Hello everyone, we are rubbing the heat of the Winter Olympics again (manual dog head).
After all, this Winter Olympics is not only a wonderful event, but also the black technology frequently exposed behind it also makes people overwhelmed to fill the small blackboard for selecting topics.
From the "snowflakes step by step" at the opening ceremony, to the "cheetah" and "flying cat" thanked by the whole network in the course of the race, to the sign language commentary in each live broadcast room, the digital people with cargo ice piers... This is not only a feast for sports fans, but also a feast for technology lovers.
Even, the above is only what you can "see". Digging deeper, behind this Winter Olympics, the changes brought about by technology have really penetrated into every capillary of the ice and snow event, everywhere.
What to say?
I don't know if you noticed this special effect called "Bullet Time" in the speed skating competition.
With 120 cameras shooting footage + post-production crews continuing to explode for more than a month, Neo in "The Matrix" has this cool few seconds.
But now in the Winter Olympics, within 1 minute, such special effects can be automatically synthesized, accompanied by live broadcast of the game to the audience immediately presented.
The reason why it can be done so quickly is directly related to one of the major changes in the Winter Olympic Games, that is, the first full cloud of the core system of the Winter Olympic Games.
Backed by cloud computing, not only dozens of 4K high-definition signal content formed by dozens of shooting angles can be transmitted and processed in the minute level, but for tv stations that broadcast events, they do not even need to send people to the scene at all, and they can get 4K/8K event pictures on the cloud, and complete editing and broadcasting.
The data shows that the Beijing Winter Olympics, which adopted the cloud broadcasting method, had about 32% fewer live broadcasters than the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
And that's not all.
In fact, from a lower-level perspective, the full cloud is like putting a new engine on the Olympic car:
The Winter Olympics on the cloud are revolutionizing the IT architecture, the way it is disseminated, and even "making the impossible possible" for such a global event...
Bach: Cloud technology sets a new standard for the Olympics
Let's pull back to 2004.
At that time, the Athens Olympic Games were attracting the attention of the whole world.
As a first-hand witness of the technical preparations for the Olympic Games, Zhang Dazhi, head of the Alibaba Cloud Olympic project, introduced that before the event was held, the relevant technical preparations had actually lasted for 4-5 years.
Most of this time is spent on the construction of traditional data centers:
For the organizing committee, even with the help of partners or suppliers, from the equipment shelf to the subsequent operation and maintenance management, it is still necessary to pay attention to it personally.
In this way, in the basic guarantee work of technical management of this event, the organizing committee needs to spend a lot of time and energy, and the equipment costs and labor costs generated are also very huge.
The bigger problem may be after the game: after a dozen days of the game, this temporary data center is useless, and it is inevitable that a lot of resources will be wasted after demolition.
It was also at this point in time that the concept of the cloud began to emerge in the technology world.
In 2004, Google published three articles on distributed file systems, parallel computing, and distributed databases, providing the basis for the evolution of computing systems from centralized to distributed.
In the same period, due to the development of the Internet, the global backbone network infrastructure has made breakthrough progress.
In 2008, Alibaba established a cloud computing strategy. The following year, Alibaba Cloud was officially established, and the cloud operating system developed by Alibaba Cloud was named "Feitian".
The road to "Feitian" research and development is quite bumpy, and engineers once carried the insult of "human flesh calculation" and struggled to move forward in a wave of doubts. It was not until 2013, when Alibaba Cloud became the first company in the world to provide 5,000 servers with computing power, that Feitian made substantial progress in research and development.
Feitian is like a huge network, connecting millions of servers in data centers in different regions of the world into a supercomputer, and enterprises or individuals can obtain unlimited computing power as long as they are connected to the Internet no matter where they are.
This invisibly provides a very suitable infrastructure for the Olympic Games, which changes the host city every four years. In 2016, cloud computing finally entered the vision of the International Olympic Committee, when cloud technology has matured quite well, and has replaced traditional IT as a new type of infrastructure in storage, networking, video and other technologies.
At that time, the traffic of Double 11 supported by Alibaba Cloud had reached the level of 175,000 transaction orders per second and 120,000 payments per second.
The ability to smoothly survive such a level of traffic peak successfully attracted the attention of the International Olympic Committee.
In 2017, after Alibaba Cloud engineers demonstrated their ability to build a cloud-based broadcast-grade live broadcast environment for 10 minutes, the IOC finally decided to cooperate with it. Alibaba Cloud has become the IOC's only global cloud service partner.
This means that building a brand new data center from scratch is no longer a must for the Olympics.
In this way, after going to the cloud, the IT construction model of the Olympic Games was completely subverted:
The organizing committee no longer needs to consider issues such as equipment procurement and operation and maintenance management, but only needs to use the existing Alibaba Cloud cloud computing capabilities according to the needs of the online system.
Zhang Dazhi revealed that when launching a new system, Alibaba Cloud can build the cloud environment it needs at the minute level.
With the development of the Olympic games, when the demand for computing power and storage resources in the Olympic system has risen, cloud-based services can achieve rapid expansion.
