Official Guowei, the chief product of Huawei Cloud: No one has a crystal ball to see the future, how to break through the cloud?

[Abstract] current cloud development needs to be broken through is not a technical problem; how cloud vendors can really help enterprises to go to the cloud; what are the three key starting points for cloud product planning with constant changes; what is the significance of the ecology to the cloud What? Let's listen to the big tech guys and talk about the cloud story.

This article is shared from the Huawei Cloud Community " Huawei Cloud Chief Product Official Guowei: No one has a crystal ball to see the future, how to break through the cloud? ", author: HUAWEI CLOUD community selection.

There is a learning column in Huawei called 【Experts Lecture Hall】, and a video of a speech four years ago is particularly eye-catching. In the past few years, employees have searched and watched and left messages: "Insightful! Looking back at this speech now, in recent years, some controversies and detours in the cloud service field have actually been very clear by Teacher Fang."

With great curiosity, we opened the resume of the speech expert Fang Guowei.

He graduated from the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University. He was responsible for building the first cloud computing demonstration center of Microsoft China. He was also the first technical staff of Amazon AWS China. He was the first to promote the practice of cloud computing concepts, technology and business in China. One of them. During his decades of walking with the cloud, Fang Guowei was affectionately called the "cloud computing brother" in his team.

Today Fang Guowei holds the position of Chief Product Officer of Huawei Cloud. In this issue of HUAWEI CLOUD COMMUNITY "Cloud Sharing Characters · Big Clan Face-to-face", we have invited this tech celebrity, let us listen to him and talk about the cloud story.

1. The cloud that needs a breakthrough is not technology, but psychology and benefits

Once upon a time, some people questioned that cloud services are old wine in new bottles, and some people think it is the general trend. Ten years in Hedong and ten years in Hexi, while our lives have undergone earth-shaking changes, Yun has also quietly changed traditional industries. Facts have proved that the cloud era has swept irreversibly after all.

Fang Guowei is one of the witnesses and promoters. Since that particular year of 2008, he has plunged into this industry head-on. During the 13 years of ups and downs, he has always firmly believed that cloud computing is an inevitable product of economic laws and technological development to a certain stage, and is the direction of the development of the ICT industry. , Is a general trend, in which public cloud will dominate again.

In April this year, IDC released the "Global and China Public Cloud Service Market (2020) Tracking" report, showing that the overall global public cloud service market (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) in 2020 will reach US$312.42 billion, a year-on-year increase of 24.1%. The overall market size of public cloud services in China reached US$19.38 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49.7%, the highest growth rate among all regions in the world.

This is a behemoth with rapid growth and unlimited potential, but even so, many companies are still waiting and not daring to easily step into this technological river flowing through the future, thinking that the cloud of business is full of too much Many variables.

In an interview a few years ago, Fang Guowei once said this: "The most important thing for cloud computing to break through is not technology, but psychology and benefits." Now when it comes to this question, he gave the same answer.

The emergence of a new thing will inevitably move the existing interest structure. Many traditional enterprises have their own data centers, and internal teams are responsible for infrastructure operation and maintenance. Once the public cloud is adopted, the team's own interests will be lost, such as reduced workload or directly abolished. The resulting damage to the interests is an "invisible" obstacle to going to the cloud.

But looking at it from a different perspective, the redistribution of benefits can lead to better results. When traditional enterprises hand over the underlying IT infrastructure to professional cloud vendors, they can be separated from the high hardware maintenance costs. Let existing manpower concentrate on business innovation at the application layer, which is a long-term plan that has more advantages than disadvantages.

And psychologically, there have always been cognitive misunderstandings. "For example, many people are still skeptical about the security of public clouds and feel that they are not as comfortable as building their own data centers, but in most cases this perception is wrong."

