Exclusive interview with Tencent Cloud CTO Wang Huixing: Two decades of cloud technology revolution

The following article comes from InfoQ, the author InfoQ

After more than ten years of development, what is the underlying logic of the evolution of Tencent Cloud's technology? Will low code be the next frontier of cloud computing? What is the technological world facing developers in the next ten years?

In this issue, the C person is face to face, and we are fortunate to have Wang Huixing, Senior Vice President of Tencent Cloud and CTO of Tencent Cloud. He joined Tencent for seventeen years. From the important designer of the massive technical architecture of the back-end social platforms such as Tencent QQ and Qzone to today's CTO of Tencent Cloud, he has experienced too many technological changes in Tencent these years. Facing the above-mentioned industry focal issues, what is his understanding?

Ten years of turmoil, Tencent Cloud technology change history

Since Tencent launched its open strategy in 2010 and established its Cloud Platform Department in the same year, which is the prototype of Tencent Cloud, Tencent Cloud has been serving steadily for more than 10 years. During this period, the adjustment of Tencent's organizational structure on September 30, 2018 had the most far-reaching impact. Tencent once defined this adjustment as a future-oriented evolution, which is an iteration of active innovation and upgrades for the next 20 years. Naturally, the impact of this change has received strong attention from the outside world today.

From an industrial perspective, this change has allowed Tencent to officially shift its future strategic focus from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet. So far, more than 1,000 days have passed, and the wind has not blown for a long time.

From the Way of Mass to Growth on the Cloud

Tencent's accumulation in the consumer Internet level is obvious to all. Massive business cohorts have emerged, and there are hundreds of millions of applications represented by Qzone, Qzone, and Happy Farm.

Wang Huixing, who was in charge of the Qzone architecture design, experienced the explosive growth of storage very early. If the daily images generated in WeChat and QQ chats are included, Tencent may be the first company in China to achieve EB-level storage. The stable operation of WeChat and QQ over the years has benefited from Tencent’s accumulation of massive services in the PC era. Such a technical concept not only supports the breakthrough of Tencent’s numerous internal businesses from 0 to 1 to 100 million, but also contributes to Tencent’s PC Internet The development of the times provides a strong technical guarantee.

However, when Tencent was so happy to apply these experiences to the industry, it encountered various challenges.

First of all, the foundation of the massive service approach is that Tencent is equipped with strong R&D forces at the bottom and front end of the business. These R&D teams and Tencent Cloud product teams provide each other with reasonable design suggestions to ensure that Tencent’s business can run in small steps. Iterate quickly.

After returning to the industry, Tencent Cloud immediately felt the huge difference in the size of the technical teams of different companies, and many companies lacked a stable and large technical team to support them. At the same time, with the rise of the mobile Internet, companies have put forward higher demands for business innovation and R&D efficiency. Companies need a set of technology systems that adapt to the era of mobile Internet and cloud computing, and developers also need to rely on cloud infrastructure And basic services to accelerate business growth.

Therefore, when companies choose cloud vendors, they naturally put forward more demands on cloud vendors, and subconsciously ask whether Tencent is using the technology internally. They hope that the technology they use has experienced the polishing of Tencent's massive business.

"We must go back to the status quo of the industry, adjust according to the average R&D investment of the company and the feedback in the open source community, and try to get as close as possible. Only in this way can the products and services we make can better meet the needs of customers."

From the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet, changes are not limited to the strategic direction of the entire company. The overall technical concept behind Tencent Cloud is also quietly changing. The original "Massive Way" is gradually evolving to "growth on the cloud."

Therefore, after the 930 reform, Tencent launched the far-reaching "open source collaboration and self-developed cloud" strategy.

In terms of open source collaboration, because within Tencent, there are many applications with a huge single business volume like WeChat, and different business segments have their own R&D teams. These R&D teams have developed some and their own for different business scenarios. The ability of scene deep binding, but there may be insufficient versatility and generalization ability.

If you return to the essence of technology, not all businesses need a separate architecture for design. There may be 60% to 80% of similar requirements behind different businesses. Since there are similarities, open source collaboration can be used to reduce duplication of wheels. Tencent Cloud’s main idea for this is to concentrate technical forces to make the "single wheel" as good as possible, so that it can serve core businesses such as WeChat, QQ, and video accounts at the same time. At the same time, these technologies can also be used in the industry. Suitable for the needs of the industry.

