What is the current state of cloud native development in the energy industry?

Cloud Native Changes the Way the Industry Thinks

CloudNative is an emerging concept in the field of cloud computing, and cloud computing is the foundation of cloud native. CloudNative indicates that the application is located in the cloud, rather than a traditional data center, and that the application is designed from the beginning with the cloud environment in mind, designed natively for the cloud, and running in the best possible position on the cloud to take full advantage of and leverage the elasticity and distributed benefits of the cloud platform.

Pivotal's latest website summarizes cloud native as DevOps + Continuous Delivery + Microservices + Containers. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the infrastructure of cloud native includes containerized packaging + automated management + microservices oriented, service mesh (Service Mesh) and declarative APIs. DevOps enables automation of the system, supports continuous iteration and O&M automation, and leverages the facilities of the cloud platform to achieve elastic scaling, dynamic scheduling, and optimized resource utilization.

Cloud native is one of the biggest trends in the software industry today and has changed the way the industry thinks about developing, deploying, and operating software products.

Cloud native is more than just using a cloud platform to run existing applications; it impacts the design, implementation, deployment, and operation and maintenance of applications, and can take full advantage of the cloud computing model. Cloud-native applications are characterized by flexibility, scalability, elasticity and manageability. Cloud-native technology facilitates organizations to build and run elastic and scalable applications in new dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds. Compared to traditional cloud architectures, cloud native has the advantages of being able to store data in multiple ways, having no fixed schema for data, isolating data from other tenants, and scaling horizontally.

The value of cloud native technology has been initially recognized

According to the relevant research data of the Cloud Native Industry Alliance, the market scale of China's cloud native industry has reached 35.02 billion yuan in 2019. The value of cloud native technology has been initially recognized, but the further expansion of the popularization and application of the new technology still needs time. Survey data show that in the proportion of annual investment in cloud native-related construction to the overall investment, 28% of users are less than 5%, 28% of users account for between 5% and 10%, 25% of users account for between 10% and 30%, 10% of users account for between 30% and 50%, and 9% of users account for more than 50%. More than half of the users cloud native related construction annual investment accounted for less than 10% of the annual investment.

In the cloud native construction that has been invested, technology development and operation and maintenance become the main direction of expenditure. Users who invested in technology R&D accounted for 77%, those who invested in operation and maintenance accounted for 59%, and those who invested in testing, hardware procurement, and software procurement accounted for 36%, 34%, and 30%, respectively.

Container technology effectively divides the resources of a single operating system into isolated groups in order to better balance the isolation technology of conflicting resource usage requirements between isolated groups. Microservices architecture is an architectural pattern that promotes the division of a single application into a set of small services that coordinate and cooperate with each other to provide ultimate value to the user. Each service runs in its own independent process, the individual microservices are loosely coupled, and the services communicate with each other using lightweight communication mechanisms.

Cloud-native technologies enable agile development of applications, with continued acceleration of iteration efficiency and delivery. Container technology has been applied by users in a variety of scenarios, such as: microservices, DevOps, big data, artificial intelligence, edge computing and so on. Among them, microservices application hosting and automated R&D and transportation process construction have become the most important application scenarios of containers. 60% of users have applied container technology in production environments, and 50% of users have used microservices architecture for application development. At the same time, Serverless technology is significantly warmed up, nearly 30% of users have been applied in the production environment.

While the cloud-native industry is in its early stages now, it will grow rapidly in the future with the development of big data and cloud computing.

For more data, please refer to China Cloud Computing Industry Development Prospect Forecast and Investment Strategy Planning Analysis Report published by Prospect Industry Research Institute.