HUAWEI CLOUD Comes to the Fore at KubeCon 2018
May 16, 2018
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, the world's top container summit, hosted leading cloud computing enterprises and technical experts at Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss the present and future of container technologies. Huawei, one of China's early investors in cloud computing research, has seats in both the steering committee of Kubernetes and the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At KubeCon, Huawei came to the fore as a strong Chinese competitor in the cloud-native domain by sharing technical findings in Kubernetes, microservices, container networks, container storage, DevOps, Logging, Serverless, and GPU acceleration with international IT giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, Red Hat, and VMware.
HUAWEI CLOUD Experts Join to Establish Cloud Native Trends
This year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon has attracted a lot of developers and enthusiasts from open source communities around the world. At keynote sessions from May 2 to May 4, open source experts dived deep into technological challenges and trends in Cloud Native, with a special focus on 2 topics: (1) helping enterprises rapidly deploy services on the cloud by using features such as Kubeflow, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning; (2) putting Kubernetes into practice, for example, using Kubeflow in Booking to optimize services and improve operation efficiency.
Main venue of KubeCon 2018
Huawei participated in seven important seminars over three consecutive days, being the most invited Asian guest to share technical insights.
At the Storage Working Group session, storage technologies such as interface definition, volumes, key-value stores, distributed databases, and object stores were pointed out as the key focus areas of the future. Huawei is an open-source leader and a new member of the CNCF TOC. According to Quinton Hoole, Huawei's Technical Vice President, enterprises must analyze both advantages and disadvantages of different storage technologies and find common grounds before selecting a technology. Additionally, "Persistent Memory", a new project that aims at addressing storage technological challenges, has attracted much attention onsite. This project uses Kubernetes-based Storage Class and Container Storage Interface (CSI) Parameters to provide different storage capabilities, without adding complexity to Kubernetes and CSI cores.
Storage Working Group session
At the Kubernetes Policy Working Group session, developers from Huawei, IBM, and Red Hat introduced the Working Group's history and background, focused on the recent progress in regulations compliance, multi-tenancy, and cluster technology development, and revealed the plan to establish the CNCF Policy Working Group. From the follow-up Deep Dive sessions, it is evident that CNCF is moving towards a cloud-native policy driven architecture. At the Multi-Tenancy Working Group Deep Dive, Huawei engineers shared their experience in building multi-tenancy platforms and tackling key design issues.
Storage Working Group Deep Dive
Huawei Is Rewarded for Its Contributions to Open Source Communities
As a founding and platinum member of CNCF and Kubernetes, Huawei has made significant contributions to the Kubernetes community, ranking No. 1 in China since 2016 and jumping from No. 5 in the world to No. 3 owing to continuous investment in Huawei Cloud BU founded in 2017. Huawei recently gained a seat in the CNCF TOC. This is the first time for a Chinese company to be listed in the CNCF's supreme management committee as a technical decision maker of the Cloud Native field.
Huawei as a founding and platinum member of CNCF and Kubernetes
This year's summit featured nearly 300 topics, which is almost twice the topics in summit held at North America last year. At this year's summit, Huawei shared technical insights and best practices addressing key Kubernetes issues such as storage and management strategies, application scaling, and cluster federation.
Inspired by Open Source and Beyond It, Business Innovation Facilitates Independency and Controllability
The big picture of the three-day summit shows us that Kubernetes has matured in various industries. Although there is always room for improvement in security, network, and storage, Kubernetes has been applied to enterprise customers. Industry experts believe that in the future, Kubernetes will continue to develop in terms of agile development, resource utilization improvement, and portability enhancement. In addition to sharing technical knowledge, this summit attached great importance to customer cases. Enterprise customers such as Spotify, Wikipedia, Booking.com, and YouTube shared use cases about containers and technical practices in the production environment. HUAWEI CLOUD also showcased the latest Kubernetes innovative technologies at the summit. A firm believer in drawing from open source community and contributing back to the community, Huawei provides commercial assurance based on leading competitiveness and innovative features and facilitates independent and controllable system deployment for enterprise customers.
Huawei has been actively embracing open source and outputting its practices in the form of cloud services to manage digital transformation of enterprises. In the Internet cloud infrastructure 2.0 era, enterprises are paying more attention to efficiency improvement in the cloudification of applications.
HUAWEI CLOUD has attained a leading position in providing application services such as microservices, container service, and blockchain service. These application services are centered around the idea of containers to help customers quickly develop, deliver, and maintain containerized applications on the cloud while maintaining application reliability, elasticity, and performance. Currently, HUAWEI CLOUD offers 16 cloud application services that integrate the lifecycle activities (application development, delivery, and O&M) required before and after cloudification of enterprise applications, into a single one-stop lifecycle management solution for cloud applications. The cloud application services include the Application Performance Management (APM), API Gateway (APIG), Kubernetes-based Cloud Container Engine (CCE, a core part of the application service profile), Cloud Service Engine (CSE), function services, and middleware services. Huawei's in-house CSE was officially open-sourced last year. The open-source version ServiceComb was selected to be an Apache Incubator project, and is widely recognized by developers worldwide.
Last year also witnessed inspiring achievements from Huawei CCE, China's first cloud container engine that supports bare-metal containers for artificial intelligence, big data, and gaming. Successful use cases of CCE's bare-metal containers are seen with China Mobile Migu and multiple Chinese game suppliers. CCE's Windows containers were used to containerize Enterprise Resource Planning (a popular, company-wide software system used to manage and coordinate all the resources) immediately after its launch this year, along with the latest version of Kubernetes. Huawei's Cloud Container Instance (CCI), the world's first Kubernetes server container, fully demonstrated HUAWEI CLOUD's global leading strengths in the Kubernetes field and attracted significant attention from the KubeCon audience. Open Telekom Cloud (OTC), Huawei's public cloud partner from Europe, showcased the best practices of Huawei CCE and Kubernetes. By leveraging open architecture, standard APIs, and localized support, OTC is committed to provide better cloud container services and other public cloud services for European enterprises and developers.
Bustling visitors at the HUAWEI CLOUD booth
Huawei is an integral part of Kubernetes's growth and continues to pursue joint investments and innovations with Kubernetes. HUAWEI CLOUD provides agile, open, and enterprise-class cloud application services, powering the businesses of customers and partners globally. This is also a vision for our open-source cloud technologies.