At present, for core technology sectors such as AI, big data, audio and video, Tencent has set up a dedicated technical committee internally. It hopes internally that these technologies can serve its core businesses, and externally, it will cooperate with the world’s top technology communities to form Better participation and interaction mechanisms will help China's technology go global.

In the past three years, Tencent has organized and incubated a total of 117 open source collaborative teams, covering computing, storage, big data and other technical fields, involving core business sectors such as WeChat, QQ, and Tencent Cloud. The company's internal code open source rate Reach 85%; Externally, Tencent has also open sourced more than 130 open source projects, with a cumulative number of stars 380,000+, including cloud native, operating system, database, big data, AI and more and more self-developed core technologies are gradually open sourced to the outside world .

In terms of self-developed cloud migration, starting in 2019, Tencent started cloud migration, focusing on hosting cloud to consolidate cloud infrastructure capabilities; the following year, Tencent launched a cloud transformation to encourage business to be converted to self-built PaaS to the cloud. The BG container platform uses cloud native as the base to complete the transformation to the cloud; this year, vigorously develop cloud native. The data shows that in the three years since self-developed to go to the cloud, the total number of cores on Tencent Cloud has reached 45 million. The company has achieved a 21-year increment of 100% on the cloud, and 66% of the stock resources are already on the cloud.

"All the services on Tencent Cloud can only be better equipped to promote the industry to the cloud only through the first internal use and inspection, and the real mass business polishing within Tencent. This is the core concept passed by Tencent's self-developed cloud. One." Wang Huixing said.

localization of 161bb3153d04ef does not mean the closure of

"Closed domestic self-research will actually bring a lot of consumption to the industry, and localization should also pursue open source and openness."

However, if you want global developers to realize that Chinese technology is still very good, it must be proved by products. This task is undoubtedly arduous. Moreover, many technologies have formed de facto open source standards. For example, many excellent projects in the field of machine learning originate from North America. It is very challenging to make projects with similar and better functions in the country in the short term. Wang Huixing believes that developers can uphold Participate in the pragmatic and innovative consciousness first.

"Participating and continuously contributing code is not only an expression of technical responsibility and self-confidence, but also one of the main ways to achieve technological independence and control."

For example, in the field of KVM, as the underlying technology of cloud computing, Tencent Cloud insists on solving various challenges encountered by Tencent Cloud online through continuous innovation on the one hand and feeding back the output to the community, on the other hand, exploring new technologies in the field of cloud computing. Do a good job preview and accumulation of cutting-edge technologies, and continue to contribute to the KVM open source community. At present, Tencent Cloud has accumulated more than 200 historical contributions to the community, of which the cumulative "core breakthrough" contribution has reached 9 items, and it has entered the Chinese company with the highest contribution value for five consecutive years.

Wang Huixing also said that while domestic developers are participating in foreign open source communities, they must also look for opportunities to make breakthroughs.

In terms of databases, localization has a very large space and opportunities. Today's databases are mostly based on the architecture system constructed by the hardware of the 80s, because the database itself has a deep intrusion into the business, resulting in extremely high business stickiness. It is this stickiness that hinders the development of database technology, such as how to improve SQL There is huge room for improvement in analytical efficiency, how to better integrate with hardware technology, and how to better implement new storage media. It can be predicted that a new technical architecture will be born in the database field in the future.

Specific to the level of domestic database construction, Tencent Cloud hopes to make greater breakthroughs and investment in the compatibility of applications from the bottom to the top, especially the integration of software and hardware. Tencent Cloud will firmly continue to invest and deploy in these fields to promote domestic production. Chemical technology has emerged in the forefront of the world.

Global Cloud Technology Development Focus Observation

Since the development of cloud computing technology, the global market has begun to pay more attention to trends such as containers, microservices, serverless, and low-code. These technologies shield the underlying details and scheduling problems, allow developers to focus more on business logic and improve R&D efficiency, and are therefore popular among developers.

