Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Research | Li Zhe and Zhang Hongxiang

Compose | Zhang Hongxiang

Hourly Cloud, founded in October 2014, is one of the earliest container manufacturers in China. The founding team comes from IBM and Aliyun, and has been deeply involved in the development of IBM Bluemix PaaS platform and Aliyun public cloud.

At that time, the pattern of container orchestration tools was still unclear, and most companies chose relatively mature technologies such as Swarm, while the hourly cloud team firmly chose the Kubernetes route from the very beginning, so hourly cloud became the first container manufacturer based on Kubernetes in China, with a certain technology first-mover advantage.

Take the application as the center to create a modular three-level product system

The product architecture of hourly speed cloud consists of three levels from bottom to top, namely, TenxCloud Enterprise enterprise container PaaS platform, TenxCloud DevOps application delivery platform and TenxCloud Microservice micro service governance platform.

High-speed cloud products have a high level of production, and all levels of products adopt modular design, which can be deployed either uniformly or independently according to customer needs, and provides team organization, rights management and other functions.

The TenxCloud Enterprise enterprise container PaaS platform is the core of the hourly cloud product system. As a container cluster management platform based on Kubernetes, it helps enterprises to improve product iteration efficiency, simplify resource management and reduce operation and maintenance costs.

With Container PaaS platform, in order to better serve customers' application delivery, hourly Cloud has created a TenxCloud DevOps platform to help enterprises establish a set of automated delivery processes, including code development, unit testing, compilation and construction, packaging and deployment, and application release, to achieve CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous deployment).

More and more applications in the cloud era use micro-service architecture. after a large number of applications based on micro-service architecture are delivered, enterprises have a growing demand for application governance. The hourly cloud TenxCloud Microservice micro-service governance platform provides micro-service governance, APM performance monitoring, cloud service bus and other functions to maximize the availability of micro-services.

Through the three-level product system of container platform, application delivery and application governance, hourly cloud is committed to serving the full lifecycle management of enterprise applications.

In addition, due to the shortcomings of native Kubernetes in the network and support for stateful applications, hourly cloud continues to carry out technology research and development in related fields.

Hourly Cloud does not use Kubernetes's open source network solution, but uses its own container network solution to support network isolation and other functions. In order to solve the storage problem of stateful service, hourly Cloud has developed a distributed storage system based on Ceph.

From the perspective of customer base, Speed Cloud mainly serves enterprise customers in finance, energy, operators, manufacturing, education and other industries. The first three industries are the focus, selling through direct sales teams and channels including integrators and software developers. Benchmark customers include State Grid, ENN Group, Van Pjinco, China Mobile, Daimler Mercedes-Benz, Lianjia, Huike Group, Platinum Tao Group, etc., with a unit price of one million.

At present, in addition to the headquarters in Beijing, hourly Cloud has also set up branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and other places, with a team size of more than 110 people, including more than 70 R & D teams and 20 delivery teams.

Recently, Ai analyst interviewed Huang Qigong, founder and CEO of hourly Speed Cloud. He elaborated on the development, future strategy and future development trend of hourly Speed Cloud. Some of the contents are as follows.

Service capability is the competitive advantage of container startups in the face of large manufacturers

Love analysis: why did hourly cloud firmly choose the technical route of Kubernetes at the beginning of starting a business?

Huang Qigong: when Fast Cloud was established, Swarm had not yet been released, and the only PaaS technologies available on the market were Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry belongs to the first generation of PaaS, the architecture is heavy, and it belongs to the "black box" for users, that is, the focus of Cloud Foundry is not on the whole life cycle management of the application, but mainly to provide Runtime running environment. Container PaaS initially starts from the development, construction and deployment of applications, and uses container images to solve the pain points such as rapid release of applications, inconsistent environment, and difficult version maintenance.

Kubernetes and Mesos, Speed Cloud studied the ecology behind them. Although Kubernetes technology was still in its early stages, it was supported by Google. There were almost three times as many developers in the open source community as Mesos, and more than 50% of the code in Mesos was written by Mesosphere itself. Mesos is not created for containers, but another Marathon framework has been written to support containers.

At that time, container technology was still in a very early stage, and it was difficult to apply it to customers' production environment, so there was plenty of time for Kubernetes to grow in the market.