This is very difficult in the traditional IT infrastructure construction, adding servers to deployment, testing, and going live, which often means a month or two of months.
This undoubtedly greatly reduces the cost of investment required for the Olympic Games in the construction of IT infrastructure.
The waste caused by the past "demolition, construction and demolition" has also been effectively solved. All computing resources and products serving the Olympic Games can be released after the game to continue to serve other customers who need cloud computing.
At the same time, the Olympic Games on the cloud are also more in line with the new trend of "green Olympics". The Beijing Winter Olympics data center adopts natural air cooling, immersion liquid cooling, intelligent temperature regulation and other technologies to achieve zero mechanical refrigeration and reduce energy consumption by more than 70%. Its energy consumption is as low as 1.09 compared to PUE.
Note: PUE = total data center energy consumption / IT equipment energy consumption, the closer to 1 indicates that the energy efficiency level is better.
In fact, such a new IT construction logic has been tried out at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021: the Tokyo Olympic Games have adopted the form of cloud broadcasting for the first time.
In 2022, the core system of the Beijing Winter Olympics was officially fully clouded.
IOC President Bach said:
Cloud computing has left a new technical standard for the Olympics.
The Winter Olympics are on the clouds, why now?
After combing through this road where cloud computing and the Olympic Games meet, the reasons why the Olympic Games fully embrace cloud computing at the time node of 2022 have become clearer.
It can be divided into two main aspects.
On the one hand, it comes from the Olympic Games themselves. The Olympic Games have always been a window for high-tech to debut. And these technologies are not just about "showing muscle", but more importantly, the urgent need of the Olympic Games.
As a sports event for human beings to explore the limits of physical fitness, the slight differences in the Olympic arena are often of great significance. How to more accurately determine these details and present them to a global audience is the goal that the Olympic Games have always pursued.
On the other hand, the Olympic Games are also one of the best testing grounds for high-tech.
The hosting of Olympic games has always been known for its high standards and high requirements. Behind this is not only the strict control of all aspects of the competition itself, but also the careful coordination of the on-site broadcast of the event, the operation and maintenance of the Olympic Village, the organization and management of personnel, and strives to minimize the possibility of mistakes and failures.
As a result, the technology that can be featured at the Olympic Games has often developed itself and has the capacity to take on major situations.
Based on the promotion of these two factors, the Winter Olympics have become a natural thing.
Let's start with the maturity of the technology.
Self-developed core cloud network technology
This year, OBS Cloud, the Olympic broadcasting cloud developed by Olympic broadcasting service company OBS in cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, has fully undertaken the work of broadcasting Olympic events, so that Olympic broadcasting no longer relies solely on satellite transmission.
On the cloud, live signals no longer need to pass through OB trucks, on-site editing facilities, and signal transmitters, but are transmitted directly to the rest of the world through a global network deployed on the cloud.
This network technology that supports cloud broadcasting was named "Luoshen" by Chinese programmers, taking the name of the god of the Luohe River. In ancient times, river transport was a very important and very fast means of transportation, and the river network was very important, just like today's network.
"Roselle" is a network subsystem of Feitian, on the one hand, through network virtualization, to provide users with network products and services. On the other hand, as the underlying technical system, it supports almost all Alibaba Cloud products, including computing, storage, and databases.
Its core capabilities can be divided into three aspects: hyperscale, ultra-high performance and super elasticity.
Ultra-large scale: It means that there are enough "tubes" broadcast on the cloud, and Alibaba Cloud Network has the ultra-large scale capability of one million VPCs per region and 300,000 instances per VPC.
Ultra-high performance: to ensure that the "pipe is thick enough", the use of self-developed DPCA MOC card, and the basic components of the VPC are optimized for software and hardware integration, which greatly reduces latency.
Super elasticity: The NFV platform enables high flexibility and resiliency of complex service network elements.
Elasticity is one of the core advantages of cloud computing, which can flexibly expand and shrink the computing power of the network according to actual needs. The sudden surge in visits during the Double 11 event every year is solved by this technology.
This is mainly through the network function construction technology based on the computing node to achieve super elasticity of the network.
Similar situations occur from time to time during the Winter Olympics, such as when watching the opening ceremony.
When a large number of viewers pour into the network, this is a completely different situation from the peak and valley access of the daily network, and it is necessary to quickly adjust the bandwidth to carry a large number of user visits.
However, this bandwidth may not be called in normal times, and it will be quickly returned to the public computing pool after the peak period, avoiding idle waste after the peak period.
In addition, there is an operating system called network intelligence services, which mainly guarantees that the services of the cloud network are stable and reliable.
This is a big data analysis system based on real-time computing and offline computing, which can provide reference data when planning the network to help engineers build the network more efficiently; in operation, it can analyze which places in the entire network are prone to abnormalities and analyze the reasons for it.
For example, when the network jitters, the system can analyze the causes of jitter, the consequences, how to solve problems.
Taking Bach and Xiaoyaozi's cloud meeting as an example, Alibaba Cloud Network will not only provide a large-scale, highly elastic underlying network, but also use a line for backup, and there will also be a monitoring system to monitor possible failures in the network in real time.
