What is cloud computing?

Talking about cloud computing , I believe we are all familiar , We can not only in the news media 、 I saw it in the Internet Report , In fact, cloud computing has penetrated into all aspects of our lives ： Online shopping 、 Transportation 、 Live video 、 Government Affairs Office 、 Online learning . It can be said that , In this information age 、 In a digital society , Wherever there is a network, there is Cloud Computing .

Cloud computing is so closely related to us , But if I ask you “ What is Cloud Computing ？” Or let you explain cloud computing in simple words , It's not necessarily that easy . Little scholar combed the relevant knowledge of Cloud Computing , And added their own understanding , Try to make a technical popular science post , Try to explain cloud computing clearly in as popular a language as possible .

Next , Little scholar will use several articles to talk about the past and present life of Cloud Computing . Today is the first article , About the definition of Cloud Computing 、 classification 、 Development process and problems to be solved , Let you have an overall understanding of Cloud Computing .

01  The definition of Cloud Computing

For the definition of Cloud Computing , I believe many people have heard the image analogy of using tap water ： Cloud computing is a network that provides resources , Users can access at any time “ cloud ” Resources on , It's like getting water 、 Electricity is the same , Take it and use it , Get on demand . This is for “ Cloud computing ” A simple understanding of .

And for the normative definition of Cloud Computing , Popular ones include ：

National institute of standards and technology （NIST） Definition

： Cloud computing is a pay per use model , This mode provides available 、 Convenient 、 On demand network access ,  Enter the configurable pool of computing resources （ Resources include the Internet , The server , Storage , Application software , service ）, These resources can be provided quickly , Just a little management work , Or have little interaction with service providers .

Baidu Encyclopedia definition

： Cloud computing （cloud computing） It's a kind of distributed computing , It means through the Internet “ cloud ” It's a huge amount of data processing programs , then , Through the system composed of multiple servers, these small programs are processed and analyzed, and the results are returned to the user . At this stage, cloud service is not only a kind of distributed computing , It's distributed computing 、 Utility calculation 、 Load balancing 、 Parallel computing 、 Network storage 、 The result of the hybrid evolution and leap of computer technologies such as hot backup redundancy and virtualization .

From the above two for “ Cloud computing ” By definition ,

“ Cloud computing ” These three words , It is not a single meaning , It includes at least two different interpretations , namely “ Cloud computing technology ” perhaps “ Cloud computing services ”

, The former can be understood as a technical term , The latter is more like a service （ It can be used for consumption and produce real value , Similar to commodities ).NIST The definition given , Is actually the “ Cloud computing ” and “ Cloud computing services ”（ Or cloud services ） There is an equal sign between the two ; And Baidu Encyclopedia's explanation , At first, it was “ Cloud computing ” As a technology , And the later explanation , Mentioned “ The cloud service ” The words... . thus it can be seen ,“ Cloud computing ” Three words is not a precise expression , Related concepts , A more accurate expression can be “ Cloud computing technology ” perhaps “ Cloud computing services ”.

If we go to the official websites of different cloud manufacturers to check their information about “ Cloud computing ” Introduction to , Actually, it's more like being right “ Cloud computing services ” Describe and define . therefore ,

The present “ Cloud computing ” Usually, it tends to be understood as “ Cloud computing services ”

. In the following space , Cloud computing 、 Cloud computing services and cloud services , These three words have the same meaning .

02  Classification of cloud computing

In the news report , Or understand 、 In the process of learning cloud computing knowledge , You must have heard these nouns , For example, public cloud 、 Private cloud 、 A hybrid cloud , Or government affairs cloud 、 Financial cloud , as well as IaaS/PaaS/SaaS etc. . These are cloud computing classifications in different dimensions . The classification of cloud computing generally includes the following ：

In terms of deployment form

, It can be divided into public clouds 、 Private cloud 、 Mixed clouds, etc .

Public cloud

： Cloud services provided by third-party providers , Users do not need to purchase by themselves IT resources , Just pay for the resources they use ; elastic 、 Pay as you need is its characteristic .

Private cloud

： Cloud services built for the sole use of an enterprise , Owned and operated by a single company , Or hosted by a third-party service provider ; exclusive 、 Private ownership is its characteristic .

A hybrid cloud

： It is a mixture of public cloud and private cloud .

From the application industry

, It can be divided into government affairs cloud 、 Financial cloud 、 Medical cloud 、 Education cloud, etc .

From the service type

, Can be divided into IaaS/PaaS/SaaS Three categories , Recently, there have been DaaS And other newly defined cloud computing services .

IaaS class

： Infrastructure as a service , It is one of the basic forms of cloud computing services , It refers to the services that cloud manufacturers provide virtualized computing resources to individuals or organizations .

PaaS class

： Platform as a service , For development 、 Testing and managing software applications provides an on-demand development environment , Provide developers with a platform to build applications and services through the global Internet .

SaaS class

： Software as a service , It is a hosting and management software application provided by cloud manufacturers , And allow its users to connect to the application and access the application through the global Internet .SaaS Class cloud computing services , It is the cloud computing service closest to ordinary users , It can help users solve a specific problem or achieve specific functions .

