We are in an unprecedented era of technological change. If you want to choose the fastest-growing, most widely used and most far-reaching technological innovation, cloud computing and must be what everyone hopes for. Amazon Global Vice President and Executive Director of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China Zhang Wenyi believes that cloud computing "is bringing innovation to all industries at an incredible speed, solving many unprecedented challenges: from autonomous driving and vehicle networking, to new drug research and development and telemedicine, to e-commerce, social networking, games, and even the most popular meta-universe and quantum computing, all of which are inseparable from the support of the cloud."
The cloud computing we talk about usually includes three major categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). According to data from IDCh, the overall market size of public cloud services increased by 29.0% in 2021 to US$408.6 billion. Among them, basic cloud services related to digital priority strategies mainly include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS-SIS (system infrastructure software as a service), accounting for more than 50%, forming the cornerstone of digital transformation of in the enterprise market. Dave McCarthy, vice president of cloud computing and edge infrastructure services research at IDC, said: "Enterprises are increasingly relying on cloud services to modernize operations and provide more value to customers." In this market of up to US$230 billion, eight major public cloud service providers (Amazon Cloud Technology, Microsoft , Google , Alibaba , IBM, Tencent , Huawei and Oracle ) occupy the vast majority of the market share, of which Amazon Cloud Technology alone accounts for up to 40% of the market share, exceeding the second to fifth place combined.
In the evaluation reports of world-class data analysis institutions such as Gartner and IDC, Amazon Cloud Technology is in the leader quadrant of cloud computing infrastructure and platform services, far ahead of other competitors. Since Amazon Cloud Technology entered the relevant reports, Amazon Cloud Technology has always been at the forefront of forward-looking indicators. With the improvement of execution capabilities, it is natural to enter the leader quadrant.
Amazon cloud technology's position in the field of public cloud computing has actually laid the foundation since its birth. In 2006, then CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, proposed the concept of "cloud computing" for the first time at the search engine conference. Amazon provided cloud services such as elastic cloud computing (Amazon EC2), simple storage services (Amazon S3), simple databases (Amazon SimpleDB) in the form of web services. It can be said that the birth of Amazon Cloud Technology is originally derived from the demand for digital infrastructure by its huge business. This is similar to the later Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. They are both upgraded technical facilities caused by internal business needs, thus forming an independent cloud service platform.
"Those who do not plan for the whole world are not enough to plan for the moment; those who do not plan for the overall situation are not enough to plan for a domain." As for the cornerstone of building a digital society, the layout of the cloud computing field must start from small things and also from the overall situation. At the 2022 Amazon Cloud Technology China Summit held not long ago, Amazon Cloud Technology announced four strategic measures: "Connecting China and foreign countries, supporting hundreds of industries, carrying partners, and promoting green", reflecting its goal of integrating global resources and empowering exploration and innovation.
Connecting China and Foreign: The goal is to build a bridge between
"connecting China and Foreign" strategy based on Amazon Cloud Technology's extremely perfect global layout and security compliance practices, and build the best technical bridge for enterprise global expansion: not only serves international enterprises to enter the Chinese market, but also guides Chinese enterprises to explore the global market.
As of now, Amazon Cloud Technology's cloud infrastructure has spread to 87 availability zones, 115 Direct Connect sites, and more than 400 edge nodes in 27 geographical regions around the world. Through 19 local expansion areas, the cloud has been expanded to a densely populated central city, covering 245 countries around the world. In addition, Amazon Cloud Technology plans to launch 8 new areas, 24 availability zones, and 31 local expansion zones.Amazon Cloud Technology has expanded the cloud to the edge of 5G network through the Amazon Wavelength region, expanded the cloud to the user's data center through Amazon Outposts, expanded the cloud to the edge of the Internet of Things devices through IoT services, and even expanded the cloud to the North and South Poles and space through the Amazon Snowball family. Try to achieve consistent cloud services around the world, Amazon Cloud Technology is making the cloud truly ubiquitous.
