Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

What do cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence mean respectively? Why are we talking about the relationship among these three today? Because these three things are very popular now, and they seem to be related to each other: big data is usually mentioned when talking about cloud computing, big data is mentioned when talking about artificial intelligence, and cloud computing is mentioned when talking about artificial intelligence. It feels that the three are complementary and inseparable. However, if they are non-technical personnel, it may be difficult to understand the relationship between the three, so it is necessary to explain. So come and have a look with the editor.

I. the original goal of cloud computing

Let's start with cloud computing. The initial goal of cloud computing is to manage resources, mainly in three aspects: computing resources, network resources and storage resources.

1. Managing a data center is like a computer.

What are computing, network, and storage resources?

For example, if you want to buy a laptop, do you care what kind of CPU it is? How much memory? These two are what we call computing resources.

To surf the Internet, this computer needs a network port that can be plugged into the network, or a wireless network card that can connect to our router. Your home also needs to open a network, such as 100m bandwidth, to an operator such as Unicom, China Mobile or China Telecom. Then a master will bring a network cable to your home, and the master may help you configure your router and their company's network connection. In this way, all your computers, mobile phones and tablets can surf the Internet through your router. This is the network resource.

You may also ask how big the hard drive is. In the past, hard drives were very small, such as 10G; later, even 500G, 1T, 2T hard drives are not new. (1T is 1000G), this is the storage resource.

This is true for a computer, and the same is true for a data center. Imagine you have a very large computer room with a lot of servers, which also have CPU, memory, hard drives, and access to the Internet through router-like devices. The question is: how do the people who run the data center manage these devices in a unified way?

two。 Flexibility means to have it whenever you want, as much as you want.

The goal of management is to achieve flexibility in two aspects. What are the two specific aspects?

For example, if a person needs a very small computer with only one CPU, 1 gigabyte of memory, 10 gigabytes of hard disk, and one megabyte of bandwidth, can you give it to him? For a computer of such a small size, any laptop is now better than this configuration, and it takes 100m to pull a broadband at home. However, if he goes to a cloud computing platform, he only needs a little bit when he wants this resource.

In this case, it can achieve flexibility in two ways:

Time flexibility: you can have it whenever you want, and come out at a little bit when you need it.

Space flexibility: have as much as you want. Need a very small computer, can be satisfied; need a very large space such as cloud disk, cloud disk for everyone to allocate space is always very large, upload at any time there is space, never run out of space, can also be satisfied.

Space flexibility and time flexibility are what we often call the flexibility of cloud computing. It has taken a long time to solve this problem of flexibility.

3. Physical devices are inflexible

The first stage is the period of physical equipment. During this period, customers need a computer, so we buy one and put it in the data center.

Of course, physical devices are getting better and better, such as servers, memory is always 100 gigabytes of memory; for example, network devices, the bandwidth of a port can be tens of gigabytes or even hundreds of gigabytes; for example, storage is at least PB level in the data center (one P is 1000 T, one T is 1000 gigabytes).

However, physical devices are not very flexible:

The first is its lack of time flexibility. You can't do it whenever you want it. For example, to buy a server and a computer, you need to have time to purchase. If a user suddenly tells a cloud manufacturer that they want to open a computer and use a physical server, it will be difficult to buy at that time. A good relationship with a supplier may take a week, while a general relationship with a supplier may take a month to purchase. Users wait a long time for the computer to be in place, and then users have to log in and slowly start deploying their own applications. Time flexibility is very poor.

Second, its spatial flexibility is not good either. For example, the above-mentioned users need a very small computer, but how can there be such a small computer now? You can't buy such a small machine in order to satisfy users that only one gigabyte of memory is 80 gigabytes of hard disk. However, if you buy a big one, you will need to charge users more money because of the large computer, but the users only need to use it a little bit smaller, so it is very unfair to pay more.