IaaS To SaaS These three cloud computing services , From the service of “ Particle fineness ” Look at , Is gradually rising , That is, more and more sophisticated . We can also use another scene in life to compare , Such as grain and wheat . Xiao Wang is a big COFCO , What he provides for the market is wheat grains harvested from the fields , It belongs to raw materials that have not been processed , That can be seen as a IaaS Form of goods ; Xiao Li, Xiao Wang's neighbor , Opened a flour mill , Specially purchase wheat, process it into flour and trade it in the market , Flour can be regarded as a kind of PaaS Form of goods , It is a certain processed grain product （ raw material ）, It can't be eaten directly, but it can be used to make more pasta products that can be eaten directly by humans ; Xiao Li's classmate Xiao Zhao 、 liu , They operate noodle shops and steamed bread shops respectively , They bought flour and other materials , Processed into noodles 、 Steamed bread is then sold to hundreds of ordinary consumers , This is it. SaaS Class of goods .

IaaS Class cloud computing services , Its providers are mostly major cloud manufacturers represented by Alibaba cloud , It's about cloud vendor Technology 、 Money 、 The requirements for safety and other aspects are very high , Like the water supply in our society 、 The power supply system is implemented by large state-owned enterprises ; and SaaS Class cloud services are more specialized 、 Customized , The subdivisions are also more complete , stay IaaS and PaaS And other infrastructure and platform facilities are sufficient , More market players can have the ability 、 There is an opportunity to provide personalization for thousands of consumers 、 Differentiated SaaS Class cloud services , Meet more diversified market demand .

03  The development of Cloud Computing

Although cloud computing has penetrated into all walks of life , It has also become closely related to our daily life , Travel 、 Group purchase 、 video 、 Behind various life scenes such as games and e-commerce shopping , Are inseparable from cloud computing . Cloud computing quietly integrates and changes our lives , But in fact, cloud computing is very “ young ”, It's in 2006 The year was born , Up to now, there is only 16 Years of time . Major events in the development of cloud computing include ：

2006.3.14

Amazon AWS Released Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3), Start with  Web  Provide services to enterprises in the form of  IT  Infrastructure services （IaaS type ）, It has created a new computing resource service mode , At that time, there was no “ Cloud computing ” The name .

2006.8.9

Google Eric, CEO · Schmidt first proposed “ Cloud computing ”（Cloud Computing） The concept of , This is the first time in the history of cloud computing that this concept has been formally proposed , Extraordinary significance .

2008.4.7

Google releases Google App Engine, Allow users to use locally Google Infrastructure construction Web application ,PaaS Forms of cloud computing services have come to users .

2008.4

Microsoft released  Windows Server 2008 R2  And virtualization products  Hyper-V, thus , The three major manufacturers in the early stage of cloud computing have been deployed .

2009.9

Alicloud was founded , Dr. Wang Jian served as President , The domestic cloud computing market has started .

2010.5.10

Alibaba cloud launched its first commercial elastic computing product , namely ECS1.0, Start to provide services for webmasters of small and medium-sized enterprises .

2013.6

Alibaba cloud breakthrough 5K test , Become the first in the world to provide 5K Cloud company .

2015

Alibaba cloud upgrades its virtualization architecture for the first time , from Xen Upgrade the architecture to a new KVM framework , Virtualization losses are significantly reduced .

2017

Alibaba cloud released the DPCA architecture integrating hardware and software , And carry out the second virtualization architecture upgrade , Virtualization losses are reduced to zero .

Same year ,AWS Released based on Nitro Architecturally C5 Example specifications , Cloud computing has begun to enter a new stage of virtualization architecture combining software and hardware .

2020

Alibaba cloud has released a cloud multi form strategy , Launch intelligent full hosting 、 Cloud box and other new products , Continue to extend the public cloud .

2021

Alibaba cloud released the fourth generation of DPCA , At the same time, upgrade to the new eRDMA Network architecture , The network delay is as low as 5 Microsecond , It is the industry's first large-scale elastic RDMA Ability to speed up .

Virtualization technology is one of the important technologies of cloud computing , It is the cornerstone of the development of Cloud Computing

. The iteration of cloud computing technology architecture is closely related to the evolution of virtualization technology , Published in Amazon cloud S3 Service as the starting point , Cloud computing and virtualization technology overlap , Yuanyuan also began from then on . We can also divide the development of cloud computing into several stages according to different virtualization architectures .

Xen Virtualization architecture （2006-2015 year ）

2003 year , Xen  stay  SOSP  publish  Xen and the Art of Virtualization , Pull away x86 The big screen of platform virtualization technology .2006 year  AWS  released EC2 Is based on  Xen  Virtualization technology , Virtualization technology gives EC2 The core product value is single , At the same time, virtualization technology to network virtualization 、 Storage virtualization , And the management and control system provides business deployment points .2009 year , When Alibaba cloud was first established , In the field of open source virtualization technology ,Xen  It is a relatively mature virtual machine monitor project , So Alibaba cloud adopts open source  Xen  As the first virtualization infrastructure . At this time , Amazon  AWS  Our virtualization architecture also uses  Xen , This choice was also the consensus of the industry at that time .

