An arrow through the clouds, thousands of troops and horses to meet each other. Who in the world of the cloud has such appeal?
Some say it's the charm of the cloud market itself. IDC's latest report shows that the global cloud market will continue to grow at a high speed, reaching $1 trillion by 2024, and the share of the Chinese market is expected to exceed 10%.
Some say it's the cloud's ability to define everything. According to Accenture's research, from 2018 to 2021, among the 8,300 benchmarking companies selected from around the world, the top 10% of companies that embrace digital technologies such as cloud computing have a revenue growth rate of 5 times faster than the bottom 25%.
Obviously, the cloud has become the cradle of the new digital world, so who is the cornerstone of the cloud? Partners from more than 200 cloud vendors around the world provide product and technical support for more than 80% of cloud instances of mainstream cloud service providers, and the cloud ecosystem based on their infrastructure is huge and robust, and the solution of soft and hard collaboration is unique - the answer is unexpected and reasonable.
Yes, Intel. Whether it is overseas giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, or domestic leaders such as Ali and Tencent, there is intel's full support behind them. In a sense, Intel has been interpreting the meaning of the cloud and setting the benchmark for the world of the cloud.
The "character" of the cloud: trustworthy× consistent × predictability
In the era of digital transformation of thousands of industries, going to the cloud has become the only way. Cloud-based IT strategies promise to lead to increased agility and efficiency, but also lead to increasing complexity. Enterprise cloud architectures often span multiple vendors and cloud platforms, and integrate with a growing number of cloud, network, edge, and end devices.
Deploying and migrating workloads becomes more difficult in a volatile environment – how can workloads be diversified, with underlying products and services and new cloud-native applications stacked on top of them? Do I have to retest everything or refactor a lot of code? How can I ensure that my infrastructure can meet my application requirements? How can long-term flexibility, cost, and scalability be balanced?
Solving the above problems is closely related to the choice of basic facilities and service modes such as hardware and software of the cloud base. Among the many variables, trustworthiness, consistency and predictability are the three most important elements when users make decisions.
Research shows that more than 75% of company executives believe that trust when using the cloud is an important and priority. Intel technologies are recognized by major cloud service providers, mainstream ISVs such as Oracle, SAP, and VMware certify cloud environments only or primarily on Intel architecture, and relatively small ISVs prioritize optimizing their applications for Intel technologies.
From the cloud to the edge to on-premises, a consistent, scalable architecture is important. Intel offers a dedicated architecture that delivers consistent performance across a wide range of workloads. In particular, Intel is committed to achieving consistent, predictable application performance gains with each new generation of processors, significantly increasing the certainty of cloud infrastructure – up to 1.46 times the performance of third-generation Intel ® Xeon ® Scalable processors compared to the previous generation of processors.
Today, millions of Intel ®CPUs are running on major cloud platforms. As a result, users can be confident enough to achieve seamless transitions when migrating workloads from on-premises to the cloud, or between different clouds. In contrast, moving from Intel architecture to other platforms may require extensive application revalidation or refactoring, with uncertainty skyrocketing.
With a cloud ecosystem built with ISVs, OEMs, and cloud service providers, Intel continues to optimize in terms of technical capabilities and price/performance, creating many dedicated instances. For example, The Microsoft Azure DCsv2 virtual machine is designed to better support demanding tasks, excelling at data encryption and decryption, in-memory databases, and data analytics.
For latency-sensitive workloads such as databases and e-commerce applications, Intel ® Xeon ® Scalable processors meet stringent conditions and service-level agreements, making them a widely deployed computing engine on public cloud platforms. Users can also choose from hundreds of different workload tuning instance types, many of which are supported by more innovative technologies such as Intel ® ® Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Intel ® SmartNIC, Intel QuickAssist, and Intel ® Optane ™ Persistent Memory.
The "internal power" of the cloud: open source × optimization × full-stack empowerment
Based on the rational allocation of resources and the need for risk diversification management, more and more enterprises adopt hybrid cloud architecture and tend to choose multiple public clouds as partners. Enterprises are moving between several cloud platforms, and it is difficult to achieve the desired goals without good skills and suitable helpers.
When enterprise workloads need to migrate to other cloud providers, they may face the challenge of having a significant portion of enterprise applications that do not have commercial support for non-x86 architectures, as do many of the major open source software components, tools, orchestrations, and container images.
It is worth noting that the vast majority of enterprise applications and open source projects are first developed on the basis of Intel ® architecture. As a veteran player with 20 years of global open source experience, Intel has been an important contributor to the Linux kernel for the past 10 years and is active in more than 650 open source projects such as KVM, Kubernetes, tensorFlow, etc.
