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

Recently, Aliyun launched a new product, Edge Node Service (ENS). With the deepening of product operation and promotion, users occasionally encounter doubts about ENS products and several other products, such as:

ENS is deployed in the CDN location, can users directly use CDN instead?

The resources provided by ENS are virtual machines, how is it different from ECS products?

The Internet of things also has edge computing. What problems does ENS and it solve respectively?

In response to the above questions, Wang Wenjuan, Senior Product Manager of Aliyun, will explain in detail from the aspects of location, capability, scenario, competition and so on. Through this article, users can fully understand the differences between ENS and other products, and be able to match the best solution for each kind of scenario.

Product definition

The product definitions of CDN, ECS and Link Edge can be easily obtained from Aliyun's official website and help documents. My excerpt is as follows:

CDN: distribute the content of the origin server to the node closest to the user, so that the user can get the required content nearby, and improve the response speed and success rate of user access. To solve the access delay caused by distribution, bandwidth and server performance, it is suitable for site acceleration, VOD, LVB and other scenarios.

ECS: CVM ECS (Elastic Compute Service) is an elastic and scalable computing service that helps you reduce IT costs, improve the efficiency of operation and maintenance, and make you more focused on core business innovation.

Link Edge: the edge computing platform of the Internet of things, also known as Link Edge, is an extension of Ali Cloud's capabilities at the edge. It can be deployed in smart devices and computing nodes of different orders of magnitude, connect devices of different protocols and data formats through the defined object model, and provide local computing services with security and reliability, low delay, low cost, easy scalability and weak dependence.

ENS: provides an CDN-based edge elastic infrastructure that allows you to sink computing, forwarding and other services to the edge. Reduce the response delay and bandwidth cost, reduce the pressure on the central cluster, and is suitable for all kinds of services under the "center + edge" architecture model.

By taking the literal definition of the above four products, disassembling and extracting the keywords, we can roughly get the following keywords:

CDN: content, nearest access, resolution of access delay

ECS: elasticity, Computing

Link Edge: Internet of things, deployment nodes, defined devices, local computing

ENS: edge nodes, resilient infrastructure, latency reduction

Core difference

From the above definition and keyword disassembly, we can see the obvious differences of each product in terms of location, capability, focus, and so on, which are summarized in the following table.

ENS and CDN

At present, both ENS and CDN are located on the edge of the metropolitan area network based on cities and operators, and both meet the needs of users for proximity processing and area-wide coverage.

The main difference between the two products lies in the capabilities provided. CDN is a mature field with clear demand scenarios after years of development. It focuses on accelerating the distribution of files and video content. Users can use CDN to accelerate content after adding domain names, configuring origin servers, adding CNAME and other operations.

On the other hand, ENS opens up the computing power mining of the edge location, and is not limited to doing a thing of content acceleration. Users can flexibly choose computing power specifications, protocols and ports according to their business needs, and develop and deploy their own edge-close processing system.

Therefore, if users want to do standard content acceleration, it is recommended to use CDN products; if users want to do custom nearby processing, forwarding, caching and logic on edge nodes, it is recommended to use ENS products.

ENS and ECS

In terms of capability, both ENS and ECS currently provide virtual machine resources, which seem to converge, but virtual machine is only the form choice (technology maturity, customer acceptance, cut-in progress) at the initial stage of ENS product business. In the medium to long term, the core capability of ENS lies in edge coverage and nearby processing capabilities, with the goal of providing a perfect distributed computing distribution and scheduling platform, while the form is virtual machine, container, function or other. It does not deliberately limit the user.

The greater difference between the two products is at the location and coverage level. Users use ECS as the master station and data center. Even if multiple availability factors are taken into account, less than 5 region is generally sufficient to meet the needs. The purpose of users using ENS is to solve the nearest access needs that cannot be met by the cloud center.

Therefore, if you want to be a master station or data center, and pay attention to ultra-high availability but not network transmission delay, you are recommended to use ECS products; if you are concerned about terminal access delay, a large number of data room resources across the country are still being used outside the cloud center, ENS products are recommended.

ENS and Linkedge

ENS and Linkedge are both in the broad edge computing field. Due to the differences in product capabilities and deployment locations, there are clear differences in their applicable scenarios.

As an edge computing platform of the Internet of things, Linkedge provides SDK components to help users deploy SDK on their own gateways or other intelligent devices on the user's local side. Through cloud collaboration, it can complete intelligent device access, rule setting, message routing, local function calculation and other operations. It is suitable for scenarios where IoT terminals report and respond locally, such as homes, buildings, factories, and so on.

ENS products, through self-building, co-building and cooperation, have mastered a large number of node resources on the edge of the network, and on the basis of these resources, a highly automated remote operation and management standard ApsaraEdge system is built, which provides distributed and flexible computing resources with full coverage. Users can flexibly pay to use ENS computing resources to build their own nearest processing services, and the terminals accessing edge nodes can be PC / PHONE / TV / CAMERA.... And other networking devices.

Summary

To sum up, there are clear differences and cutting surfaces between ENS and CDN, ECS, LinkEdge and other products in terms of location coverage, providing capabilities, scene-oriented and so on. Hope that readers of this article have a clear understanding of the definition, capability and differentiation of ENS products, and look forward to all kinds of friends in the field of edge computing to communicate with us!

Author: Guan Lei

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.