Serverless needs to be integrated with the company's existing R&D system

At the infrastructure level, the emergence of cloud platforms has helped us solve stability and shield some of the complexity, but in the complete development chain, front-end and back-end developers still need to communicate a lot to complete a project. The emergence of Serverless has greatly liberated the energy that developers spend on the underlying infrastructure level. By serverlessizing part of the work, we can further realize on-demand use and pay-as-you-go, reduce labor costs and development costs, and make the development level higher and higher. It's getting simpler.

At the same time, the emergence of Serverless will also promote the development of the domestic SaaS industry, which can be seen from the sharp increase in market value after Adobe's transformation. In China, large enterprises may prefer customization, but small and medium-sized enterprises are more concerned about how to run their own businesses due to their limited technical capabilities, and tend to use on-demand and pay-as-you-go models, thereby greatly reducing operating costs. With the emergence of Serverless, many originally complex functions are functionalized, and SaaS companies can innovate better.

At the serverless level, Tencent Cloud has already had a layout, and reached a global strategic cooperation with Serverless.com in the early stages of the development of the technology, and made many optimizations in aspects such as cold start of functions. "Mini Program Cloud Development" is the benchmark product of Tencent Cloud and WeChat cooperation. In the traditional development model, the front end of the applet corresponds to a back end, and the back end is connected to many other subsystems, such as database, storage, load balancing, network, disaster tolerance, etc. However, cloud development can greatly simplify the entire architecture. The page goes to the WeChat backend, and the WeChat backend uses a dedicated line to transfer user requests to the Tencent Cloud Base component (TCB for short). The database, storage, network, disaster recovery and other systems are connected to the back of the TCB. Therefore, engineers don’t need to consider complicated Back-end operations can be directly connected through TCB, making the development of small programs easier.

In order to better serve these developers, Tencent Cloud and WeChat have jointly upgraded the "Mini Program·Cloud Development" brand to "WeChat Cloud Development". Based on the development of the Mini Program, it will further support the development of the official account H5 and other developments. Scenarios to achieve full coverage of the WeChat ecosystem. This means that the combination of Tencent Cloud's technical capabilities and WeChat ecosystem will enter a new stage, and it also means that Tencent's strategy of cloud integration is overweight.

As it gradually penetrates into the industry, Tencent Cloud will continue to optimize the underlying capabilities of the technology and further reduce costs in the future. In the interview, Wang Huixing mentioned that for teams with a certain amount of R&D accumulation, they need to consider how to integrate with the existing R&D process system when entering Serverless. This does take some time. In addition, today the industry is not investing enough in the serverless level. There will be a lot of room for enhancement in the future. Tencent Cloud has considered serverlessizing services such as database and GPU computing power. Although virtualization has brought great improvements, Serverless will further optimize the entire process.

low-code "places of use" in traditional industries

With the development of a series of cloud computing technologies, the popularity of low code has continued to rise in the past four to five years.

Last year, Gartner predicted that by 2023, 50% of large and medium-sized enterprises will adopt low-code platforms as one of their strategic application platforms. By 2024, 65% of global applications will involve low-code development.

However, many people disagree with the prevalence of low-code. Some people think that low-code is a pseudo-demand and it is of no real use. Some people think that the cost of low-code platform changes is huge and cannot reduce costs and increase efficiency as expected. Others think this It is a through train for the rapid expansion of enterprise business...

"I think the low-code trend is right. It is in line with the law of the evolution of the entire technology. When the level of development becomes higher and higher, technologies like low-code that can make development easier will help promote business. Innovate and further reduce costs," said Wang Huixing.

It is precisely seeing the huge market demand and industry prospects for low-code development that Tencent Cloud has increased its layout in the field of low-code development. In January of this year, Tencent Cloud launched a public beta with the WeDa low-code platform, and it was officially launched in March.

Using the WeDa low-code platform, developers can quickly build multi-terminal applications such as small programs, H5, and Web through industrial templates, drag-and-drop components, and visual configuration. Even users with a low level of coding can quickly create a small program/H5/web page.

It is worth noting that the low-code default group has never been those companies with large R&D engineers. In the entire industry, more business teams do not have so much energy, manpower, and financial resources to invest in R&D. On the contrary, traditional enterprises need low-code platforms to help them solve digital management problems and improve human efficiency and data flow efficiency.

