Brief introduction:On July 1, 2021, the GIDC Global Internet Data Conference with the theme of “Gathering Shadow, Converting Network and Gathering Life” was successfully held in Shanghai. Guided by China ICT Institute and hosted by Edit.com, the conference invited experts from the government, industry and other fields to carry out in-depth discussions on the current industry hot topics such as “new infrastructure”, “green data center”, “cloud network collaboration” and “cloud edge collaboration”, so as to promote the healthy development of cloud computing industry in the 5G era. Luo Xiaofei, chief product architect of Aliyun Edge Cloud, was invited to attend the meeting and shared Aliyun’s exploration and thinking in the field of Edge Cloud, and how to help enterprises improve their value from the aspects of product evolution, technology innovation, scene application and so on.
On July 1, 2021, the GIDC Global Internet Data Conference with the theme of “Gathering Shadow, Converting Network and Gathering Life” was successfully held in Shanghai. Guided by China ICT Institute and hosted by Edit.com, the conference invited experts from the government, industry and other fields to carry out in-depth discussions on the current industry hot topics such as “new infrastructure”, “green data center”, “cloud network collaboration” and “cloud edge collaboration”, so as to promote the healthy development of cloud computing industry in the 5G era. Luo Xiaofei, chief product architect of Aliyun Edge Cloud, was invited to attend the meeting and shared Aliyun’s exploration and thinking in the field of Edge Cloud, and how to help enterprises improve their value from the aspects of product evolution, technology innovation, scene application and so on.
The Outline of the National 14th Five-Year Plan clearly points out the need to “synergistically develop cloud services and edge computing services”. 5G technology will be commercialized on a large scale, further accelerating its 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 business needs of customers in different industries for low latency, large bandwidth, nearby data computing and so on.
Definition and morphology of edge clouds
When it comes to the definition and understanding of edge cloud, Luo Xiaofei believes that there may be differences in the definition of edge cloud from different industry perspectives, but there is no conflict in the integration and solution of customer business problems in customer business scenarios. Edge cloud is a large-scale decentralized deployment of computing nodes in the form of resources, and a managable, safe and easy-to-use distributed cloud formed by the cooperation of various nodes in the form of business. The edge cloud node of Ali Cloud is based on the technical architecture of Feitian kernel and builds a distributed and miniaturized cloud computing platform close to the customer side. Feiten is a super-large general computing operating system independently developed by Ali Cloud and serving the world. It supports a variety of forms, namely, central Region, local Region, edge cloud nodes and field computing nodes, so that customers can share all products on a variety of forms of cloud.
Edge cloud is the accumulation and precipitation of long-term investment in technology, products and resources of Ali cloud
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 has long started to build CDN nodes and has more than 2800 nodes covering the world. Technically, the characteristics of edge cloud nodes are different from the central Region, that is, closer to the user, lower latency and better cost, but the stability of a single node is not as high as that of the central Region. CDN itself is a very typical edge cloud service scenario. When customers choose Ali Cloud CDN, they choose a stable and reliable cloud service. The capabilities of intelligent scheduling, topology perception, fault escape, distributed management and control, automatic installation, operation and maintenance configuration, multi-point collaboration and other aspects precipitated in the process of serving customers can be further applied to the edge cloud technology scenarios to achieve high stability and high availability of edge cloud services. In the context of content distribution, CDN mainly consumes the downlink bandwidth. The idle computing resources and the uplink bandwidth provide the possibility for the comprehensive upgrade of edge cloud computing, so as to bear more scene services that need to compute at the edge. AliCloud Edge Cloud supports the original capability of Edge Cloud, so as to realize the deployment of different applications on the edge. Typical services include CDN, view computing, cloud terminal, cloud desktop, cloud game, etc. Edge cloud node ENS provides unified resource construction management delivery capabilities, allowing partners to use ENS resources as if they were using a unified operating system.
Flexible product delivery forms to meet the needs of different scenarios
Ali cloud edge cloud support one-stop solution and integrated solution, one-stop solution is in the base of the edge cloud node to precipitate out now has a relatively common productization ability. The integrated solution is the concept of cloud connected node, which supports the integrated sale 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 the optimization of the transmission protocol, the control of the packet issuing strategy and other technical means, the end-to-side acceleration capability is provided. In this way, from the edge cloud node to the central Reigon, the MEC node with the operator, as well as the connection between the central Region and the local Region are realized through the cloud network integration technology. 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 and network integration. Finally, it can also rely on mature SDN technology on the edge cloud to provide high availability synergy and cloud native network.
The business value of Aliyun edge cloud
Luo Xiaofei said: Edge cloud business value depends on the actual process to help customers solve the problem. The specific summary is as follows:
- The business has good flexibility. Through AliCloud, the business can be distributed and configured to all edge cloud nodes in China within 1min, greatly improving the efficiency of business deployment and configuration.
- The cost is better, the resource can be used through some reuse or other mode, the cost will be better.
- Easy operation and maintenance, Ali cloud provides standardized platform capability, reduces operation and maintenance costs, and improves operation and maintenance efficiency.
Luo Xiaofei also shared 1 group of customer measured data: improve the upstream quality of anchors by 5%, push stream is more stable, reduce the slow rate of live broadcast; Increase the percentage of successful connections by 0.5%, reducing millions of failed requests per day; The completion rate of one-to-one online courses increased from 97% to 99.5%, and the completion rate improved significantly.
In the past three or four years, Ali Cloud has precipitated a number of typical edge cloud usage scenarios:
Edge cloud typical usage scenario: live streaming
The ability of online live broadcast, from push stream to stream processing, and finally distribution, and then the ability of edge cloud computing is used at the distribution end. At the push stream end, edge cloud computing can be used to build a system to realize beauty, special effects and image quality enhancement. The distributor can distribute some bullet screens, and then receive some bullet screens. It can set up its own RTC platform architecture. Many customers use this product model in the field of online broadcast.
Edge cloud typical usage scenario: edge pressure test
The traditional pressure test is mainly two kinds, one is in the central Region of the pressure test, the second is in the terminal pressure test, the central Region of the pressure test problem is the end of the pressure test is particularly concentrated, many want the effect of business decentralization can not be achieved, in the terminal pressure test problem, it is difficult to find so many terminals, Moreover, it is not convenient to install some pressure testing programs on the terminals, so there is a scene at the edge. Based on the 2800 edge cloud nodes of Ali Cloud, the flexible and standardized edge cloud nodes are used to do the corresponding pressure testing, which saves time and effort and is highly efficient.
Edge cloud typical usage scenario: 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, In the operation and maintenance as well as technical optimization also has a lot of precipitation, can better help customers quickly realize the platform construction. 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, To create more scenario-based solutions and promote the edge cloud industry forward.
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