This is an era of rapid development of IT technology. With the continuous upgrading of hardware infrastructure and the increasingly mature technologies such as virtualization network, cloud manufacturers are also facing great challenges brought by various new technologies. From data center infrastructure construction to cloud platform system construction to product underlying technology reform, how to combine the latest technology trends with the changing needs of users to achieve further development? UCloud’s thoughts on these issues will be shared at the UCloud User conference and ‘Product & Technology Session’ of Think in Cloud 2018 in Shanghai on December 21.
Very simple products, very deep technology
We know that Jobs has been pursuing minimalism all his life. Minimalism emphasizes the perfection of simple product design, but behind it, it often requires enterprises to fully understand and deeply dig user needs. In this regard, UCloud has always pursued the belief that “user’s demand is the next product”. While meeting user’s business demand, UCloud has continuously polished its product form until presenting simple, direct and easy-to-use stable high availability cloud service to users. For example, the PERFORMANCE of the ULB is greatly improved after continuous upgrade and optimization, and multiple balancing algorithms and automatic disaster recovery (Dr) are implemented. The USER interface is increasingly simple, facilitating intelligent selection and improving resource utilization. In addition to ULB, UCloud has many examples of such product design.
If an enterprise wants to always walk in the forefront of the industry, it must master its own core technology and improve technical barriers. With the development of nearly 6 years, UCloud keeps up with the pace of new technologies to accelerate the iteration of new products and functions: 1000 cloud hosts can be created concurrently in 5 minutes, online hot patch migration of cloud host kernel, 13 times improvement of SSD cloud disk ultra-high performance and so on. When the functions and features of cloud computing products become more and more similar, how to create their own differentiated technology advantages as competitive cloud manufacturers? What technology is used to achieve the minimalist design of these new product features?
Next generation network
For the UCloud product line, virtual networking has always been a core component of IaaS products and has evolved many times to provide more reliable and faster networks for users without increasing their costs. The answer is to require technical teams to constantly adopt new technologies to meet multiple requirements for new features, forwarding capabilities, stability, and more.
Since the 1990s, the fourth generation of Internet (IPv4) has experienced rapid development with the help of several waves of the Internet. Until now, IPv4 resources are almost exhausted, service quality is difficult to guarantee and other constraints are prominent, and the sixth generation of Internet (IPv6) is gradually approaching the public view. UCloud has also started to switch some of its products to IPv6 in the cloud. During this process, because IPv6 and IPv4 are not directly compatible, how to ensure that the old services running on IPv4 and the new services switching to the IPv6 network can be connected? How to realize the evolution from IPv4 to IPv6 in the cloud platform?
As users’ requirements for improving network performance are increasing, 25 GBIT/s nics are becoming standard configurations. In order to meet the network performance under the peak traffic scenarios such as festival promotion, UCloud investigated and compared the mainstream intelligent network card scheme in the industry, and finally adopted the self-developed new intelligent network card scheme which can improve the network capacity by 4 times and reduce the delay by 3 times after it is applied to the cloud host. How is the new intelligent network card scheme implemented? UCloud stepped on what pit is how to break through technical means one by one?
In addition to the new intelligent network card solution, 25G networks also present a number of challenges for UCloud virtual switches. From the original SDN switch to the gateway cluster using DPDK technology, but there are still many problems. The UCloud network team developed a new generation of switching gateway, UXR, using Barefoot’s supported P4 programmable switches through continuous pre-testing. What is the advantage of P4 compared to other switch solutions? What is the implementation principle?
Next generation computing
The emergence of container technology and Serverless computing in recent years is reshaping the landscape of next-generation computing. Some say Serverless will become mainstream in the cloud computing industry, even surpassing container technology. However, with the rapid development of container choreography technology represented by Kubernetes, some people believe that container is the future of cloud computing.
Kubernetes aims to provide developers with a clean, application-oriented API that lets them forget the details of underlying server administration. The advent of Serverless allows developers to completely ignore these underlying servers. Since the successful use of Serverless for large-scale applications requires the development of orchestration systems, the integration of Kubernetes orchestration layer and Serverless may be an indispensable core technology for the next generation of computing.
UCloud has been promoting the development of container technology applications since 2015. In terms of availability and resource utilization, container technology is lighter and easier to implement dynamic migration and setup than traditional virtualization technology, especially in hybrid cloud deployment. In addition, container technology has also been used in UAI-Train(UCloud AI training platform), which is essentially a PaaS service that can automatically create running environment (Docker container) for training tasks. UCloud also developed a computing resource delivery platform based on Kubernetes. So how exactly are these products being modified to take advantage of new technology? What are the other applications of Kubernetes container technology?
What are the problems to be solved in global infrastructure development?
As the user dividend of the domestic Internet application market is gradually disappearing under the monopoly of giants, and under the influence of multiple factors such as the tightening of relevant regulatory system and the “Belt and Road” initiative, more and more Internet enterprises begin to go abroad to seek overseas user market. In order to help more enterprises lower the threshold of business “going overseas”, UCloud has successfully landed in many localized regions around the world, including Nigeria, Thailand, Brazil, India and Russia.
UCloud has accumulated rich experience in helping more enterprises to “go overseas” on the construction of data centers. Considering the basic information of data centers, reliability design, carrying capacity, bandwidth quality, supporting monitoring facilities and other aspects, it has become an absolute factor for users to choose. So, in the face of increasingly diversified and global business, what aspects of data center construction need to be fully considered?
It has been proved that users tend to give priority to local coverage with low latency. In addition to local access, they also need to consider the delay of global access. Large-scale anti-ddos attack capability cannot be ignored. Can the next generation of data centres solve these problems from the users themselves?
Many of the above mysteries will be revealed in the UCloud user conference and Technology special session of Think in Cloud 2018 in Shanghai on December 21. At that time, Yang Lei, vice President of UCloud, will bring in-depth analysis of cutting-edge technology topics such as minimalist product design concept, next generation network, next generation computing and global infrastructure construction. In addition, it will also share information about the new UCloud background system and the gray scale of Service Mesh.
What’s wrong with the numbers in the poster below? What perception of user value is conveyed? To know the mystery behind the numbers, please click on the TWO-DIMENSIONAL code in the picture to open the door of exploration.