Wang Huixing believes that in these companies, the premise of low-code implementation comes from the sceneization and standardization of the entire business, because it is difficult to achieve reuse at the organizational and R&D level because of the excessively personalized requirements. Low code is of greater significance to companies with smaller technical teams. The simple development of companies on it can achieve application landing, which can not only save developer manpower, but also achieve further reuse at the software level."

Therefore, Tencent Cloud has put more low-code "places" into traditional fields. He said that the focus of Tencent Cloud's development and low-code is to move from small programs to more enterprises and to developers in the government field.

During the epidemic, the health code application has become an important carrier for people to communicate with each other efficiently.

"Tianfu Health Tong", which provides services to more than 80 million people in Sichuan Province, is built on the basis of micro-architecture. Through the identification, map component, QR code engine and other components and templates on the microtop, developers can easily build epidemic health code applets, epidemic prevention and control forms and other business systems.

At present, most of the traditional companies that Tencent Cloud has contacted believe that low-code will help companies build applications more conveniently. Business personnel can simply drag and drop a light application. Through staged training, IT personnel can independently build internal OA office applications in the enterprise to speed up digitalization. process.

For the vast number of developers, low-code can free them from tedious development work, so that they can devote more energy to more valuable bottom-level innovations.

"There are many underlying technologies that tend to evolve more and more to the upper level. From assembly to C to today's evolution to low code, it is based on the cloud programming model. As a developer, one must see this technology The overall social innovation cost savings brought about by changes; on the other hand, we should also stand on the application side to think about the underlying issues and development, and be willing to participate in the innovation and in-depth exploration of underlying technologies."

Wang Huixing hopes that serverless and low-code technologies can be used as cloud native 2.0 technologies to benefit millions of developers and provide them with more room for innovation.

Distributed cloud is the future of cloud computing

A cloud? Hybrid cloud? partly cloudy? Each method can find a prototype in the enterprise. The more clouds bring more complexity, what method can better solve the problems faced by the enterprise?

For various reasons such as data compliance and fear of being tied to a single supplier, many domestic enterprises have more than one cloud. Back to the multi-cloud itself, this is similar to today’s CDN bidding speed test. As long as it meets the standard, which side of the CDN speed is fast, the enterprise can automate the scheduling to which side, but it corresponds to the realization of computing power, storage and other technologies. Challenging.

In Wang Huixing's view, container technology objectively brings huge possibilities for the transferability of computing power. Tencent Cloud is already discussing with Didi to jointly build such a container technology to achieve smooth scheduling similar to CDN. At the level of private cloud construction, domestic companies can easily ignore the comprehensive operation and operation and maintenance costs of private clouds. Tencent Cloud is also building with some companies, hoping to export the experience of these companies in private cloud operations, in order to improve the industry. Generate value.

In addition, Tencent has always advocated not relying entirely on infrastructure. Enterprises need to consider the problems that infrastructure may encounter under certain extreme conditions. At this time, the disaster tolerance of the business becomes very important. Today, the computing engines of different business units within Tencent have basically been containerized. Tencent Cloud also hopes to unify container standards with the industry so that users can more easily implement cross-cloud deployment.

It is worth mentioning that, in response to the pain points of hybrid cloud hybridization, Tencent Cloud also officially announced its own distributed cloud strategy and released a cloud-native operating system. This strategy aims to provide users in multi-cloud/hybrid Provide consistent product services and experience in cloud scenarios. Through centralized management and control, cloud resources and business applications located in different locations can be managed uniformly, helping users to obtain required cloud resources and cloud services at any location, making the cloud ubiquitous.

Distributed cloud not only extends the scope of the cloud, but also retains the advantages of the cloud, allowing enterprises to enjoy the same services as the public cloud locally or at the edge.

next ten years, the era of true interconnection

Today, the changes that cloud brings to society are obvious. Thinking about the next ten years, what kind of technology will change the world? Tencent believes that Quanzheng Internet technology may define the next decade.

The technological prototype of the era of true interconnection is already in

What kind of world is True Internet?

Wang Huixing said that the current live broadcast and cloud games can be regarded as simple prototypes of this world, but it takes a long time to explore in order to achieve the ideal true Internet age. Tencent Cloud is planning to focus on the technology related to the true Internet. And input.

