[2021 Cloud Edge Collaboration Conference] Alibaba Cloud Zhou Zhe talks about the innovative development and scenario practice of edge cloud infrastructure

Introduction to On June 4, the 2021 Cloud Edge Collaboration Conference with the theme of "Opening a New Era of Distributed Cloud" was held in Beijing. This conference was hosted by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Alibaba Cloud Edge Cloud Computing Senior Technical Expert Zhou Zhe was invited to participate in the conference and shared Alibaba Cloud’s exploration of edge cloud computing, introduced the interactive forms of the main edge cloud products, and how to evolve in the process of cloud infrastructure upgrades, and offered to enterprise customers The best business experience.

On June 4, the 2021 Cloud Edge Collaboration Conference with the theme of "Opening a New Era of Distributed Cloud" was held in Beijing. This conference was hosted by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Alibaba Cloud Edge Cloud Computing Senior Technical Expert Zhou Zhe was invited to participate in the conference and shared Alibaba Cloud’s exploration of edge cloud computing, introduced the interactive forms of the main edge cloud products, and how to evolve in the process of cloud infrastructure upgrades, and offered to enterprise customers The best business experience.

With the acceleration of the construction of new infrastructure, the acceleration of digital transformation has become the consensus of the whole industry. The 5G network's enhancement of mobile broadband, massive terminal interconnection, and demand for high-reliability and low-latency connections will make the value of edge cloud increasingly prominent.
Cloud Infrastructure Upgrade

After 12 years of development, Alibaba Cloud has evolved in multiple layers of cloud computing technology and rich forms. By creating an independent research and development Feitian cloud computing operating system, it provides multiple forms of services for customer scenarios in different industries, namely the central region and the local region. , Edge cloud nodes and on-site computing nodes, allowing customers to share all products on multiple forms of clouds.
Edge cloud is a distributed cloud composed of large-scale geographically dispersed edge cloud nodes that cooperate with each other. It has the characteristics of remote management and control, security and credibility, and standard ease of use.

Long-term deep plowing of the edge cloud field

Alibaba Cloud Edge Cloud Node is a product and technology evolution based on the strong node network of Alibaba Cloud CDN and long-term technology accumulation.
As a leading domestic CDN service provider, Alibaba Cloud has a deep experience in technologies such as intelligent scheduling, topology perception, fault escape, distributed management and control, and automated installation operation and maintenance configuration, combined with the miniaturization and integration of Alibaba Cloud Feitian operating system The computing power and the multi-point collaboration capability of a powerful network realize the evolution of product form from CDN to edge cloud.
Behind the change in product form is the change in customer needs. The enterprise application on the cloud generates new business scenarios and a large amount of data. There are higher requirements for the response speed of cloud access delay, which means that more information needs to be provided on the edge side close to the user. More computing power needs. As scenarios change and technology 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, corresponding resource isolation can be carried out, whether it is a 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. The CDN content distribution system includes static page acceleration, streaming media caching and accelerated live broadcast, on-demand acceleration, dynamic acceleration for dynamic content acceleration, and security acceleration products that provide content security and network security; the edge computing system includes provision at the edge Computing virtualization edge cloud nodes, computing power offloading and edge caching of video images, view computing products, and other edge applications.
At the same time, Alibaba Cloud has 2800+ edge cloud nodes all over the world to ensure that customer business can reach global users. Through the comprehensive cloudification of CDN, CDN nodes are upgraded to edge cloud nodes, and customers can enjoy more edge computing services when using original CDN resources.
Cloud Edge Cloud Node Service Product Matrix

When talking about the product matrix of edge cloud, Zhou Zhe said: At the IaaS level, there is a standard edge cloud node service ENS, which is a small distributed cloud node service. The ENS base of the 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 if using a unified operating system. At present, Alibaba Cloud edge cloud node services have built many application scenario products, including CDN product systems, cloud communication scenarios, view computing scenarios, cloud games, and innovative scenarios built with partners.
The nature of the Alibaba Cloud edge cloud node provides basic computing, storage, and network capabilities at the edge. Both deployment scale and application scenarios are very different from the public cloud center Region. The edge cloud development space in the future is huge and needs to be based on more industry understanding and Only by cognition can we create product solutions that fit users.
Rich edge cloud product forms to match the needs of different scenarios