The leading open source community in China is also the goal of Intel's deep cultivation. Alibaba Cloud is a long-standing strategic partner of Intel, and its open source community built around the Dragon Lizard operating system is beginning to take shape. Relying on the accumulation of resources in the open source field, Intel actively participates in the construction of the dragon lizard community, in-depth topic discussion, promotes technological innovation, and wins good feedback.
Intel also invests significant time and effort to ensure that customers get higher performance from enterprise applications. Users benefit from optimizing apps, tools, libraries, and frameworks. Most popular AI frameworks such as OpenVINO™, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet have been optimized by Intel to get ® the most out of Intel AVX-512 and Intel ® DL Boost.
These optimizations can increase the speed of AI inference by up to 30 times, allowing users to gain insights faster. Intel has also developed a development team with extensive experience in compiler tuning and validation, programming languages, and middleware to ensure that a wide range of emerging technologies and applications can run on Intel ® architecture, and has supported more than 700 mainstream cloud and enterprise ISVs to date.
It can be seen that Intel's contribution to the entire cloud ecosystem is multi-layered and systematic, beyond the general understanding of the industry. Intel recently proposed the concept of "full-stack empowerment" for cloud platforms from the dimensions of hardware and software and solutions, further expressing its determination to expand its influence.
As we all know, mainstream cloud service providers usually carry out product development and application adaptation in advance when Intel launches a new generation of chips to help users achieve a smooth transition based on the new architecture; what is less known is that Intel has cooperated with cloud service providers in the field of cloud-native new project development and other fields, empowering and optimizing with the help of underlying software and hardware technology - the "sandbox container" cooperating with Alibaba Cloud is a typical representative, and the relevant results have been recognized by users.
Tencent Cloud launched a data drop solution with a new storage engine design and Intel ® Optane ™ persistent memory, reconstructing and optimizing the speed of SSD CBS products. With better bandwidth, lower latency, and higher number of reads and writes per second, the new solution creates a high-speed cloud storage experience for performance-intensive user service scenarios.
Intel is also working with NetEase Shufan to explore a variety of products and services that combine software and hardware. NetEase Cloud Music introduced the Redis memory database of Qingzhou middleware, which runs Redis on a server equipped with large-capacity Intel Optane persistent memory, realizing high-performance, high-density hybrid deployment, greatly improving resource utilization, and reducing the overall cost of cloud use by 30%.
According to IT Genesis, Intel has conducted in-depth cooperation with partners such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, JD Cloud, NetEase Cloud, Volcano Engine, Kingsoft Cloud, 21Vianet, and Qingyun to promote platform innovation and optimization in the cloud and data center markets such as public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud, and to help the development of the digital economy.
The "bottom line" of the cloud: reducing costs× data security× controllable supply chains
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is no longer a trendy concept, but it's still worth considering when choosing a cloud infrastructure. Hardware costs are important, but they are only part of the investment. According to the survey, 64% of it IT decision makers surveyed found that the cost increase caused by extensive refactoring and re-verification was more serious.
Tools that assess cloud costs typically refer only to instance costs, but this approach can be misleading. For example, many enterprise ISVs charge per core, and choosing a product with fewer cores but offering similar performance to more core nodes can obviously reduce software licensing costs.
Intel ® server platforms offer excellent virtual machine (VM) density, allowing users to achieve higher performance with fewer cores. In addition to the number of cores, consider migration simplicity, compatibility, and vendor binding risks. Intel partnered with Densify to develop cloud optimizer tools that help optimize cloud, container, and VMware infrastructures, recommending the right public cloud instances based on the performance and price characteristics required for specific workloads.
If reducing costs is the economic bottom line of the cloud, then data assurance is the bottom line of the cloud' security. The exponential growth of data is driving a paradigm shift, and there is an urgent need for more effective approaches to data protection. With 3rd Gen Xeon ® Scalable processors, Intel can deliver on its "safety first" promise—software innovations based on cryptographic accelerators and all levels of the stack that deliver superior performance for cryptographic algorithms.
In the context of the global chip shortage, the control of the supply chain is also crucial. Intel has a secure, reliable supply chain with more than 9,000 Tier 1 suppliers in more than 80 countries and territories. Intel's breadth and depth in software, chips, platforms, packaging, and manufacturing enables customers to support their next-generation innovation with scale-up manufacturing capabilities.
Perhaps, the shape of the cloud will be ever-changing in the future, but the "core" will persist with it, and Intel's pace of interpreting the cloud will never stop.