Specifically in terms of computing power, Tencent Cloud is based on self-developed chips and server hardware, with the help of the Aochi cloud native operating system, Aochi, to build ubiquitous, accessible cloud services, and consolidate the foundation of a truly interconnected world. Aochi is currently the industry's only cloud-native operating system that supports mixed scheduling of servers, containers, and functions. A single cluster supports 100,000-level servers and a million-level container scale. The number of managed CPU cores exceeds 100 million.

At the level of real-time analysis, the face of True Interconnection will bring a new round of data explosion. In response to the data requirements of different business scenarios, Tencent Cloud has launched the first object storage COS that can accommodate hundreds of exabytes in terms of massive data storage. For low-latency and high-throughput data access, the first 10-microsecond ultra-fast cloud hard drive CBS was launched, and a file storage service that exceeded 100GB throughput; Tencent Cloud’s high-performance database can support 10P storage space, stand-alone QPS reaches more than 100 million per second. Through the integration and development of storage, database, and big data technologies on the cloud, Tencent Cloud has achieved the industry's number one real-time calculation per day, exceeding 200 trillion.

In addition, data transmission in the era of true interconnection is bound to further break the constraints of time and space, and achieve online interaction closer to face-to-face experience. In related technical fields, Tencent Cloud has also achieved a number of industry firsts.

For example, in order to transmit video more efficiently, Tencent Cloud has leading video compression technology. In this year's MSU Video Codec Competition, Tencent Cloud achieved the best results in all indicators on multiple mainstream tracks. Based on this technical capability, the compression rate of Tencent Mingmo's ultra-fast HD solution has increased by 50%.

On the user side, in order to better bring immersive effects, Tencent Cloud real-time cloud rendering is the first to support rendering 144 frames of 8K ultra-high-definition video streams in one second. In order to allow more users to participate in online interaction in real time, Tencent Cloud Real-time Audio and Video (TRTC) single cluster currently supports 10 million interactive users online at the same time.

Wang Huixing said that the basic technology prototypes for realizing the era of true interconnection are all available, but application-side innovation and continuous evolution of underlying technologies still have a long way to go.

Technological development should not only focus on the immediate business

For the future world, the value carried by technology should not only be limited to the business world, but should also focus on greater propositions such as environment and environmental protection.

In 2021, "carbon peak" and "carbon neutral" became buzzwords. In addition to policy promotion, the reasons also show that the consciousness of domestic technology companies is actively changing.

During the interview, Wang Huixing mentioned that Tencent’s concept of “promoting sustainable social value innovation” fits well with its carbon neutral strategy. In this regard, technology companies can do a lot of things, such as through AI and cloud computing technology. Promote energy conservation and emission reduction, reduce the overall energy consumption of the data center, and promote the gradual evolution of material physics in the direction of less environmental pollution and stronger performance.

He said that as a cloud vendor, Tencent Cloud hopes to do things that are beneficial to society, people's livelihood, and economic development based on its own technological advantages. It is understood that Tencent Cloud has made a series of key investments in carbon neutrality strategy, energy saving and emission reduction, and received positive feedback.

written at the end

As the person in charge of Tencent Cloud Technology, talking about the future of cloud computing technology, Wang Huixing said: "As a cloud service provider, the best state of the changes in the underlying technology is not to disturb users. Cloud technology should stand quietly in the future. At the lowest level, it safely and stably supports customer business innovation.

"The mission of an engineer is to leave the complexity to himself." From the architect of QQ to the CTO of Tencent Cloud, Wang Huixing has witnessed several changes in cloud computing and other technologies in 17 years, but he believes that no matter how the trend changes, Developers should not change their down-to-earth nature.

"Only when developers go deep into the industry and into the scene can they make the technology better and better and become a solid supporter behind the operation of the world."

The growth rings of the times are rolling forward. From the mobile Internet to the coming era of true interconnection, it is not only the transformation of application interaction methods, but also the process of technological subversion and subversion.

Maybe wait until the day when the change really comes, and then think back to the storm that the mobile Internet has set off in the past, what kind of emotion will the thousands of developers who have experienced it?