Market value is nearly 4 billion! The first hybrid cloud stock is listed. Is this market booming?

On March 16, Beijing QingCloud Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "QingCloud Technology"), a third-party cloud service provider, was officially listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. This means that the A-share market has welcomed the first company focusing on hybrid cloud business, and QingCloud Technology has become the " first hybrid cloud stock " in China.

Qingyun Technology issued a total of 12 million shares in this IPO , with an issue price of 63.7 yuan per share. Just one hour after listing, Qingyun Technology rose by about 38.30% to 88.10 yuan. At the close of the first day, Qingyun Technology's stock price was 82.13, with a total market value of 3.898 billion.

Qingyun Technology's listing bell ringing ceremony

Source: China Entrepreneur Magazine

As one of the hottest industries in IT infrastructure, hybrid cloud can be said to be an unavoidable keyword in the field of cloud computing in recent years. In the early days, hybrid cloud was more regarded as a sales pitch derived from private cloud vendors. Under the premise that public cloud and private cloud divided the market, hybrid cloud was not taken seriously.

However, in recent years, more and more research data show that with the emergence of real needs and the maturity of products, hybrid cloud architecture has a clearer and more standardized definition and has become the most popular cloud migration method for government and enterprise users. Major global cloud service providers have also targeted this trend and started competing for the hybrid cloud market.

AWS, which has always believed that public cloud is everything, launched its hybrid cloud product Outposts in 2018, bringing AWS into local data centers and allowing users to run AWS infrastructure locally for a truly consistent hybrid cloud experience.

Azure Stack, launched by Microsoft, allows enterprises to put Azure in their own data centers. With a considerable number of users and a wide range of functions, Azure Stack has considerable advantages in the hybrid cloud market.

The hybrid cloud computing service platform CSP jointly launched by Google and Cisco is its first real attempt to introduce its own cloud computing services as managed services into enterprise data centers, and emphasizes the ability to move application containers in different environments.

IBM's newly launched IBM Cloud Integration Platform is the main foundation of IBM's new hybrid cloud strategy, which can connect applications, software and services across public clouds, private clouds and local systems. At the same time, in order to match the new products, IBM also launched related cloud strategy and design services.

In 2020, at the Cloud Summit held by Alibaba in the cloud, Alibaba Cloud released its hybrid cloud strategy: full-stack cloud construction, intelligent cloud management, and extreme cloud use, becoming the first large-scale, mature commercial native hybrid cloud in China.

In addition, there is the TCE matrix released by Tencent Cloud in 2018, the Anthos hybrid cloud released by Google in 2019, the new generation hybrid cloud 2.0 released by UCloud in 2020, and the Huawei Cloud Stack 8.0 released by Huawei.

According to the "2020 Hybrid Cloud Report" released by an ICT research and consulting agency, the penetration of hybrid cloud in the domestic industry is currently not high, but the market will maintain a high growth trend. It is estimated that by 2024, the market size will reach 89.29 billion yuan, and the annual compound growth rate will reach 35.3%. It will become an important pole of cloud computing in the next few years.

From public cloud service providers represented by AWS and UCloud, to Internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, to technology companies such as Huawei, they are all heavily involved in hybrid cloud . From being "not taken seriously" to becoming "a must-have", the popularity behind the "really good" hybrid cloud can be seen.

Hybrid cloud is an integrated cloud service that combines public cloud and private cloud to realize various functions within the enterprise. The implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructure can ensure that all platforms in the organization are seamlessly integrated. In simple terms, public cloud is for public use, private cloud is for private use, and hybrid cloud is a combination of the two.

Cloud computing has gone through a decade of ups and downs since its rise, and public cloud and private cloud have always occupied the vast majority of the market. So why has hybrid cloud gradually emerged in recent years?

From a business perspective , enterprises must respond quickly to business needs. At the same time, Internet business needs are flexible and changeable. The traditional model makes it difficult to launch a new application in a short period of time. For public clouds, their elastic scaling capabilities can cope with frequent business activities and make up for the shortcomings of traditional IDCs.

From the perspective of cost investment , on the one hand, using public cloud can reduce the overall hardware and operation and maintenance costs; on the other hand, the migration cost from traditional IDC to public cloud already includes the cost of system transformation and migration time during the migration process. Therefore, based on these two considerations, the hybrid cloud model is the most appropriate.