Love analysis: when serving enterprise-level customers at high speed, do you need to invest a lot of manpower in customized development? what is the rate of production?

Huang Qigong: the products delivered to customers by the cloud per hour include products, customized development services and training.

For ordinary enterprise customers, the standard products of cloud per hour can basically meet customer needs, and there is no need for custom development. For large enterprise customers such as central enterprises, customized development is needed, accounting for about 20-30%. Customization includes two aspects, on the one hand, around the product itself, on the other hand, it is integrated with the internal system of the enterprise.

Service capability is an advantage for speed clouds to compete with large manufacturers, which are generally unable to provide customized services to their customers, let alone resident implementation.

Love analysis: what are the main aspects of customization related to the product itself?

Huang Qigong: first, the optimization of specific functions, such as the authority of multi-tenants needs to be divided into three levels: member, team and organization.

The second category is the support of the underlying network, such as network isolation and network traffic control.

Third, support for horizontal expansion of infrastructure, such as supporting the scheduling of underlying VMware and OpenStack, and some functions similar to CMP.

Cloud per hour will not customize business applications for customers, but it will help customers migrate traditional applications to the cloud, split them into micro-service applications, and provide relevant training.

Love analysis: what applications are mainly carried by the financial industry, such as banks and securities firms, on their container platforms?

Huang Qigong: mainly credit card center small loan system, asset management CMDB system, online mall and other applications, less related to the traditional core business system.

Love analysis: when serving customers at high speed, how long is the delivery cycle?

Huang Qigong: ordinary customers do not need any customized services, and can complete product deployment in half a day at the speed of cloud per hour, until the application is launched and accepted, and delivery can be completed in two weeks.

Large enterprise customers refer to projects with a level of more than one million, which require a large number of customized services, and the delivery time is not fixed, which can take a month or even three months.

Love analysis: will Swift Cloud cooperate with other companies when delivering customers?

Huang Qigong: at present, it is mainly done by our own team, and the ecological expansion of partners is under way, and some peripheral implementations will be delivered to partners in the future.

Kubernetes will become the core of IT infrastructure in the future, and there is a broad space for container market.

Love analysis: at present, enterprises are more likely to deploy containers on bare metal or virtual machines?

Huang Qigong: in theory, containers deployed on bare metal will have higher performance and lower cost. But for traditional enterprises, a virtualization platform was built in the IT plan two or three years ago, so most containers are deployed directly on virtual machines, and the proportion of bare metal is very small, about 20%.

In contrast, because Internet companies have no historical burden, they prefer to deploy directly on physical machines, such as JD.com, Tencent Games, Huawei Public Cloud and so on.

In addition, some traditional applications and application scenarios do not support containers very well, so containers cannot replace VMware or OpenStack.

In terms of the real customer environment, at present, it is more the stage of the integration of various technologies, and the container itself still has a large incremental market, which is not enough to replace OpenStack or VMware to seize their market.

Love analysis: will containers become the underlying IT infrastructure like virtualization technology in the future?

Huang Qigong: I think this is the trend of the future. Container orchestration technology Kubernetes will become the core of the future IT infrastructure. It may be difficult for a container to destroy a virtual machine because each technology has its own specific application scenario. However, the future IT infrastructure will take applications as the core, jump out of the original concept of computing as the core and resources as the core, and applications will be deployed based on containers. For developers, operators and other IT personnel, it may be more likely to face the Kubernetes and container layer.

Love analysis: what are the main competitors Suisuyun will encounter when bidding?

Huang Qigong: the first category is startups like Fast Cloud per hour; the second category is OpenStack, but relatively few; the third category is traditional IT service providers in the industry; and the fourth category is Huawei, IBM, Red Hat and other large manufacturers.

Love analysis: how to view the development space of start-up companies in the container industry?

Huang Qigong: I think PaaS based on Kubernetes is not the traditional theoretical IaaS or PaaS, but part of the new IT infrastructure, which will replace a large part of the application scenarios of IaaS.

Hourly cloud creates a cloud platform with application as the core, including container platform, application delivery and application governance, and will be extended to big data, deep learning, CMP, hybrid cloud and other fields in the future. Although the market competition is fierce, the market is broad enough to support hourly cloud to grow into a listed company.

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