The scale of the new generation of private cloud will exceed the sum of public cloud IaaS & PaaS

Author: Easy clouds EasyStack founder and CEO Chen Xilun

Original title: "Cloud computing era, the rise of a new generation of private clouds"

Editor's note: In 2017, the analysis organization Wikibon took the lead in proposing the concept of true private cloud in the cloud computing industry, which kicked off the emergence of a new generation of private cloud concepts. In 2018, the analysis agency IDC also specifically discussed the concept of a new private cloud (new private cloud) at a global conference. This is a main channel market that will be active for you in the next ten years. So what is a new generation of private cloud, how is it different from traditional private cloud, and what is its significance to the industry and users?

In 2006, Amazon AWS began to provide cloud services. For a long time, it has been predicted that cloud computing is only a public cloud; and now the multi-cloud world is generally recognized, the real private cloud market is rising, and AWS has also begun to choose to cooperate with VMware on private clouds , Also launched a private deployment product Outpost. The strategic changes of AWS also reflect the tremendous changes in the entire cloud computing industry. At the level of soft and hard infrastructure, what new conclusions does the private cloud market have?

1. The scale of the private cloud market in 2019 may approach the public cloud

In 2017, Wikibon, a third-party analysis agency in the United States, took the lead in the cloud computing industry to propose the concept of True Private Cloud (TPC), which undoubtedly kicked off the emergence of a new generation of private cloud concepts. In November 2018, the "Wikibon's 2018 Cloud Markets and Trends Report: The cloud moves to thedata" report predicted that the global real private cloud market will achieve a strong growth of 29.2% CAGR, exceeding US$51 billion in 2019, and for the first time in 2024 with US$1,860 Exceeding the total market of public cloud IaaS&iPaaS of 176 billion US dollars, it will continue to surpass with high growth rates.

If you compare the Gartner public cloud forecast report for the same period in September 2018, the numbers are even more radical: the real private cloud market in 2019 will approach the public cloud IaaS&PaaS at $58.3 billion at $51 billion, and it will reach the same level of $72.9 billion for the first time in 2020. Scale and achieve continuous surpassing.

The real private cloud market will soon surpass the public cloud IaaS&PaaS market. The prediction is beyond many people's expectations. This is undoubtedly a highly active market in the next ten years, and the main channel for all companies to fight for, and it is the decisive game that determines the cloud computing era.

Second, the new generation of private cloud is the private deployment of cloud

However, such rapid growth does not belong to traditional private clouds.

Although the customization of traditional private cloud meets the complex IT environment and the needs of customers in the industry, it has the problem of fragmentation and non-evolution, and it cannot achieve the convenience of public cloud activation, continuous evolution of functions, unified operation and maintenance, and on-demand The paid consumer experience has become a constraint to the large-scale growth of traditional private clouds.

Therefore, it is a new generation of private cloud that can support the rapid growth of the real private cloud market.

Let’s first look at the basic judgment of a cloud-Wikibon has emphasized in the latest several cloud computing reports that “Facing the next step of cloudification for traditional enterprise-level customers, the ultimate dominant model is to move the cloud to the data instead of The judgment of "massive data moving to the central cloud" is the basis for the rise, development and surpassing of the true private cloud market. Coincidentally, after IBM acquired Redhat for $34 billion, it also mentioned similar thesis of "move cloud and AI to data". Indeed, "moving the cloud to the data" dispels many doubts about data security, application delays, migration costs, complex environments, regulatory compliance, intellectual property rights, etc. caused by industry enterprise customers "migrating data to the central cloud" A truly customer-centric digital transformation model.

So, how should the new generation of private cloud be described?

The mainstream form of the new generation of private cloud should be designed with the complex environment and data requirements in the enterprise customer firewall as the original intention to establish a private cloud with customer data as the center and multi-cloud management capabilities. This means that it has a wider range of hardware and software ecological compatibility, takes into account the new generation of enterprise-level applications and traditional applications, and has the evolvable characteristics of coping with the complex environment of the enterprise, and it can also provide a consumer-level experience like a public cloud. .