From a security perspective , the hybrid cloud model can migrate all the relevant computing and cache nodes of the front-end application to the public cloud. The core group data is still retained in the IDC to ensure the security of the core data. In the era of rapid development of the Internet, data security has become the focus of people's attention.

As the Internet industry is booming, traditional government and enterprise users are the main group of cloud users, and their needs are very consistent with the characteristics of hybrid cloud. This user group is accelerating its own digital transformation, and the business scale is usually large. They are eager for public cloud to allow infrastructure resources to respond to business needs agilely and flexibly, and they also hope that they can be more private and controllable.

The emergence of hybrid cloud means that users no longer have to choose between private cloud and public cloud in terms of cloud computing deployment, but have more options. It can be seen that the most important purpose of the emergence of hybrid cloud is to allow users to better use the various resources and technologies of public cloud.

In the "2020 Cloud Computing Technology Maturity Curve" released by Gartner, hybrid cloud shows a steady growth period, which means that hybrid cloud will be used on a larger scale. It can be said that 2021 is the most important market turning point for hybrid cloud, which also indicates that the new trend in the field of cloud computing will accelerate.

Source: Smart Computing World

Judging from the development trend of hybrid cloud, it may extend in three major directions in the future: edge computing, automation, and cloud native .

Edge computing: Edge computing is the next chapter in the evolution of cloud technology, as it enables computing to be performed close to where the data is generated. For example, cloud computing will enable retailers to benefit from fast-updated consumer buying trends, factories to perform predictive maintenance on equipment that is about to fail, and cell phone operators to support mobile gaming and augmented reality.

As more enterprises look to incorporate edge computing into their hybrid cloud strategies, 5G will also become a key element. As 5G deployments begin to hit cellular networks, hybrid cloud ecosystems will increasingly take advantage of opportunities for computing at the edge.

Automation: Hybrid cloud environments have various advantages such as disaster recovery, scalability, and compatibility with various applications, APIs, and data types, but this also means that hybrid clouds are inherently complex environments. To help enterprises manage this complexity, automation tools will become a "weapon" for enterprises to manage hybrid clouds.

With this tool, enterprises can adjust the environment, put the right workloads in the right place, effectively control costs and manage security keys and encryption processes. As enterprises accelerate the adoption of hybrid cloud technologies, they will also pay more attention to automated management solutions that meet management needs.

Cloud Native: In recent years, enterprises have begun to use open source software to modernize enterprise infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of hybrid multi-cloud. Developers are more focused on developing tools that can support rapid application deployment, and their enterprises need to use these tools to ensure that they are always at the forefront of digital transformation.

This means that enterprises will widely adopt the model of continuous delivery and accept the concept of DevOps, that is, rapid building, testing and deployment. As developers continuously deploy cloud-native applications, the delivery model will also evolve, and the number of open source tools will surge.

Although major cloud service providers and IT giants are in place, users still face certain difficulties in adopting hybrid cloud :

Seamless connection between public and private clouds

With the continuous expansion of cloud computing, hybrid cloud is no longer a simple stacking of public cloud and private cloud. How to connect public cloud and private cloud to achieve seamless connection between the two, maintain business migration between clouds, and maintain data consistency on each cloud is one of the issues that need to be considered when applying hybrid cloud.

Increased difficulty in operation and maintenance management

Enterprises need to manage the resources of multiple cloud providers and self-built private cloud platforms at the same time, monitor the business usage distributed in various resources, and discover and solve problems as soon as possible. This has increased the difficulty of operation and maintenance management to a certain extent.

Cloud-Network Integration

For users, one of the biggest problems facing hybrid cloud services today is that the application, billing, and operation and maintenance of cloud computing resources and network resources are separate from each other, which to some extent affects the user experience.

Single platform limitation

Hybrid cloud architecture is currently limited to a single cloud platform and cannot support users' multi-cloud needs. Cross-cloud operations for enterprises remain a major challenge, and this will also become an issue that major cloud service providers must address in the hybrid cloud field.

We will have to wait and see how the second half of the battle for hybrid cloud plays out.

Part of the content of this article is referenced from public accounts such as Technology Cloud Report, Internet Review, and Big Data Online. The content is for communication and learning purposes only. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@gsi24.com.