In the early years of cloud computing, many did not think of it as new tech, instead considering it to be an economical way of delivering IT. However, after ten years of development, cloud computing is now a pillar that carries an assortment of advanced technologies. Vendors able to offer this category of tech demonstrate high technical strengths because the threshold is high.
At Huawei Connect 2018, CTO of HUAWEI CLOUD BU, Mr. Zhang Yuxin, shared his interpretations on the technical features of the Cloud 2.0 era and the unique technological offerings of Huawei’s cloud service brand.
Cloud No Longer Just About General-Purpose Hardware
Significant changes have taken place in industries and technologies in the Cloud 2.0 era.
From the perspective of development trends in cloud architecture, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud architectures will become the main choice for large- and medium-sized enterprises. According to a report from Gartner, 90% of organizations will use hybrid-cloud management infrastructures by 2020. Enterprises are even placing their production centers on the cloud with the new levels of assurance the tech is able to ensure. Key enterprise services are being cloudified, and enterprise applications are grafting in higher levels of intelligent utilities.
In this change, benchmark cloud computing technology of the Cloud 1.0 era needs to evolve for the Cloud 2.0 era.
In his speech, Zhang Yuxin pointed out that: "Cloud technologies in the Cloud 1.0 era are described as distributed, automated, large-scale, and elastic. In the Cloud 2.0 era, just having cloud is far from enough. The platforming must be able to support higher levels of reliability and security so enterprise can confidently place their core services on the cloud. At the same time, enterprise and Internet applications are becoming more intelligent. The cloud needs to support the new features while simplifying transformations and making the catalog more cost-effective."
Therefore, in the Cloud 2.0 era, the cloud computing offering will no longer be a contest over general-purpose hardware + software innovation. Instead, it needs to be further oriented towards vertical integrations and optimized designs, including hardware, and software. Cloud service providers able to innovate in hardware have the advantage in terms of end-to-end efficiency and collaboration.
HUAWEI CLOUD – Standing on the Shoulder's of Giants
At Huawei Connect 2018, HUAWEI CLOUD showcased a series of technological innovations to help smooth out digital transformations for organizations. The innovations are all geared to the Cloud 2.0 era and include everything from hardware for key enterprise services and AI optimization to intelligence-endowed cloud services including compute, storage, network, smart enterprise cloud application platforming, and a long list of others.
Zhang Yuxin pointed out the huge buildup of HUAWEI CLOUD in software and hardware has benefited from the 30+ years of technological accumulations derived from Huawei's expertise in serving carrier, enterprise, and consumer customers. This is what is meant by the expression that executives at Huawei are always saying: 'HUAWEI CLOUD, though new to the game, is standing on the shoulders of giants'.
Zhang Yuxin also mentioned that Huawei has achieved many exciting innovations in full-stack technology for the cloud data center, including hardware, data center management, basic cloud services, and application development platforms (including O&M platforms and tooling frameworks). Huawei has a large number of technical breakthroughs in the vertical axis of basic model algorithms for AI and domain-oriented modeling and algorithm application.
Since inception, HUAWEI CLOUD has been committed to technological innovation and released a series of industry-leading new products covering cloud security, DevOps, cloud container engine, microservice engine, service mesh, computing, cloud storage, network, cloud DR, and the full range of other services in the catalog. The cloud arm is always updating its offerings to ensure the products remain at the edge of technology.
HUAWEI CLOUD continuously integrates various advanced technologies accrued by Huawei over the past 30 years. Huawei continuously improves its capabilities and places all the advanced technologies into the cloud service model, now complete with AI utilities for the wide spectrum of use cases.
On October 11, 2018, Jia Yongli, General Manager of HUAWEI CLOUD BU EI Service Product Dept, announced that EI suite available on HUAWEI CLOUD now runs on the supercharged performance of the newly released AI. The High-Performance Computing H6 ECSs now come standard with 16 TOPS AI reasoning capabilities. For those requiring even higher levels of technological firepower, HUAWEI CLOUD also provides 512 TOPS computing services in AI-enhanced VMs and containers. In training scenarios, HUAWEI CLOUD provides bare-metal versions of VMs. A single node can provide a maximum of 2 PFLOPS of computing capability.