If you sum it up in one sentence--the new generation of private cloud is the private deployment of the cloud.

On the one hand, compared to the cloud-centric expression of private cloud and public cloud, cloud private deployment and public deployment can better reflect the dominant model of "move the cloud to the data", that is, the data in the firewall requires the private deployment of the cloud. Data outside the firewall requires public cloud deployment. On the other hand, compared to the split expression of private cloud and public cloud, cloud private deployment and public deployment can better reflect the consistent experience of cloud.

From this point of view, since "migrating data to the central cloud" is the original intention of the public cloud, AWS Outposts, which focus on the consistency of public and private deployment of the cloud, are designed with the public cloud as the core, and their value lies more in The extension of public cloud services within the firewall is an important supplement to the mainstream form of a new generation of private clouds.

Third, traditional private cloud vs. a new generation of private cloud

What are the characteristics of cloud private deployment or a new generation of private cloud?

Let's first look at the three stages of private cloud development.

The first-generation private cloud can only be called virtualization + cloud management in the strict sense. Enterprise customers basically do not have a new generation of cloud applications. Most of their cloud applications are based on virtualization management and cost reduction. Such projects limit the imagination of private clouds and make the private cloud market questionable.

The second-generation private cloud, enterprise users have a new generation of cloud application needs, but it is less competitive than public clouds in terms of richness and application fragmentation. The business model is still in the license-based software era, due to the complex customer environment There is a large amount of customization, complicated deployment and operation and maintenance, and smooth upgrades cannot be achieved.

Both the first and second generation private clouds belong to the traditional private cloud era. The purpose of users migrating traditional applications to cloud architecture is mostly to reduce costs and improve manageability. Although this is also part of the value of cloud, the growth driver of cloud will come from new enterprise-level applications in the future. The main reason for the frustration of cloud projects in the traditional private cloud era is the delivery of integrated "fake clouds":

On the one hand, the private cloud projects of large-scale early adopters are too complicated, and the purpose of construction is management-based rather than innovative business-driven; on the other hand, the patchwork product line combination centered on cloud management has a long delivery cycle and the delivery results cannot be reflected. The cloud's flexibility, simplicity, flexibility and the possibility of docking PaaS ecology.

Today, a new generation of private cloud is emerging. From the perspective of cloud private deployment, it includes the following features:

First of all, in the application of the business layer, a new generation of private clouds can carry a new generation of enterprise applications such as Cloud, Mobile, IoT, BigData, and AI.

Second, in terms of the PaaS experience, based on the open-source PaaS-based ecosystem, Kubernetes is used to build a sharable PaaS across public and private clouds, enabling the new generation of private clouds to support richer applications; You can develop new PaaS on the cloud according to your own needs, and apply them to specific scenarios and applicable industries;

Third, in the implementation of IaaS, through the microservices and integrated design of the cloud platform, a new generation of private cloud can bring enterprise users a consumer-level experience like a public cloud, not only from delivery, operation and maintenance, and upgrades. The "turnkey project" has also enabled the realization of a new generation of private cloud pay-on-demand cloud service model, from the era of cloud software to the era of cloud services.

Fourth, in the evolution path, productization based on the open source ecosystem is the best practice for the evolution of a new generation of private clouds. When IBM acquired Red Hat and Microsoft acquired Github, when major public cloud vendors applied Linux/KVM/MangoDB and other open source technologies, Google directly pointed out at the Google cloudnext 2019 conference that "the future of public cloud is open source". In the same way, the new generation of private cloud is highly productized under the premise of maintaining compatibility and synchronization with the open source ecosystem. On the one hand, it maintains full synchronization with the community, and on the other hand, it meets customer needs through a scenario-based cooperative ecosystem. This is a complex environment The inevitable move to replace customization with scenarios is also the only way to enrich the PaaS ecosystem.

