Kubernetes has been building momentum for the last three years and is about to hit the cloud with hurricane-like force. The new PaaS platforms running on container +Kubernetes will become the popular form of cloud computing. In the Cloud 2.0 era, cloud computing and public cloud services are undergoing qualitative change as increasingly more enterprises want to do more than store their data and run apps on the cloud, they want to be able to use the stores of data to smooth out their businesses. Intelligence-enabled services grafted into the new infrastructure, represented by the container technology, brings revolutionary conveniences and incredible new levels of freedom with avoidance of vendor lock-in, allowing a mix of technologies and other elements to enter the profile. The agility from the new models available in the overarching cloud iteration helps enterprises solve digital transformation problems, break through technical barriers, and implement more innovations.
Docker and Kubernetes Storm the Market
Container technology has become an application deployment and O&M standard of Internet companies. Now, more and more traditional enterprises are also favoring the tech. Containerized applications enable IT application deployment and O&M to become more agile with the efficiency improvements from cloudifying multiple dimensions and the resulting resource throttling and long list of other capabilities from the adoptions.
Kubernetes comes from Google and in 2015 became the first incubation project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CFCN). As an open source container automation orchestration management platform, it provides extended support for deployment, scheduling, and container clusters. Kubernetes has quickly become one of the most followed open source container orchestrators in the entire cloud industry. After three years of market demonstration, Kubernetes is now recognized as the commanding management platform for container orchestration.
With the maturity and development of the Docker+Kubernetes technology, more and more traditional fields have begun to accelerate their adoptions. The PaaS technology represented by containers and microservices is helping enterprises accelerate innovation in different phases such as application development, testing, and deployment on the cloud. The tech also provides middleware services such as message queuing, caching, and database that match the production environment with deployments ready in hours. The microservice components can easily be split up for easy management and the container orchestration utilities allow applications to be deployed in minutes or even seconds, bringing great value to the ICT industry.
No. 1 in China in Community Contributions
As a founding and platinum member of CNCF, Huawei joined in the early stage of the Kubernetes project. Optimistic about the development prospect, it took the lead in implementing the container management system and reconstructing its own business to suit the advantages of running the environment.
Huawei, the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer, has eight data centers spread around the world dedicated to O&M, running over 800 applications in over 100,000 virtual machines (VMs). Huawei uses the Kubernetes technology to transform its IT system into a containerized one within a short time. Based on the globalization attributes of its own services, Huawei offers hybrid cloud, cross-region, and multi-DC deployment options. Huawei continuously contributes to solving the issues the community faces and works with other members to promote the development and accumulate knowledge in running Kubernetes.
Huawei has contributed over and over again to the community, living up to its number one ranking amongst Chinese tech firms for many years straight. Currently, Huawei has five maintainers to its credit. Huawei ranks No. 1 in China and third in the world in terms of commits (data source: cncf.biterg.io). Huawei is highly engaged in tuning, cluster federation, architecture design, security, and other contributions. Huawei is also one of the first vendors to obtain the Kubernetes Certified Service Provider qualification.
In 2017, HUAWEI CLOUD earned a seat on the Kubernetes Community Steering Committee (13 spots in the world; Huawei is the sole China-based company). In April 2018, HUAWEI CLOUD won a top seat in CNCF's Technical Supervisory Committee, with a total of 9 seats. Huawei was the first company from Asia to get such a seat. Huawei participates in the highest technical decision-making level in the cloud native domain.
To further promote container technologies at home and abroad, HUAWEI CLOUD and CNCF Foundation brought the cloud computing event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to China for the first time in 2018. As a leader/practitioner of container technologies, Huawei announced the open source gene container framework KubeGene and intelligent edge framework KubeEdge at the conference. At the conference, Liao Zhenqin, general manager of the PaaS Product Dept at HUAWEI CLOUD, said: “The two pieces of tech are helping enable new levels of performance for the Kubernetes ecosystem in the gene and intelligent edge fields.” This enables industry developers to build and try Kubernetes technologies and lower the threshold for industry customers to use these new technologies. In the future, HUAWEI CLOUD will continue to innovate based on cloud native technologies and help build a prosperous ecosystem. It is committed to providing enterprises with more secure, convenient, and efficient services and enabling more industries to accelerate their businesses.
Full-stack Container Services Lead the Domestic Cloud Container Market
Being one of the earliest adopters, Huawei has implemented K8s in many of its products for internal use since 2013. In this process, Huawei has accumulated rich practical experience and provides fully vetted, full-stack container services for enterprise users so they can easily cope with the challenges of the Cloud 2.0 era and smooth out their cloud adoptions.