In July this year, Amazon Cloud Technology also officially launched Amazon Cloud WAN, a fully managed wide area network (WAN) service. With Amazon Cloud WAN, users can easily form their own global private network in a few minutes, connecting branches and Amazon cloud technology areas around the world without having to face the technical and security challenges brought by multiple networks. Unified cloud services, unified network services, and unified security management have helped enterprises pave the way to carry out cross-border business. Especially for Chinese overseas companies, Amazon Cloud Technology's global infrastructure, rich security and compliance practices, and a comprehensive cloud service business system will help them quickly expand overseas businesses and meet various challenges.
Xiangbai Industry: The core is to empower
"Xiangbai Industry" strategy is to integrate into all walks of life and help them transform and innovate digitally. Amazon Cloud Technology has formed a professional team to use its own technologies and solutions to promote industry transformation and upgrading in key industries such as finance, manufacturing, automobiles, retail fast-moving consumer goods, medical care and life sciences , education, games, media entertainment, e-commerce, energy and electricity. Taking the automotive industry as an example, Amazon Cloud Technology focuses on empowering transformation from three directions: autonomous driving, Internet of Vehicles, and software-defined automobiles. At last year's China Summit, Amazon Cloud Technology announced the "Automotive Industry Innovation Acceleration Plan", which will complement the advantages of all parties in the automotive industry chain from three aspects: training and technology output, building industry solutions, and market expansion, and reshape the automotive industry value chain. At this year's China Summit, the plan was upgraded to version 2.0, focusing on three core issues: solutions, car companies going overseas, and partner plans, helping participants develop more competitive solutions to the automotive industry.
Partners: The focus is on win-win
"Partners" strategy lies in building, improving and upgrading Amazon Cloud Technology's partner network. Amazon Cloud Technology has launched the "3+3 Value Achievement System" for its partners. Through the three-layer base support, technical support, collaborative sales and talent training, we will improve the service capabilities of partners, develop localized solutions in a targeted manner, promote business development in new regions, and achieve full coverage of the partner network in all types, industries and regions. Amazon Cloud Technology has launched the full growth path of ISVs, providing technical support to accelerate the SaaSization and service professionalization of their products; by providing various sales resources and Marketplace, they can help partners expand their business scope; they can even rely on Amazon's global resources and support to help partners explore international markets. Amazon Cloud Technology Marketplace has currently covered 26 regions and provides more than 12,000 products in 65 categories from more than 3,000 partners.
Amazon Cloud Technology’s cooperation with SAP, PwC , and Infor is a typical example. Taking the cooperation between Amazon Cloud Technology and PwC as an example, PwC, as the global core partner of Amazon Cloud Technology, uses Amazon Cloud Technology's infrastructure to serve enterprise customers on the one hand, such as using cloud storage, analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning services to carry out big data analysis to provide enterprises with cloud data analysis and insights; on the other hand, the two parties have also jointly created solutions to provide security and compliance consultation, cloud migration and cloud security assessment for various industries, and build a digital platform.
Promoting Green: The key is responsibility
Compared with the other three strategies that focus on business development, the "promoting Green" strategy proposed by Amazon Cloud Technology is more of a reflection of social responsibility. Through the upgrade of its own infrastructure and cloud services, the entire ecosystem, including cloud-based enterprises, can implement the sustainable development strategy .Its specific operations include: First, build a sustainable cloud infrastructure, build a highly available infrastructure, improve methods to cool data centers, and reduce the use of energy and water resources; Second, innovate sustainable cloud services, improve software and hardware efficiency, and optimize cloud workloads; Third, develop cloud applications and solutions to evaluate the company's own carbon emissions and supplier performance, and conduct carbon emission management and supply chain risk management. For example, the free carbon footprint tool "Carbon Footprintml4 Tool" provided by Amazon Cloud Technology can visually display historical carbon emissions and the effect of reducing carbon emissions brought by cloud services.
