The quasi-unicorn "Zhuyun Technology" in the observable field completed a new round of financing of 200 million yuan

Recently, Zhuyun Technology announced the completion of a new round of financing of 200 million yuan. This round of financing was led by Huaye Tiancheng, followed by Shenzhen Venture Capital and Yunjiu Capital.

According to CEO Jiang Shuomiao, after the completion of this financing, Zhuyun Technology will fully carry out a new era of business layout centered on observation cloud products. The previous cooperation business with Alibaba Cloud will be undertaken by its wholly-owned subsidiary.

In the past ten years, more and more enterprises have released a huge demand for "cloud" in the process of digitization, allowing cloud computing enterprises to grow rapidly in China, and the content and management mode of IT operation and maintenance have also changed from traditional concerns. The "three-piece set" of server, storage, and network has been upgraded to complex needs such as public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and even IBM minicomputers. When there is a fault such as a response delay in the business, it may bring thousands of associated warnings, and the query link will become extremely cumbersome, and it cannot be solved by simply adding manpower.

To this end, "making the system observable" has become the focus of attention in the global technology circle. Who defines whether the system in the cloud era is observable has also become a topic of discussion among "big bulls" in the current global technology circle.

Zhuyun Technology's observation cloud products can uniformly meet the monitoring needs of enterprises in cloud, cloud native, application and business. It has 200+ technology stack support, unlimited data sources, and monitors data in actual business scenarios to realize data monitoring. Real-time acquisition, monitoring, viewing and analysis, and "on-site recovery of problems".

It is understood that the observation cloud reduces the difficulty of building observability for customers. At the same time, customers no longer need to build hardware resources or cloud resources for observability, which greatly reduces the overall cost of business observability.

Stable business, why is it not "sweet"?

When Zhuyun Technology was established in 2013, it was the barbaric growth period of domestic cloud computing companies.

In the first three years, the company took Alibaba Cloud as the base to provide enterprises with technical services such as cloud computing framework consulting, implementation, and operation and maintenance, and established a good cooperative relationship with Alibaba Cloud; it has launched a new service model of Solution as Service. , that is, to help software vendors complete deployment, testing, and delivery on Alibaba Cloud. As of 2018, the company has accumulated rich technical service experience in the field of public cloud services, ranging from cloud basic components to the performance and failure points of various software stacks. In the following few years, although the company's business and company scale have been further grown and expanded, the outside world has always stayed in the cognition of "residence in the cloud is only for cloud services", which made CEO Jiang Shuomiao feel that "it's not good." ".

"I often think about the growth point and value of the business. In addition to helping the public cloud optimize more products, as a service provider, we should also think more about the needs from the user's standpoint. For example, the operation and maintenance engineers of the enterprise, find the system in the system. 'Where is the problem' is only a passive solution to the problem, and they need to find out 'why the problem', in order to free themselves from the tedious and time-consuming work, and to better improve the system stability." Jiang Shuomiao said.

In order to break this long-term accumulation of cloud-based thinking, since 2018, Jiang Shuomiao led the team to start a four-year road of independent research and development of the observation cloud. Observation Cloud was born in the context of the business strategic transformation of Zhuyun Technology.

Looking back, Jiang Shuomiao admitted that this was a bold and "impulsive" decision, because during the research and development process, he found that he greatly underestimated the difficulty of achieving observability system monitoring.

In terms of data storage, it is very difficult to store a large number of different types of data in the same data structure and realize the call. It is necessary to overturn the entire storage structure. The observation cloud is realized through the self-developed query language DQL and the data processing center KODO. The integration of the data layer, that is, the use of only one database language to issue instructions. It greatly reduces the difficulty of implementation and deployment of customer observability, and improves the observable construction speed and monitoring effect of business systems.

