Alibaba Vice President Yu Pengwu reveals the latest four technology layouts of Alibaba Cloud edge computing

As the 5G race is booming, edge computing has also taken advantage of the opportunity to enter new territory.

At the Hangzhou Yunqi Conference, Yu Pengwu, Vice President of Alibaba Group, shared Alibaba Cloud's technical layout and future applications in edge computing.

As the head of Alibaba Cloud's edge computing line, Yu Pengwu revealed that Alibaba Cloud has completed full coverage of 300+ edge computing nodes in more than 30 provinces in China. Next, it will specifically focus on the four edge technology stacks of edge chips/devices, edge computing platforms (operating systems), urban edge middleware, and urban edge applications and services.

At the beginning of his speech, Yu Pengwu talked about how, in the 5G environment, the access capacity of wireless networks will further increase, and the mode of data production and consumption will change from centralized production and decentralized consumption to decentralized production and ubiquitous consumption, which means that technical reconstruction of applications and industrial collaboration are needed.

The three major 5G application scenarios currently defined, eMBB, mMTC, and URLLC, are all intelligent application scenarios for various fields in the city, and 80% of the data and computing will occur at the edge.

“The 5G architecture is a perfect architecture, but we need to increase computing capabilities at the edge in addition to storage and distribution.”

According to Leifeng.com, Alibaba Cloud has already grown into the largest CDN manufacturer in China, surpassing traditional CDN giants such as Wangsu Technology.

Yu Pengwu said that this position in the industry is a very good foundation for Alibaba, but at the same time, Alibaba Cloud understands edge computing not for the sake of computing, but to support the implementation of more new 5G application scenarios. It is a collection of urban computing that includes road computing, utility computing, consumer computing, security computing and home computing.

“Edge computing faces a change in application architecture.”

In addition, he said there is also a "synergy" proposition - Alibaba currently has a cloud-edge-end integration strategy.

From the perspective of scenarios, Alibaba has accumulated a large number of internal applications. Based on 10 years of FeiTian technology and Alibaba's digital economy, Alibaba Cloud is gradually building a cloud-edge-end collaborative open ecosystem across e-commerce, logistics, finance, transportation, home entertainment and other scenarios.

"All Alibaba Cloud products serve the internal system and are gradually being released to the outside world."

Leifeng.com believes that this is very similar to the fact that Alibaba Cloud’s first customer was Alibaba Finance - it was first used and polished internally, and then opened to the public after there were no problems.

When talking about the technical layout of urban computing, Yu Pengwu said that Alibaba Cloud has completed the full coverage of 300+ edge computing nodes in more than 30 provinces in China, and will also focus on the layout of the four edge technology stacks of edge chips/devices , edge computing platforms (operating systems) , urban edge middleware , and urban edge applications and services .

specifically is:

• 1) In terms of chips/equipment, Alibaba Cloud edge computing adopts a "2+2+1" investment strategy, namely: 2 types of general-purpose chips (X86, ARM) + 2 types of special-purpose chips (GPU, ASIC) + 1 type of self-developed chip (Pingtou Ge NPU cloud-edge-end integrated chip ecosystem);

• 2) In terms of edge computing platform, Alibaba Cloud provides three computing forms (virtual machines, containers, and functions) and three delivery forms (server, server let, and server less);

• 3) For edge middleware, Alibaba Cloud needs to transform from the original "content distribution scheduling" to "computing scheduling", while adding new technologies such as AI and storage, and gradually form unique middleware capabilities for urban application scenarios;

• 4) For upper-level edge applications and services, it is necessary to work together with Alibaba’s business ecosystem and vertical industry partners.

At the end of his speech, Yu Pengwu also put forward a point of view:

"5G may not necessarily usher in the era of industrial Internet. It is very likely to transform from consumer Internet to industrial Internet. Therefore, for Alibaba Cloud, our investment in technology and applications will still be very large."

He believes that edge computing is an application combination, edge computing is the collaboration of an industrial chain, and the scenario of edge computing is oriented towards urban computing, and the scenario in the city is all walks of life.

"Don't think about the industrial Internet scenario every day. I think building a new business model for consumer-oriented applications is likely to be an effective way for edge computing to flourish."