Large public cloud vendors often have strong security teams to protect customer data and information security, and mature security compliance solutions. But for a single enterprise, the resources it invests in security are relatively limited. This is mainly a psychological problem, which needs time to resolve. Just like in the early stage of e-commerce development, buyers will worry that the payment will not be received. The guarantee payment system solves this problem in the later stage. Similarly, the psychological doubts of going to the cloud also need to do more technically, which is also something that cloud vendors will need to consider in depth in the later stage.

In the final analysis, for traditional enterprises, going to the cloud is a must to take advantage of the trend. Therefore, at the next key node in the development of cloud computing, how to enable these large traditional enterprises to go to the cloud in batches and with confidence is of the utmost importance.

2. The six key genes of HUAWEI CLOUD truly help traditional enterprises go to the cloud

"Cloud is essentially ToB service. This is exactly what Huawei is best at. From traditional carrier business to enterprise business, serving government and enterprise well is in our genes." Fang Guowei said that these experiences are precious and they can be without This is one of the ways that the seam is matched to the cloud of government and enterprise.

In the current public cloud market, HUAWEI CLOUD is neither an e-commerce company nor a pure Internet software company. Its business has the least conflicts with its customers and partners. This safe, neutral, and credible positioning is its Two advantages.

Third, the development direction of the cloud is the integration of software and hardware. There will be more and more dedicated hardware in the cloud. Cloud vendors also have more control over the construction of the underlying software and hardware. From the acceleration card to other hardware, Huawei’s original hardware innovation experience accumulated in the ICT industry can directly serve customers through the cloud platform.

"Partner cloud is our very unique model, builds the cloud with partners together, almost no other cloud vendors are doing it."

In the early years, Huawei has explored cooperation with customers to build private clouds, which is also the basis for becoming a partner cloud. Today, HUAWEI CLOUD can deploy the full-stack capabilities of the public cloud to customers and provide them with cloud services through online centralized O&M or localized O&M. This is an extension of Huawei Cloud's service capabilities in the client room.

Fang Guowei explained in detail that with HUAWEI CLOUD as the core, a cloud platform covering different scenarios will be established, radiating to partners, edge side, customer side and so on. Use Huawei Big Cloud to connect each partner cloud and edge cloud, and finally realize a distributed cloud alliance with a unified experience. It's like going on a business trip abroad. Although you are holding a mobile phone of a Chinese operator, the service is actually provided by the local operator. From the perspective of usage, it is completely imperceptible.

Another example is HUAWEI CLOUD’s proprietary cloud solution, which can physically isolate a dedicated resource pool in the public cloud, allowing computing and storage resources to be exclusively used by customers. These are innovative and optimized for specific customer scenarios, flexibly matching the organizational structure and business processes of government and enterprises, and using innovative technical means to achieve a cloud from the user's perspective, to better meet their needs, and to go to the cloud with confidence.

In addition, the ability to deploy global services and the ability to mobilize in collaboration with consumer clouds are unique to Huawei Cloud.

However, opportunities and challenges always coexist. When the Huawei Cloud model includes public clouds and partner clouds, the corresponding R&D and product management collaboration is a challenge. Fang Guowei is also thinking about how to achieve collaboration from a product perspective and give full play to ToB. Traditional advantages.

3. Everything starts from the demands of users, and the future can be seen without a crystal ball

One of Fang Guowei's very important work at Huawei is the planning of cloud products, which is both macroscopic and specific. Speaking of this "hard work", he said frankly, "No one has a crystal ball to see the future, but we may be able to make some trend judgments based on the demands of users."

Just like Bezos thinking about the development of e-commerce back then, he doesn't need to rack his brains to guess what changes will happen in the future, but to see what will remain the same, and what is unchanged here is what people want: more Product selection, faster delivery, and cheaper prices.

This concept also applies to cloud products. Fang Guowei believes that the development of cloud products is to satisfy:

1. From the perspective of product planning, solve the problem that large enterprises have to go to the cloud for their business;
2. People are inert, and cloud products should be designed to be more useful, such as writing less code and more automatic configuration;
3. Cheaper or better cost performance is an eternal proposition.

