Ali Cloud Is Strengthening Its Video Cloud Service and Edge Computing

Technology Author: Zekun Wang Apr 10, 2019 05:47 PM (GMT+8)

Ali Cloud will invest more in the edge computing.

Alibaba. Photo: Credited to Ali Cloud

On April 10, 2019, ZHU Zhaoyuan (朱照远), the manager of the video cloud of Ali Cloud, and the man in charge of the edge computing, said at the CDN summit that “the market pattern of Chinese video cloud was settled, and the edge computing would be a new track for the Content Delivery Network (CDN).” ZHU believed that with its complete products line, the advanced technology and talents, the low cost and high efficiency, as well as the best service, Ali Cloud has won the phased victory of the competition of the video cloud.

According to the data from CCW Research, in terms of the video cloud, the head players’ market shares are increasing while the technology and resources are making the barrier for this industry. Ali Cloud’s video cloud occupies 42.5% of the market share, and its share equals to the sum of those of the second company to the fifth company. On the other hand, with the rapid development of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, IoT and 5G, the new requirements are generated from billions of devices, including the management of a great amount of data, the reducing of the delay, etc. All these new requirements are challenging the existing cloud computing model.

“Ali cloud has accumulated a lot of advantages in the cloud computing industry, which provides the necessary technology, service experiences and abundant scenarios for us to conduct the edge computing.” ZHU said that “in terms of edge computing, we are competing with others in 3 fields, the maturity, stability, and openness of the infrastructures.”

Currently, the first floor of Ali Cloud’s edge computing is to transfer the edge IDC into the cloud infrastructure, which could cover the area between the cloud to places that are 100 kilometers far from the customers. The second floor is the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which would be combined with the 5G network. The third floor of the edge computing is for the customer-side, which would be located into the Internet of the community, government institutions and enterprises, and families. The edge computing of Ali Cloud is moving forward floor by floor and aims to be applied into different scenarios.

Ali Cloud began to start its edge computing business from 2016. In Mar 2018, Ali Cloud officially announced that it will strategically invest the edge computing, and combine its advantages of cloud computing, big data, and AI with edge computing. In this way, Ali Cloud aims to build a computing system which combines the cloud, edge, and devices. During the past year, Ali Cloud published its IoT edge computing products Link IoT Edge, and the edge node service ENS.

The edge computing of Ali Cloud has been applied to several scenarios. For example, the digital updating of the industrial Internet, the intelligent updating of the logistics, the low-cost cloud operating of Future hotel, and the perfect support of the game broadcast with 70 million audiences. ZHU said that in the future, Ali Cloud would invest more on the edge computing, and will keep offering the edge computing services to more partners. As one of the most important fields of Ali Cloud, edge computing is showing its power to better human society.