Alibaba Cloud and VMware jointly build a cloud-native IoT ecosystem and gather open source communities to create field standards

About On May 29th, the "2021 Alibaba Cloud Developer Conference" was held at the Beijing International Convention Center. At the "Cloud Native Technology and Best Practices" forum site of this conference, Yi Li, head of Alibaba Cloud Container Service, and Lu Guang, R&D Director of VMware China R&D Center, jointly announced that the two parties have reached a technical strategic cooperation in the field of "cloud native edge computing". I hope that in the future, relying on the power of the open source community, accelerate the construction of the edge cloud native ecosystem, jointly promote the cloud edge integration process, and help more enterprises fully embrace the transformation and upgrading of digital intelligence.

Source | Alibaba Cloud Native Public
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On May 29, the "2021 Alibaba Cloud Developer Conference" was held at the Beijing International Convention Center. At the "Cloud Native Technology and Best Practices" forum site of this conference, Yi Li, head of Alibaba Cloud Container Service, and Lu Guang, R&D Director of VMware China R&D Center, jointly announced that the two parties have reached a technical strategic cooperation in the field of "cloud native edge computing". I hope that in the future, relying on the power of the open source community, accelerate the construction of the edge cloud native ecosystem, jointly promote the cloud edge integration process, and help more enterprises fully embrace the transformation and upgrading of digital intelligence.

Left 1: Lu Guang, R&D Director of VMware China R&D Center​
Right 1: Yi Li, head of Alibaba Cloud Container Service
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With the rapid development of 5G, IoT, AI and other technologies, companies are actively exploring how to make better use of new technologies to innovate applications and expand business boundaries. The rapid increase in the number of smart terminal devices has enabled edge computing technology to undergo extremely rapid evolution in the past few years. At the same time, it has become a new trend to sink the capabilities of cloud computing to the edge and equipment sides, and to conduct unified delivery, operation and maintenance, and control through the center.
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Yi Li, Head of Alibaba Cloud Container Service

Edge cloud native is increasingly being widely used in various industries such as automobiles, agriculture, energy, and transportation. The combination with the cloud-native model enables edge computing to combine the capabilities of the cloud to the greatest extent, ensuring that the business has a consistent operation and maintenance experience, better isolation and security on the edge and on the cloud. Further expand the application scope of edge computing.
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OpenYurt + EdgeX: Building an ecosystem together to create a zero-intrusive cloud-side-end integrated platform

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As an important cornerstone of cloud native technology, Kubernetes has gradually become a new interactive interface between users and cloud computing. Its powerful container orchestration and scheduling capabilities are widely used in large-scale application management, multi-cloud hybrid cloud support and other scenarios. However, management edge applications often need to solve more problems, such as edge resources scattered in different regions, cloud-side network connections are unreliable, cloud-side-side operation and maintenance coordination is difficult, and support for heterogeneous resources is difficult. All these make it extremely challenging to use Kubernetes directly in edge scenarios.

Alibaba Cloud open source project OpenYurt and the open source project EdgeX Foundry jointly initiated by VMware and maintained by its Chinese community have launched in-depth cooperation, which will help enterprises and edge business developers to easily build a cloud-side-end integration without any modification of K8s. Collaborative IT architecture. As a "plug and play" open source IoT Edge platform, EdgeX Foundry (EdgeX) supports devices from different manufacturers and using different protocols. At the same time, OpenYurt can extend Kubernetes to edge scenarios through native plug-ins, and supports all upstream Kubernetes features.
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1. OpenYurt

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OpenYurt became the CNCF Sandbox project of the Cloud Native Foundation in September 2020, and was officially open sourced by Alibaba Cloud in May 2020. It is also the core framework of Alibaba Cloud's public cloud service ACK@Edge. Adhering to the industry’s first "zero-intrusive cloud-side integration" design concept, OpenYurt has implemented a complete set of edge cloud native solutions based on native Kubernetes, for such things as edge autonomy, efficient operation and maintenance channels, edge unitized management, and edge traffic topology management. Security container, edge Serverless/FaaS, heterogeneous resource support and other capabilities help users solve the problems of large-scale application delivery, operation and maintenance, management and control on massive edge and end resources, and provide central service sinking channels to realize and edge computing Seamless connection of applications.
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Huang Yuqi, Alibaba Cloud Senior Technical Expert & OpenYurt Community Co-Founder

As the core framework of the public cloud service ACK@Edge, OpenYurt has been verified to be able to achieve full network coverage and local coverage in all scenarios, such as CDN, audio and video live broadcast, Internet of Things, logistics, industrial brain, and cities. Brain, etc.; locally covered application scenarios and cases such as Alibaba Cloud LinkEdge, Youku, Hema, AIBox, Yintai Mall, etc., can greatly optimize edge application R&D efficiency, response time and R&D efficiency.
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2. EdgeX Foundry

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EdgeX Foundry is a vendor-neutral open source project operated by the Linux Foundation, which aims to create a public and open framework for edge computing of the Internet of Things. The core of the project is an interoperability framework established based on a reference software platform completely unrelated to hardware and operating systems, enabling a plug-and-play component ecosystem, unifying the market, and accelerating the deployment of IoT solutions.

EdgeX Foundry enables interested parties to collaborate freely in an open and interoperable IoT solution, whether they use public standards or private solutions. Edgex Foundry is operated by LF Edge, with more than 60 global companies participating and more than 150 engineers contributing code. The EdgeX China project was established at the end of 2019. It is responsible for operating the technology promotion in China and attracting more code contributions. VMware is one of the main maintenance units of the EdgeX China project.

Jia Yixing, Senior Chief Engineer, VMware CTO Office
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OpenYurt community Co-Founder & Maintainer, Alibaba Cloud senior technical expert Huang Yuqi introduced and VMware CTO office senior director engineer Jia Yixing introduced in this conference sharing, OpenYurt community and EdgeX Foundry community will be in-depth in the fields of edge computing, device management, and cloud native Cooperation, in the OpenYurt community IoT SIG (Special Interest Group), jointly responsible for:

1. Based on OpenYurt +EdgexFoundry's combination of edge cloud native landing practice and other case mining, it provides more enterprises and developers with experience guidance for reference.
2. Further promote EdgexFoundry's support for the cloud-native field, and Openyurt's landing in the IoT field, and jointly create a cloud-native IoT field standard.
3. Relying on the OpenYurt +Edgexfoundry community, we will develop technology co-construction with the goal of providing a consistent cloud-native IoT user experience, walk with the community, and expand the new boundary of cloud-native.

Through the above cooperation, I hope that in the future, users who have already used EdgexFoundry and rely heavily on Kubernetes container orchestration will provide a consistent user experience based on OpenYurt + Edgexfoundry, and effectively solve user needs in edge scenarios.
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Lu Guang, Joint Maintainer of EdgeX Foundry Chinese Community,
R&D Director of VMware China R&D Center

Gavin Lu, the co-maintainer of the Chinese community of EdgeX Foundry and R&D Director of VMware China R&D Center, said: “EdgeX Foundry provides a unified application framework for edge/IoT scenarios, while OpenYurt is based on Kubernetes API to achieve unified management from the cloud side. Lightweight extension of the edge-side application life cycle. Deep integration of EdgeX Foundry and OpenYurt in Kubernetes native API mode can well realize cloud-side collaboration under a unified API, and cloud-based operation and maintenance of edge/IoT scenarios based on Kubernetes Long-term goals."

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