Such as the emergence of serverless and the popularity of low-code tools have verified these characteristics. Therefore, in the process of product planning, if you can firmly grasp these three points, you can also more flexibly adapt to the needs of customers in the cloud service market.

Last year, Huawei Cloud put forward the concept of Cloud Native 2.0 to the industry for the first time, which is also one of the key plans that Fang Guowei is pushing forward. It is slightly different from the CNCF’s definition of cloud native. He believes that the original meaning of the word refers to the application or service designed and built on the cloud platform from the beginning, that is, “born in the cloud, longer than the cloud”, here is based on Cloud platform is the use of products and services provided by the cloud platform. From this perspective, whether or not technologies such as containers and Kubernetes are used are not the key criteria for judging cloud native.

In an article on Huawei’s intranet, Fang Guowei further explained this concept: The cloud-native architecture, network, and hardware we are talking about are all designed and built for cloud scenarios or cloud environments, which distinguishes the previous enterprise IT scenarios from need. For example, traditional box-type firewall products are slightly weak in the cloud scenario, because the cloud platform requires higher scalability, and must have the ability to multi-tenancy, dynamically adjust configuration, and distributed deployment.

Therefore, Cloud Native 2.0 means that in addition to containers and Kubernetes that can provide more granular and flexible resource scheduling, there are also a large number of services on the cloud platform that can help users quickly build applications, such as services that help users manage and mine data intelligence. , To help build the service of the Internet of Everything. The current cloud native is to make full use of the various service capabilities on the cloud, and the cloud platform has reached the "application-centric" stage.

Standing without breaking, the fashionable concept is not only exclusive to Internet companies. Traditional companies can completely get rid of the burden of history and change to a cloud-native model based on actual conditions. Fang Guowei believes that through cloud native 2.0, more government and enterprises can become new cloud native enterprises, gradually shifting from the "ON Cloud" model to the "IN Cloud" model, completing the goal of digital transformation and transformation.

Based on cloud native 2.0, he emphasized that Huawei Cloud will increase its investment in serverless in the future, and will combine cloud native 2.0 with distributed cloud and edge cloud. From the very beginning, it will be completely based on the centralized cloud mode of resource concentration and move towards cloud-side collaboration. The distributed cloud model allows the cloud to better meet the needs of customers in terms of latency, network costs, and data security. At the 2021 Huawei Full Connect Conference (HC) at the end of September this year, Huawei Cloud will also release some related products around Cloud Native 2.0.

4. Another battlefield: ecology and developers

Talking about the future competition of cloud vendors, Fang Guowei opened his hands and smiled, but he was not very worried.

In the online open market competition, it is difficult to have a real monopoly. The products and services of various companies are purchased and used on the table. Perhaps some of them are early in the market, and they have captured the early traffic dividends. "But the cloud covers a wide range of products, and competition is often comprehensive rather than single point." several key points: 161483f8c50112 user experience, data security, compliance and governance, reliability and stability, and cost Control, service level, ecology (including partner ecology and developer ecology).

For example, large companies may be more sensitive to stability, while small companies pay more attention to cost control and whether there are automated services. Everyone's considerations are different. But the best cloud vendors, like the number one in the student era, basically have no shortcomings in disciplines, and have balanced and excellent development in all aspects.

It is also to examine the comprehensive competitiveness. It is difficult for breakthroughs in new technologies to bring about disruptive market changes. As Fang Guowei said, “Although a breakthrough in a single technology can help improve competitiveness, cloud is a new service method. The introduction of new technologies and applications will only enrich cloud services. The nature of the cloud model will not be Changes."

Among them, I have to mention ecological construction. Because after going to the cloud, in addition to consuming computing resources, more and more users will use cloud software services, including storage, database, IoT, AI, etc., behind these products are ordinary developers. Therefore, minimalist development tools and efficient and convenient development processes are also a battlefield for cloud vendors.