KVM Virtualization architecture （2015-2018 year ）

KVM Is based on CPU Full virtualization technology of hardware virtualization technology , It is one of the virtualization technologies most used by most public cloud and private cloud service providers in the industry .2005 year 、2006 year , Intel  and  AMD  Of x86 CPU  Hardware starts to support hardware virtualization ( VT ） technology , And in 2006 Was born in  KVM  This open source virtualization project based on hardware virtualization . Red hat ( RedHat ） The company in 2008 Acquired development in  KVM  Israel's company  Qumranet  after , KVM  It has been greatly developed .2014 About years ago , KVM  In terms of functional completeness 、 stability 、 Community support and other aspects have surpassed  Xen , At this time, Alibaba cloud in China also began to develop products based on  KVM  Cloud server , In the end in 2015 In, the virtualization architecture was migrated to  KVM  On . stay 2015-2018 year , Alibaba cloud not only uses  KVM  Solved the problem of engineering , And I did  QEMU / KVM  Hot upgrade and other original work , Self developed  vCPU  The scheduler , Support performance burst instance specifications （ TS ） Products , At the same time, the important functions such as heat transfer are optimized .

Virtualization architecture combining software and hardware （2018 So far this year ）

stay  KVM  When virtualization technology is mature , In the evolution direction of the next generation virtualization architecture , Including Amazon  AWS 、 Alibaba cloud and other cloud service providers seem to have reached a tacit understanding , They have invested in research and development in the direction of the combination of software and hardware .AWS  stay 2017 At the end of, it was released based on  Nitro  Architecturally  C5 Example specifications ,

Ali Yun in 2017 In, it also released an elastic bare metal server based on DPCA Architecture , And in 2018 The virtual machine cloud server based on DPCA architecture was launched in

. The DPCA architecture is a virtualization platform that combines software and hardware developed by Alibaba cloud , Among them  MOC The card is the core hardware in the DPCA architecture , Will store 、 The Internet 、 All controlled links are transferred to  MOC On , At the same time  KVM  Virtualization technology is further optimized , To improve computing performance .

04  Problems to be solved by Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is closely related to our life , At present, the enterprise cloud is also in full swing ; At the national level , The outline of the 14th five year plan lists cloud computing as one of the key industries of the digital economy , as well as 2022 In, the state launched “ Count from east to west ” engineering . that , What problems have cloud computing solved or provided , Make it so important ？

Answer that question , I have to mention Amazon AWS, It provides the earliest cloud computing service recognized in the industry . We all know , Amazon started by selling books online , Later, it expanded to more categories of online shopping business , Formed the business form of e-commerce . In order to support a large number of user visits and shopping transactions , Amazon deployed a lot of computing and storage IT resources , Especially in shopping hot festivals like Christmas , Must be in order to deal with the website 、 user 、 Orders and other business flow pressure and reserve server resources . But it's too big to promote the node , The business flow returns to the natural state , Already deployed IT Resources are idle most of the time . In order to make full use of these idle IT resources , Amazon began to provide performance computing and storage rental services , Simply put, it is to put what you don't use at present IT Resources at a lower price “ rent ” Give other needs similar IT Users or enterprises of resources , This is the initial appearance of cloud computing services .

In the beginning ,

Cloud computing solves the problem of cloud manufacturers themselves IT Idle resources , For its users —— The cloud service “ Tenant ” for , Cloud computing helps them at a lower cost 、 Higher flexibility is achieved IT resources

.

In the subsequent development process , Cloud computing, a new service form, has been successfully verified as a sustainable and profitable business model , All major cloud manufacturers are conscious 、 Carry out data center construction in a planned way 、 Zone extension , And server cluster deployment , To better provide users with cloud services and cloud products . By calculation 、 Storage 、 Network, etc IT Resource agglomeration and scale effect , Cloud vendors can pass “ lease ” Service products to make enterprises 、 Personal needs IT Users of resources are more flexible 、 Get... At a lower cost IT resources , Improve the society IT Utilization of resources , At the same time, it reduces the user's IT Procurement cost .

On the surface , Cloud vendors are concentrating IT resources , And then to the outside world “ lease ”, It seems that they provide IT Resources are not idle , There is no problem of low utilization . But in fact

Cloud manufacturers are centralized IT resources , And then provide the IT Resources “ lease ” service , Is to solve the whole society “IT Low resource utilization ” The problem of

. It's also very simple , If there is no cloud manufacturer to provide on a large scale IT resources , There will definitely be enterprises or individuals who encounter Amazon's initial IT Idle resources 、 Low utilization .

therefore , adopt IT Rental of resources 、 share ,

Cloud computing is consistently solving IT Low utilization of resources

; Cloud computing has improved IT Utilization of resources , Thus, more computing power is provided to the society at a lower cost .

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