Once a fault is detected on the original line, the system can automatically switch to the backup line to ensure that the call on the cloud is not interrupted.
At present, the Alibaba Cloud network system has been able to control the time of network switching and recovery in about seconds, so that users can hardly feel the caton when watching.
Cloud storage with intelligent memory separation
Cloud retransmission is not only a transmission link, but also includes editing, production, saving and other functions, which requires the support of cloud storage.
For example, the real-time editing platform provided on the "Olympic Broadcast Cloud" allows staff to not only access all the videos of the Winter Olympic Games in the cloud, but also to tailor and edit on the cloud.
This involves the "hot and cold storage" of data.
The content that needs to be edited in real time will be stored in the "hot storage area", with low read latency and large bandwidth, supporting TB-level cache to accelerate read and write, reduce latency, and support dozens of 4K bitrate editing work.
After the editing work is completed, the video will gradually flow to the more energy-efficient warm storage area and cold storage area together with the historical image of the Olympic Games.
For example, this year, the Olympic Committee launched the "Centennial Olympic Games" plan, which migrates and stores the data and images of the Current Winter Olympic Games and all previous Olympic Games to the cloud for long-term preservation.
For historical images, Alibaba Cloud uses an intelligent layering method to automatically classify files, which can divide storage objects into four levels according to how often the data is accessed.
They are standard type, low frequency type, archive type, and cold archive type.
For example, video materials of popular players and competitions will be automatically stored in the standard type for easy access at any time. Data that has not been accessed for a long time is placed in the lowest-grade cold archive type.
It is worth mentioning that for cold archive type data, most of the cost in storage comes from the cost of electricity.
Therefore, Alibaba Cloud has independently designed a tile-type high-density disk cabinet, which can be combined with intelligent power-up algorithms to make the storage performance and energy consumption more balanced, and further reduce costs.
That is, the data is stored on the physical hard disk, and when one hard disk is full, it will power down; only when the corresponding data needs to be read, the system will reactivate the hard disk.
At present, the reliability and availability of this set of storage technologies have been repeatedly verified in the actual business of tens of thousands of terabytes and hundreds of millions of requests per day.
In addition, data security issues need to be considered when storing data.
Alibaba Cloud Network can provide five key management modes, which are hosted on the cloud and offline. Additional protections are also supported, WORM (write once read many), which supports write-once-read multiple times to ensure that stored data is not tampered with when it is accessed.
In addition to the maturity of technology, the cloud of the Winter Olympics is also related to the development of cloud computing scale.
In 2020, the overall market size of domestic cloud computing reached 178.1 billion yuan, with a growth rate of more than 33%. Among them, the public cloud market reached 99.06 billion yuan, an increase of 43.7% year-on-year; the private cloud market size was 79.12 billion yuan, an increase of 22.6% year-on-year.
According to IDC's "China Public Cloud Service Market (Q3 2021) Tracking Report", the overall market size of mainland public cloud services in the third quarter of last year has reached 45.761 billion yuan.
On the other side of the market boom, there is also strong support at the national level.
As an important part of digital infrastructure, the term "cloud computing" has appeared more and more often in national policies in recent years.
In the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the Outline of Long-term Goals for 2035 issued in 2020, it is mentioned that "cloud computing is regarded as a frontier industry for strengthening the national strategic scientific and technological strength, and it is one of the strategic emerging industries for the national key development".
The "Three-year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)" issued last year also requires accelerating the integration and development of traditional data centers with networks and cloud computing.
It is not difficult to see that the cloud of the Winter Olympics is not a collision under the "coincidence" of science and technology and the Olympic Games, but a "necessity" produced by the combination of time, place and multi-faceted factors.
Olympic infrastructure has entered the digital age
After more than ten years of commercial development, cloud computing has finally come to the Olympic Games today.
And such a technological change, perhaps just like the development of communication technology from 3G to 4G, 5G, has a hint of moist and silent taste.
From the perspective of an ordinary audience, the Olympic Games on the cloud undoubtedly bring a more novel and rich viewing experience.
Based on the implementation of cloud computing, AI, big data applications, so that bullet time special effects, multi-camera viewing, athlete history game tracking and other functions are presented on the small screen in people's hands, but also let the traditional unilateral "acceptance" viewing began to quietly change.
From the perspective of the event organizer, using digital infrastructure to change the traditional IT infrastructure will not only save manpower, time and construction costs, but also make the organizer pay more attention to the event itself.
At the same time, it also opened a new window for the broadcast mode of large-scale events in the future - perhaps by the next Olympic Games, cloud broadcasting has become the mainstream, just like online shopping today, which is as sparse and usual as the lives of the public.
Furthermore, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing left the city with a wealth of offline venues, fitness equipment and sportsmanship.
Fourteen years later, when the Olympic torch comes to the same city again, it will be accompanied by a digital infrastructure that is booming in the virtual world.
The longer-term implications may emerge as the legacy of the 2008 summer event continues to unfold in the digital world of the future.