Fifth, in terms of evolution methods, evolvability is the core driving force for the evolution of a new generation of private clouds. Different from upgradeability, evolutionability requires service capabilities, product forms, and support scenarios to achieve evolution. This means that evolutionability not only supports the smooth upgrade of the cloud platform's own service capabilities, but also needs to solve the problem of softness in product form. Hard-integrated cloud-ready hyper-convergence, to the evolution of different forms of private cloud, industry cloud, and multi-cloud, and at the same time solve the supporting scenarios from computing, network, storage to commercial storage and commercial SDN, from virtualization to bare metal , From container clusters to software infrastructure, from DevOps to IOT, and other evolvable problems that meet enterprise-level needs.

Fourth, the core feature of the new generation of private cloud is evolvable

Among them, evolvability is the foundation of various features of the new generation of private clouds, and is the core feature of the new generation of private clouds.

Just as Tesla pioneered a new generation of automotive software operating systems, decoupling the hardware and software of the car, making software define a new generation of cars a reality. It evolves the automobile, a traditional large-amount hardware asset purchase and a six-year replacement cycle product, into a product that obtains more functions and experiences through continuous upgrading of automobile software. In this way, the value of old cars not only does not depreciate, but through software upgrades to upgrade the configuration and performance, realize the evolution of the car, protect the customer's investment TCO, and change the rules of the game in the automotive industry.

In the same way, in the cloud computing industry, a new generation of private clouds also needs to decouple software and hardware to realize software evolution and hardware replacement, in order to truly release the value of cloud platforms for a long time and change the rules of the cloud computing industry.

In the public cloud deployment, evolution is a basic capability, but behind it is a powerful proprietary team to operate and maintain the version of the public cloud. In private cloud deployment, not only is the environment more complex, but it is also impossible for each enterprise customer to have a strong operation and maintenance team. At the same time, the faster the iterative upgrade of traditional private cloud product versions, the more serious the fragmentation and upgrade. The more difficult it is. Without manual intervention, it is still difficult for traditional private clouds to achieve smooth upgrades of different versions. To realize the evolution of service capabilities, product forms, and support scenarios in cloud private deployment, the new generation of private clouds needs to start from the core Starting from the most basic unit of the architecture, it has the ability to micro-service and integrated design of various technology stacks, which is also the core competitiveness of the new generation of private clouds.

One of the top-level designs to realize the core features of a new generation of private clouds that can be evolved is the micro-service of the cloud platform.

Through remote operation and maintenance, enterprise customers do not need to log in to the background, do not need to enter the command line, and completely apply graphical interface operations, which can realize cloud private deployment, minimal operation and maintenance, and high-availability experience guarantee. Through the microservice orchestration engine, rolling upgrade engine, real-time load diversion engine, service monitoring and self-healing engine and other technical modules, the SaaSization of IaaS has been realized, making the new generation of private clouds continue to evolve smoothly and unconsciously and consumer-level like public clouds Experience becomes possible.

Another top-level design for realizing the evolvable core features of a new generation of private clouds is the integration of cloud platforms.

Unlike some traditional private clouds, which separate computing virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization, and cloud management systems into separate product lines and combinations of different versions, the new generation of private clouds integrates the overall architecture of the cloud platform and the integration of different components And collaboration, on the one hand, the large-scale distributed architecture, user mode, kernel, architecture and protocol stack and hardware are completely deconstructed, so that it has a high degree of division and coordination in the whole life cycle, and can be in a state of unattended Achieve fully automated delivery. On the other hand, the integrated design can also achieve a high degree of unification and collaboration between the entire platform events, APIs, services, and components, making the scenario-based capabilities of the new generation of private clouds natural, and enriching PaaS capabilities by integrating open source ecology or third-party commercial products , You can also get PaaS applications shared with public clouds in a multi-cloud world.

In this way, the scenario-based capabilities of the new generation of private clouds are therefore natural.