Six major cloud technology trends to build core competitiveness
Amazon Cloud Technology’s four major measures for the future rely on strong technology and service capabilities. At the China Summit not long ago, Amazon Cloud Technology announced six major cloud technology trends, reflecting the forward-looking and pioneering nature of the current leaders in the public cloud industry.
First, it is the continuous expansion of coverage. Cloud computing is the cornerstone of the future digital society. It can be said that the boundaries of the future cloud are the boundaries of the digital society. Amazon Cloud Technology continues to expand the boundaries of the cloud, from cities to remote areas, from the North and South Poles to space, from core data centers to 5G edges and even private clouds, Amazon Cloud Technology is even in space. No matter where the customer's workload is, Amazon Cloud Technology can provide consistent cloud services.
The second is the underlying innovation of continuous progress. Amazon Cloud Technology has its own underlying core system Amazon Nitro, its self-developed chips Amazon Graviton, Amazon Inferentia and Amazon Trainium. System architecture and chips are innovative and upgraded to better control the performance and cost of cloud service . The cost of most cloud services of Amazon Cloud Technology is more than 20% lower than that of major competitors. The cost-effectiveness of public cloud is one of the key factors that attract users to the cloud.
Third, the database has entered the cloud-native era. As cloud computing is integrating into the IT system increasingly deepens, more efficient and manageable cloud-native applications have become popular. In the current data-driven era, databases, as core assets and source of innovation, have also entered the cloud-native era. The technical architecture of traditional databases cannot fully utilize the flexibility and storage capabilities of the cloud. Moreover, using traditional commercial databases is not only expensive, but also more efficient and difficult to operate and deploy. Cloud native databases can be paid by usage without pre-configured resources, which is cheaper and reduces maintenance difficulty.
Fourth, it is a significantly improved level of intelligence. With the continuous maturity and implementation of artificial intelligence technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence have also been integrated into more and more different types of cloud services such as computing, storage, security, and data analysis. This not only improves the intelligence level of cloud services itself, but also helps improve enterprise production efficiency. For example, Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering intelligent layered service can automatically allocate cold, hot and warm data on the cloud in the most economical form, optimizing customer storage costs.
Five is to fully move towards Serverless. From computing, storage to database, data analysis, and machine learning, the Serverless architecture is changing the model and process of future software development. Serverless allows users to run almost any type of application or backend service code without having to provision or manage infrastructure, greatly alleviating operation and maintenance work, increasing business agility, and better responding to various business uncertainties. The Serverless architecture uses event-triggered mechanism to maximize the elasticity, agility and pay-as-you-go features of cloud computing, and can provide more refined, flexible and agile cloud resources. Amazon Fargate, a serverless computing service for containers launched by Amazon Cloud Technology in 2017, is called a "game-changing" computing service.
Six is a cutting-edge technology that is within reach. The seamless integration capability of cloud computing makes cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and satellite communications within reach, giving more companies the opportunity to participate in the exploration of these cutting-edge technologies, and is used in business areas such as drug research and development, natural disaster early warning, etc.The exploration of cutting-edge technologies means huge investment in capital, usually the exclusive field of large institutions and leading enterprises. Amazon Cloud Technology has incorporated cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and satellite communication into the cloud service system, allowing them to enter the vision of more people. For example, Amazon Braket service can test quantum algorithms and troubleshoot problems by exploring the infinite possibilities of quantum computing by simulating quantum computer running on Amazon Cloud Technology.
written at the end
Cloud computing is an innovation and revolution that can break the underlying logic and change the rules of the game in the IT field. Amazon Cloud Technology is undoubtedly the backbone of the cloud computing industry and leads the industry's progress. Zhang Wenyi said, "Amazon Cloud Technology's cutting-edge exploration of cloud technology has provided the impetus for customers from all walks of life and types around the world to accelerate digital transformation and innovation."