On the other hand, as the complexity of the application system increases, the deployment form changes from the traditional IDC to the cloud, which increases the number of ports for capturing information. For example, personal mobile phones will also be one of the ports that need to be acquired. Observation Cloud uses the One Agent data collection technology to capture all port data through one client, which greatly reduces the difficulty and effort required for enterprises to build an observability system.

Regarding the self-research and innovation road of observation cloud products, Jiang Shuomiao said: "Only by establishing the relationship between data can we ensure that the collected data can reflect the real-time status of the system, which is as important as unifying weights and measures. We insist on not doing any The packaging of open source products means that it takes a lot of time to implement in the early stage.”

Financing boosts the influence of the observation cloud industry

Take Datadog, the most well-known infrastructure management and application performance observation tool, as an example. It has achieved a market value of over $56 billion in ten years and is still maintaining strong growth rates. Since 2017, Datadog has successively launched multiple monitoring tools for emergency management, log analysis, user monitoring, security monitoring operation and maintenance, and gradually formed a set of ITOM monitoring and analysis product system.

The development path of Datadog is also recognized and expected by Jiang Shuomiao.

Domestic cloud development methods and application environments are very different from international ones, which also makes domestic customers need local observable solution providers with localization, fast iteration speed, and timely service response. However, the small probability of failure is difficult to highlight the value of third-party monitoring tools and services, resulting in insufficient attention of most enterprises.

How to do a good job of standardization and scalability of products and truly use them for customers is a necessity for players to consider in the cloud era.

In Jiang Shuomiao's view, Observation Cloud does not solve a single digital problem, but helps R&D teams and engineers improve code quality from the underlying concept, thereby improving system reliability and maximizing ease of use. experience.

Observation Cloud not only helps customers save a lot of test time in open source selection, but also avoids falling into the "doll" work mode of "developing a tool to solve a problem, and then developing a tool to maintain the previous tool", allowing enterprises to put more Put more energy into the core business. At the same time, after mastering the standardization function of the observation cloud, engineers can also use it as a database, and use Python language for secondary development according to the company's actual business scenarios, so as to meet the needs of building data-driven, data analysis, and business analysis-based systems. More possibilities to improve operational SLAs and overall problem location efficiency

In terms of commercialization, Observation Cloud adopts the business model of "pay-as-you-go, on-demand delivery". From the perspective of the actual operation and development of the enterprise, enterprises or personal projects with a small amount of data can use the free version.

In terms of commercialization, Observation Cloud adopts the business model of "pay-as-you-go, on-demand delivery". From the perspective of the actual operation and development of the enterprise, enterprises or personal projects with a small amount of data can use the free version.

"I don't think that the unified real-time monitoring product with observability is not well promoted in China because the market is not mature enough. More likely, the product itself is not easy to use and the adaptability is not high. Just like PS in the design world, I I believe that an excellent development team will definitely pay attention to user experience, and these high-level teams and engineers are the target customers for the primary service of Observation Cloud." Jiang Shuomiao said.

At present, the observation cloud has managed thousands of servers, with a daily data volume of several terabytes, and it is still in the promotion stage. This financing will help the company to maintain cooperation with Alibaba Cloud and other leading cloud manufacturers, expand Amazon, Tencent, etc. Cooperation with pan-Internet customers. Regarding future development, Jiang Shuomiao said that the goal for next year is to achieve 50,000 management objects. Although the number of public clouds that have exceeded 10 million users is far from the same, he hopes that the observation cloud will be more stable and focus on serving excellent R&D teams. Create a product with deep industry influence.

Ren Jianjun, Executive Director of Huaye Tiancheng, believes: "Scientific and technological innovation is a process of accumulation and development. Zhuyun has been deeply involved in the field of cloud computing for many years. The core product Observation Cloud has condensed the company's years of cloud service full-stack experience and R&D efforts, allowing customers to focus on the market business layer. Design and development, cloud-based full-stack system observability, will make substantial contributions to the improvement of business operation SLA in the cloud-native era."