Scenarioization is based on the user's business scenario as the perspective, on top of the IaaS capabilities of the most basic computing unit, network unit, and storage unit of the cloud platform, plus the PaaS capabilities of the open source ecosystem or third-party businesses. Scenarioization is an effective way to respond to the industrialization and differentiation needs of customers in the private deployment of the cloud. It is also the only feasible large-scale and replicable solution in addition to customization when facing the industrialization and differentiation needs of enterprise customers. At the same time, a new generation of private clouds with an open source ecosystem as the best practice path, PaaS applications that can obtain a consistent experience shared with public clouds in a multi-cloud world, become a cloud platform with continuous vitality centered on customer needs.

It is worth noting that whether to achieve smoothness and senselessness in the evolutionary process is a key element of the unified experience of cloud private and public deployment. A smooth and non-sense upgrade consists of three elements: no perception of business, no data migration, and no service interruption. This means that it not only includes no business impact during the process of upgrading the cloud platform, but also does not affect the operation of the cloud platform itself during the process of upgrading the cloud platform. This is like a new energy vehicle that can still drive normally while upgrading the system , IPhone can still make calls and operate APP during the iOS upgrade process.

As an open source cloud computing company, EasyStack released a new generation of private cloud product ECS Enterprise Cloud at the end of May. It is a cloud platform delivered with a new generation of private cloud concepts and features. This is the company's R&D staff for 18 months The crystallization of research and development also opened the next stage of the company's full range of products.

5. The value and significance of a new generation of private cloud

From the perspective of cloud private deployment, a new generation of private cloud with evolvable capabilities not only obtains a consumer-level experience similar to public clouds, but also meets the particularity and complexity requirements of the cloud in a private deployment environment, and through the open source ecosystem In the PaaS layer, the long-term vitality centered on customer business has been obtained. This new generation of private cloud is the mainstream form of the real private cloud market and the real driving force for the sustained and rapid development of the private cloud market.

From the perspective of business driving force: the core IT system of enterprise customers can respond quickly and adapt to the agility of the business, so the cloud platform that supports the business system also needs to evolve to meet the requirements of the support business system. One of the most attractive features of cloud public deployment is that its functions continue to evolve to meet the growing needs of customers without the need for customers to participate. When the new generation of private cloud can also achieve this in a more complex environment, as Wikibon predicts, its growth rate and high total market will quickly surpass the public cloud IaaS&iPaaS market.

From the perspective of market scale: At present, the biggest pain point of traditional private cloud is the fragmentation of versions. As the number of customers continues to grow, the more different versions, the heavier the burden of operation and maintenance and the worse customer satisfaction. Any company, even an industry The giants cannot cope. Emphasis on evolvability in the design of the core of the new generation of private cloud is to solve the problem of version fragmentation, which also provides the basis for the rapid and large-scale development of the new generation of private cloud.

From the perspective of building a service system: The difficulty of evolvability is not only in evolvability itself, but also in the ability to evolve under the premise of minimalism, to achieve expansion and upgrades and operation and maintenance that can only be done by original factory engineers in the past. The new generation of private cloud vendors can also more easily establish a third-party service system to achieve wider market coverage; when light operation and maintenance help manufacturers shift the focus of resources from the operation and maintenance side to how to help customers make good use of the cloud, and improve Many businesses have migrated to the cloud, and the positive value brought by this positive and negative is immeasurable.

From the perspective of building a complete ecosystem: Another benefit of evolvability is that it can continuously deliver new capabilities to customers. These capabilities are not necessarily the self-research capabilities of the new generation of private cloud vendors, but can also be third parties including open source ecosystems. The ability of partners to realize the ecologicalization of cloud platforms can also bring new business models.

From the perspective of protecting customer TCO and building future business models: In the past, the enterprise-level software business model was based on version upgrades, and the incompatibility between the new and old versions was normal, and the upgrade process experience was not smooth enough. The evolvability capability eliminates the concept of the software life cycle. As long as the open source ecosystem is evolving, the version deployed on the client side can also evolve continuously, and the overall TCO will continue to decrease. At the same time, a new generation of private cloud on-demand subscription fees has become possible.

With the rise of a new generation of private cloud, it will bring unlimited possibilities to the entire cloud computing market, which is also the key to determining the outcome of the cloud computing era.