Cloud-Native Database Has a Strong Advantage in Cloud Computing Time

Technology Author: Zekun Wang May 09, 2019 04:10 PM (GMT+8)

LI Feifei, the man who’s in charge of the database line of Ali Cloud, believes that the cloud-native database has a strong advantage in cloud computing time.

Ali Cloud's Singapore data center. Photo: Credit to Ali Cloud

On May 8, 2019, the 10th Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), LI Feifei (李飞飞), the man who’s in charge of the database line of Ali Cloud, gave a speech. According to LI, the cloud-native database has a great advantage. Currently, the Ali Cloud database has formed a complete cloud link for the data to board the cloud. Firstly, with the help of DTS tool, the offline database could be transferred to online, then users could select the database they need according to the business requirement. Based on the abundant database species, for example, the relationship database and NoSQL database, the Ali Cloud database could cover almost all of the enterprise-level application scenarios. Currently, the Ali Cloud database has more than 100 thousand customers globally, including leading enterprises in finance, telecom, manufacturer and logistic fields, such as China Unicom, Sinopec Group and SAIC Volkswagen.

Comparing with its competitors, the cloud-native database has great advantages. In 2018, Ali Cloud published POLARDB, which is the self-developed cloud-native database. The POLARDB isolates the storage and computing functions while combines the software and hardware together. In Mar 2019, POLARDB became China’s first cloud-native database which compatibles the Oracle. For large-scale enterprises, they could finish the business transfer within several hours, and it takes only 10 minutes to finish a copy of 10TB data.

The POLARDB uses high-speed RDMA Internet to build its sharing-storage structure, which could achieve quickly flexible capacity expansion. The POLARDB could be extended up to 1000 cores CPU, and 100 TB storage space, which could meet the requirement of large-scale computing scenarios. In addition, POLARDB has a high price-performance ratio. In terms of the storage space, POLARDB’s 100TB storage is 10 times of the traditional databases.

LI Feifei said that during the past 40 years, the database evolved from traditional commercial database, out-source database to cloud-native database.  However, with the rapid development of mobile Internet and IoT technology, as well as the great increase of data, the databases should be changed as well. Meanwhile, “all in cloud” is the developing tendency of the current world. According to IDC, by 2021, the cloud-based data would exceed the data quantity of the traditional data center.  Under the new technology trend, the traditional commercial database, due to its high cost and operational difficulties, and the low flexibility, are greatly challenged by cloud-native databases. On the other hand, the cloud-native databases are customized for cloud computing service and have a flexible ability for cloud computing. Meanwhile, the cloud-native database combines both the advantages of out-source database and traditional ones, which makes it the best choice of enterprises.

Ali Cloud keeps technology innovation in the cloud computing field. In 2018’s IDC statistics, Ali Cloud occupies 43% of the Chinese cloud computing market share, and in Apr 2019, Ali Cloud’s market share in Asia ranked 1st place, exceeded AWS and Azure.