Fang Guowei bluntly said, “The most important thing for partners in the cloud is whether they can make money in this ecosystem.” Similarly, Huawei Cloud can migrate the experience system of the hardware ecosystem that was originally a ToB from offline to online. And do a good job of synergy and integration with the existing consumer cloud ecosystem.

"So, we will pay more attention to ecology and developers." will provide support and enablement services for some specific scenarios in specific industries, improve the efficiency of developers, and help them develop applications quickly.

Fang Guowei revealed that there will be some heavy releases during the HC period. For example, some traditional enterprises need to develop live broadcast apps. We will support the development of Internet applications of these traditional enterprises through mature products.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the surprise under the water, so stay tuned.

5. Good wind relies on strength, and the times create people, and people also make the times

There is a classic opening chapter in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities". This is the best era and the worst era. The former sentence applies to companies that embrace the cloud, and the latter sentence applies to companies that are too old to turn around.

But for developers, the cloud era is the best era. "The advancement of human society mainly depends on two things, one is energy and the other is information. The information age allows the value of information to be greatly displayed. I think that now and in the foreseeable future are the spring of technical personnel, we can produce Great value promotes social progress."

Fang Guowei's own experience is the best footnote. In the torrent of technology, he takes advantage of the trend to become a witness to the cloud and a key participant leader, walking along with the cause he loves.

So, how can developers, as individuals who promote cloud development, seize the opportunities of the times?

"Choose the right trend, choose a good track, and then you must have a skill, or the ability to pierce the sky with a single needle." If today's time and location are available, it depends on whether the skill can be fully utilized. At this point, Fang Guowei also talked about the three key capabilities of technicians in addition to technology:

first is to cultivate the ability to see problems from a business sense. must understand and accept that technology in an enterprise essentially serves business, and technology matches business, so the mentality must be correct. For example, a business is different from a school, because in a business, the company pays you to do technology, while in a school, you pay to do technology.

second is the ability to communicate. generally believes that strong communication skills means daily speaking, but in addition to oral expressions, writing emails, writing reports, and even giving speeches are all manifestations of communication skills. Bring out talents through products, and then express them through various communication channels.

third is empathy. is essentially the ability to empathize or empathize. It can help us deal with daily problems, better understand customer needs, and improve communication.

With the rapid development of the cloud for more than ten years, the industry has undergone rounds of reshuffles, ups and downs. Every individual in the technological wave, whether it is an individual or an enterprise, must step out of the comfort zone and dare to be self-conscious. Revolution, creating a second growth curve.

At the end of the interview, Fang Guowei humbly concluded, "I am very lucky to play my strengths in the wave of cloud computing and do what I like."

The times create people, and people also make the times.

Easter eggs

"Exercise is physical exercise, reading is brain exercise." Fang Guowei has been practicing fitness for more than 20 years, and his mental state and body management are very good in our opinion.

Regarding the hobby of reading, he explained: "Computers need to function: algorithms + data. The human brain is a biological, carbon-based computer, and some algorithms are innate (continued in our DNA). Some algorithms need to be constructed the day after tomorrow. Learning and thinking are the process of constructing this algorithm. I believe in the concept of lifelong learning, and reading is the cheapest and most convenient way of learning."

At the same time, I would like to recommend his recent book "Why We Sleep" UC Berkeley. "There is one thing that can improve your memory and increase your charm; keep you slim and reduce your appetite; protect you from cancer and dementia; prevent you from catching colds and colds; reduce your heart disease, myocardial infarction, and diabetes. Risk. It will make you feel happier, not depressed, and less nervous."

"Everyone knows that the body is 1, and the others are 0, but most people spend a lot of time on 0, spend very little on 1, and take pride in sleeping less. This book can change some of everyone’s misconceptions about sleep. Have a correct understanding.

I wish everyone a good health. "

Click to follow, and learn about Huawei Cloud's fresh technology for the first time~