The product services that Aliyun edge cloud nodes can provide externally include public cloud-based one-stop services and "software + hardware" overall delivery services.
One-stop service based on public cloud is an edge cloud node product service that customers can directly obtain through Alibaba Cloud's official website console, which is constructed and operated by Alibaba, and provides one-stop solutions through cloud technology;
The "software + hardware" overall delivery service-edge cloud connection node can help enterprise customers quickly build their local infrastructure, carry out business innovation, market expansion and business exploration based on edge cloud, and help customers' business transformation.
Therefore, regardless of the product and service model, Alibaba Cloud always provides customers with consistent product application services depending on the actual business needs of customers.
Edge Cloud Node Service Technical Features

The technical characteristics of the Alibaba Cloud edge cloud node service are divided into two layers: one is the technical reserve on the hardware system, and the other is the technical reserve on the software system.
There are multiple heterogeneous resource scenarios in the deployment of edge cloud nodes, which requires the compatibility and management of all heterogeneous hardware. Alibaba Cloud Edge Cloud nodes not only support fully self-developed hardware systems, such as hyper-converged gateways and hyper-converged servers, but also support third-party servers that manage standards.
At the same time, combined with the network scenario requirements of edge cloud deployment, a single edge cloud node may not necessarily meet the high reliability requirements. The scenario that the edge cloud has to face can have a certain degree of disaster tolerance and a certain tolerance for nodes, and the deployment of edge cloud nodes can be completed by ensuring a certain degree of availability. In the end, customer-oriented availability delivery needs to be coordinated through the network, scheduling capabilities, and upper-level management and control.
In the software system, the Alibaba Cloud Edge Cloud Node Service supports multi-point coordination and integrated cloud-network scheduling and management. In the Cloudlet node system, it supports multi-function integration, including fusion computing, VM and container integration, storage integration, and Cloudlet includes security capabilities.
At the same time, it also supports millions of nodes, tens of millions of machines, as well as edge cloud miniaturization node design, which are all facing the needs of complex networks and widely distributed coverage. Master's management and control system can complete the corresponding coordination of such large-scale heterogeneous resources, and can provide unified standard services.
The uppermost BOSS system can be used in the overall delivery service scenario of "software + hardware".
Cloud-network integration technology application

Zhou Zhe emphasized that cloud-network integration is a very important technical point of edge cloud. The integration of cloud and network is mainly manifested in: first, the requirements for location, the edge cloud service itself is insensitive to location, although the customer scenario has strong location requirements, it must have location attributes; the second is the collaboration between nodes It is completely web-based. At the same time, the edge cloud also carries the MEC node with the operator at the level, as well as the relationship between the central region and the local region. This kind of undertaking relationship, data flow direction, and routing of application paths are all realized through cloud-network integrated technology. A single node in the network can be considered untrustworthy or can be offline in a short time. This requires the integrated scheduling capability of the cloud and network to ensure high availability of edge cloud node services.
Relying on mature SDN technology on the edge cloud, it provides high-availability collaboration and cloud-native networks. Cloud native is a very important technical direction that promotes more layered development of current cloud computing. It is precisely because of the rise of cloud-native technology and more and more people who have begun to evolve their past software, systems, or platforms to cloud-native methods, the use of resources has begun to change, and it can be split. With stateful and stateless services, you can also split your own things that require strong delay and terminal computing power or edge computing power. Collaborative high availability is based on SDN. Whether it is on-site node access or edge cloud node access, the entire data flow can be seamlessly completed on the network.

Facing future technological evolution

Facing the future, Alibaba Cloud edge cloud node services will continue to develop in the direction of distributed deployment, node autonomy and collaboration, and miniaturized computing, and provide stable, reliable, and secure services to industry customers.
At the end of the speech, Zhou Zhe expressed his vision for the future: Alibaba Cloud hopes to work with industry chain partners to jointly build an edge cloud application ecosystem through the deep integration of products, technologies, and resources, so that more innovative and valuable Enterprise applications are deployed and run on edge cloud nodes to promote the development of the edge cloud industry.

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