4. Virtualization is much more flexible.

Someone figured it out. The first way is to virtualize. Don't users only want a very small computer? The physical equipment in the data center is very powerful. I can virtualize a small piece from the physical CPU, memory and hard disk to customers, as well as a small piece to other customers. Each customer can only see a small piece of his own, but in fact, each customer is using a small piece of the whole large device.

Virtualization technology makes the computers of different customers appear to be isolated. That is, I look as if this disk is mine, and if you look at this disk, it is yours, but in fact, it is possible that my 10G and your 10G fall on the same big storage. And if the physical devices are ready in advance, the virtualization software to virtualize a computer is very fast and can be solved in a few minutes. So if you want to create a computer on any cloud, it will come out in a few minutes. That's why.

In this way, space flexibility and time flexibility are basically solved.

5. Making money and feelings in the virtual world

In the virtualization phase, the best company is VMware. It is an early company to implement virtualization technology, which can realize the virtualization of computing, network and storage. The company was very good, its performance was very good, and its virtualization software sold very well, made a lot of money, and was later acquired by EMC (one of the top 500 storage manufacturers).

But there are still a lot of sentimental people in this world, especially among programmers. What do sentimental people like to do? Open source.

A lot of software in the world has closed source and open source, and the source is the source code. In other words, a certain software is well done, everyone likes to use it, but the code of this software is sealed by me, only my company knows, others do not know. If other people want to use this software, they have to pay me, which is called closed source.

But there are always some big bulls in the world who don't like the situation in which money is made by a family. Daniel thinks that you can and I can develop this technology; if you can develop it, so can I. I developed it for free, and I took out the code and shared it with you. Anyone in the world can use it, and all people can enjoy the benefits. This is called open source.

For example, the recent Tim Berners-Lee is a very affectionate person. In 2017, he won the 2016 Turing Award for "inventing the World wide Web, the first browser, and the basic protocols and algorithms that enable the World wide Web to expand." The Turing Prize is the Nobel Prize in the computer industry. What is most admirable about him, however, is that he has contributed the World wide Web, our common WWW technology, to the world for free. We should thank him for all our actions on the Internet. If he uses this technology to collect money, he should be as rich as Bill Gates.

There are many examples of open source and closed source:

For example, in the closed-source world, there is Windows, and everyone has to pay Microsoft to use Windows; in the open source world, there is Linux. Bill Gates made a lot of money from closed-source software such as Windows and Office, and he was called the richest man in the world. Daniel developed another operating system, Linux. Many people may not have heard of Linux, many backstage servers running programs are on Linux, such as enjoy Singles' Day, whether it is Taobao, JD.com, koalas … The systems that support the rush to buy Singles Day are all running on Linux.

If there is Apple, there is Android. Apple has a high market capitalization, but we can't see the code for Apple's system. So Daniel wrote the Android mobile operating system. So you can see that almost all other mobile phone manufacturers are equipped with Android. The reason is that Apple does not have a source, while Android is available to everyone.

The same is true for virtualization software, which is very expensive with VMware. Then Daniel wrote two open source virtualization software, one is called Xen, the other is called KVM, if you do not do technology, you can ignore these two names, but will still be mentioned later.

6. Semi-automatic virtualization and fully automatic cloud computing

It is not entirely true to say that virtualization software solves the problem of flexibility. Because virtualization software generally creates a virtual computer, it needs to manually specify which physical machine the virtual computer is placed on. This process may also require more complex manual configuration. So using VMware virtualization software, you need to take a very strong certificate, and people who can get this certificate, the salary is quite high, you can also see the degree of complexity.

Therefore, the cluster scale of physical machines that can be managed by virtualization software is not particularly large, generally in a scale of more than a dozen, dozens or at most one hundred.

On the one hand, it affects time flexibility: although a virtual computer

These are the details of what cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence mean, and do you have anything to gain after reading them? If you want to know more, welcome to the industry information!

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