Components in HUAWEI CLOUD Container Services
1. Containerized infrastructure
HUAWEI CLOUD provides two types of K8s services, including Cloud Container Engine (CCE) and Cloud Container Instance (CCI), which are certified by CNCF. The CCE service is a dedicated service. Users can control the K8s cluster and manage infrastructure resources and container services running in the environment. CCI is a serverless service. Users only need to manage the containerized services running on K8s. Clusters are automatically managed by HUAWEI CLOUD, further reducing the adoption threshold.
2. Container-based delivery process
HUAWEI CLOUD Software Repository for Container (SWR) provides an enterprise-class private image repository featuring high performance, capacity, and security. It also provides the image build and release pipeline ContainerOps to support automatic service delivery. In addition, ContainerOps allows enterprise personnel to continue to use existing tooling, minimizing the impact on the original delivery process and enabling a smooth migration. HUAWEI CLOUD Application Orchestration Service (AOS) provides an automatic cloud facility management tool, which enables enterprises to automate container development, testing, production environment preparation, and routine configuration and change with the convenience of preset templates, freeing enterprises from complex infrastructure management work so they can focus on their own business.
3. Containerized O&M processes
HUAWEI CLOUD provides the AOM (Application Operations Management) and Application Performance Management (APM) services to assist containerized service O&M, including various O&M tools in addition to basic monitoring, logging, and alerting. In addition, it provides advanced features such as global application topology display and call chain tracing for fault locating and analysis scenarios so that O&M personnel have a clear and comprehensive view of application health.
4. Containerized architecture transformation
Cloud Container Engine (CCE) and Cloud Service Engine (CSE) provide two microservice frameworks: Istio and Apache ServiceComb that run on K8s. The two frameworks help enterprises implement the needed transformations to their microservice architectures. For Java-based enterprise-class applications, CSE provides a microservice framework with complete service governance capabilities such as upgrade, downgrade, and fault tolerance utilities that run on ServiceComb. CSE is compatible with open source interfaces such as Spring Cloud and features excellent throughput performance. CCE is also in scope with the Istio project, provides a high-performance service mesh data plane, and provides Kubernetes-native microservice governance capabilities for scenarios requiring non-intrusive outcomes.
Since the rollout of CCE in 2017, HUAWEI CLOUD’s container services have been continuously innovating and leading the market. At the end of that year, Bare Metal Service (BMS) was launched, allowing users to run their containers on their very own servers, delivering significant advantages. Migu Interactive Entertainment uses CCE in the containerization of its services to improve system performance by 100%.
In 2018, Huawei CCE became the first container service in China able to run on Windows, allowing vast numbers of Windows Server users to enjoy the benefits of containerization just as Linux users were already doing. HUAWEI CLOUD then collaborated with the ERP software vendor Guanjiaopo to help them transform traditional .NET applications into containers. In September, HUAWEI CLOUD launched the Istio service mesh feature on the basis of the original CCE service to simplify microservice-based reconstruction.
In terms of industry applications, HUAWEI CLOUD container services are being applied to a long list of industries. Based on Huawei's profound technical accumulation in the software and hardware field, Huawei launched a GPU container featuring AI capabilities for significantly improved performance. In gene sequencing, the K8s-based Gene Container Service (GCS) is introduced to provide a more economical, faster, and easier-to-use cloud computing platform for sequencing vendors. In edge computing, the Intelligent Edge Platform (IEF) based on Kubernetes can collaborate with the computing resources and applications at the device, edge, and cloud sides to meet real-time service requirements and optimize computing resources.
Dual-wheel Drive of Continuous Innovation
Piggybacking on Huawei's accumulation in tech over the past 30 years, HUAWEI CLOUD is leading developments with its end-to-end technical strengths. Adhering to the two-wheel drive concept of "meeting customer requirements and continuous innovation", we continuously innovate technologies and make breakthroughs to exceed even the most stringent of demands. The investment in the open source market not only shows Huawei's forward-looking technical insight, but also highlights Huawei's determination and strength in promoting the development of the software industry.
In terms of influence in open source, Huawei's contribution to the Apaches Community’s CarbonData became the first top-level project in the community. The microservice framework ServiceComb also entered the Apache incubation project in November 2017 and became a top Apache project in October 2018.
Huawei began participating in Hyperledger project under the Linux Foundation in 2016. This project is the most influential open source project in the blockchain technology field. In addition, Huawei continuously made technical and code contributions in the two hottest sub-projects Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth Lake, and was granted the Maintainer position in the community (the only China-based vendor to earn the title). When Hyperledger established the China Region Technical Work Team, Huawei won the chairman position and continues to invest big with such substantial contributions as the Caliper project, a blockchain performance evaluation tool it donated to the community.
HUAWEI CLOUD launched ServiceStage, a one-stop cloud platform for applications, which provides full-stack solutions for enterprises to develop AI, blockchains, microservices, mobile, and web applications. The platform helps users quickly create enterprise-class cloud applications and accelerate service innovation.
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