integrated sales of software and hardware externally. Customers can build their own edge computing nodes to build application scenarios. Customers in the edge of the business process will involve the use of edge nodes and the network cloud, both must be linked together, all need to deal with business information all out on the edge node, a certain need through hierarchical structure, such as the need to do some local class business processing, the calculation of the local node can be dealing with customers, part of the business scenario Part of this business scenario needs to go up, may go to the edge of cloud node and edge cloud also may not be able to get rid of all nodes, the cloud or the source of the business also need to back to the center of the station, so from that perspective network and the edge of cloud must be linked together, based on this, ali cloud also offers a side edge to accelerate the ability, that is, from MEC platform, or IoT device node to the edge of the cloud, Through optimization of transmission protocol, control of packet sending strategy and other technical means, the end – side acceleration capability is provided. In this way, from the edge cloud node to the central Reigon, the cloud network integration technology is used to connect the MEC node of the carrier, the central Region and the local Region. In addition, the availability of a single node in the network must not be completely reliable, and the high availability of edge cloud node services can be realized through the scheduling capability of cloud network integration. Finally, the edge cloud can also rely on mature SDN technology to provide high availability collaboration and cloud native network.
Ali Cloud edge cloud business value
Luo xiaofei said: The business value of edge cloud depends on what problems it helps customers solve in the practical process. The details are summarized as follows: With good service elasticity, Aliyun can deliver service configurations to all edge cloud nodes in China within 1 minute, greatly improving the efficiency of service deployment and configuration.
Cost is better, resources can be used through some reuse or other modes, the cost will become better.
Easy operation and maintenance, Ali Cloud provides standardized platform capabilities, reduces operation and maintenance costs, and improves operation and maintenance efficiency.
Luo Xiaofei also shared a group of customer measured data: improve the uplink quality of anchors by 5%, push stream is more stable, and reduce the lag rate of live broadcast; Increased the percentage of successful user connections by 0.5%, reducing millions of failed requests per day; The completion rate of one-to-one online courses has improved significantly from 97% to 99.5%.
In the past three or four years, Ali Cloud has deposited a number of typical edge cloud usage scenarios:
Typical application scenario of edge cloud: Live streaming
The ability of live streaming, from stream pushing to stream processing, and finally to distribution, and then use edge cloud computing in the distribution side, where edge cloud computing can be used to build a system to achieve beauty, special effects and picture quality enhancement processing. The distributor can distribute some bullets and then receive some bullets. It can build its own RTC platform architecture. Many customers use this product model in online live broadcasting.
Edge cloud typical usage scenario: Edge pressure measurement
There are two kinds of traditional pressure testing: one is conducted on the central Region, and the other is conducted on terminals. The problem of pressure testing in the central Region is that the pressure testing ends are concentrated, and the desired effect of service dispersion cannot be achieved. It is difficult to find so many terminals for pressure testing on terminals. Moreover, it is not convenient to install some pressure testing programs on the terminal, so there is a scenario on the edge side. Based on the 2800 edge cloud nodes of Ali Cloud, the flexible and standardized edge cloud nodes are used to perform corresponding pressure testing, which is time-saving and efficient.
Typical usage scenario of edge cloud: content acceleration
There is a scene of some business is to build a CDN demand, but will face heavy demands a high capital costs, operational and technical optimization problems such as hard, and through the use of ali cloud edge node of cloud, customers can quickly build a own CDN platform, thereby removing the long process of self-built node, ali cloud as a CDN service at the same time, There are also a lot of precipitation in operation and maintenance and technical optimization, which can better help customers quickly build the platform. Summary, future edge cloud technology will inevitably continue towards distributed, miniaturization, direction of autonomy, collaborative, and cloud native evolution, ali cloud will give full play to its own products, technology, ecological advantages, by providing a flexible, open, safe edge cloud base, plus and the edge of the partners to develop applications, each vertical industry customer service, Create more scenario-based schemes and push the edge cloud industry forward. PS: If you want to know more about aliyun edge cloud business, to obtain the speech PPT, you can add group of Nail search 35469210