Jia Yongli added, "With this series of cloud services, HUAWEI CLOUD will enter the new AI era." The offerings in the EI suite will increase to 45 categories providing 142 functions with the improvements in basic computing capabilities, covering various application scenarios of AI. Senior data scientists, data engineers, entry-level IT engineers, and business personnel can all benefit from the affordability of the Inclusive AI strategy from Huawei.
By the end of Sept 2018, HUAWEI CLOUD had rolled out over 128 cloud services in 18 categories. Over 60 solutions, such as SAP on Cloud, HPC Cloud, IoT, and DevOps have been launched. Over 80 industry-specific solutions for such sectors as manufacturing, e-commerce, gaming, finance, and IoV have been launched. The cloud service brand also recently launched the IPv6 solution.
HUAWEI CLOUD booth at Huawei Connect 2018
Long-term Technological Innovation and Continuous Building Up of Strengths
Zhang Yuxin said innovations at HUAWEI CLOUD are driven by two main elements: customers and technologies.
Technological innovation is the core element of HUAWEI CLOUD and precisely what has fueled Huawei’s high-speed growth over the decades. Zhang Yuxin classifies Huawei's technological innovations into three types: innovation in basic technologies, long-term technological innovation, and customer-oriented innovation.
First, innovations in basic technologies are basically industry agnostic, including such general-purpose tech like operating systems, databases, virtualization, distributed storage, and the newer accumulation in big data and AI capabilities. Huawei already possessed these capabilities before it set up its HUAWEI CLOUD BU because Huawei also needed to have these capabilities to serve its existing customer bases.
Second, long-term technical innovation refers to technologies that may not have entered the production and R&D domains. Huawei calls it a "three-generation strategy" including application, development, and research phases. Zhang Yuxin commented, "In the market, products and services sold by Huawei are in the application phase. We don’t talk about some of the products we are developing. The research phase we keep even more secretive, many of the other departments might not even know what is coming next."
Huawei's investment in R&D is amongst the highest in the world. Since 2009, Huawei has invested more than CNY 400 billion in R&D. In 2017 alone, Huawei invested nearly CNY 90 billion in R&D. Mr. Zhang jokingly asked, "Where did all this investment go?" The technology on the market is just the tip of the iceberg; the part laying below the iceberg is much bigger, which is Huawei's preparation for the future.
Huawei has 80,000 R&D personnel located around the world. The company also has what it calls the "Noah's Ark Laboratory" that serves as the AI research center for Huawei Technologies, with teams spread around the world as well. The tech conglomerate has 16 research centers, 6 joint innovation centers, and 45 training centers and is highly engaged with research institutes, schools, and enterprises to innovate the tech that industry, education, and society need.
Mr. Zhang said it this way: "The norm for researching before product adoption is 3-5 years. In many cases, we are investing for 5-10 before we see the product actually make it to the market. Huawei dares to invest in the future. We are willing to make such bold moves and predict what the future needs. HUAWEI CLOUD BU stands on the shoulders of giants, benefiting from all this investment in its packaging of the accumulated tech into cloud services."
The third type is customer-oriented innovation, including some engineering solutions for specific use cases and service-oriented enabling technologies. In 2011, Huawei set up its enterprise business group. It has accumulated extensive expertise in major industries for several years now and that knowledge has gone into the corpus of the Huawei platforms.
Zhang further commented: "Many Internet customers have come to HUAWEI CLOUD. Why do they use the service brand? The performance of the computing instances powered on Intel Xeon Skylake CPU tops the industry, helping customers sail through peak traffic events while supercharging normal operation. This is also a sort of accumulation in experience from gearing solutions to customer requirements."
HUAWEI CLOUD BU also has many of its own impressive innovation capabilities. Zhang Yuxin commented "HUAWEI CLOUD runs two main planes on its backbone network: a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) private line network on the physical layer, and uses software-defined networking (SDN) technology to manage it all. It also uses SDN-based technologies to form a virtual WAN on the Internet, achieving dual-plane collaboration. For customers, in the unlikely event one of the planes fail, the other can be used as the emergency channel.
Huawei's huge R&D team, global R&D center layout, and continuous investment in basic technologies, customer-oriented technologies, and future-oriented technologies all contribute to the services advantages of the HUAWEI CLOUD brand. The comparatively new arm of the company continues to build up its storehouses and implement frequent iterations to ensure its tech capabilities remain at the forefront and that its products are able to maintain a leading position in the industry. Learn more about how the unique competitive advantages HUAWEI CLOUD can empower your organization in the Cloud 2.0 era.
