Chapter 2440 What is cloud computing?

Many sophisticated industry concepts come from the English-speaking world and are all in English.

During the translation process, some errors will occur.

In some large companies, many people speak in Chinese mixed with English. Part of the reason is that they are really dragging out words, and part of the reason is that sometimes English can describe a concept more accurately.

For example, the word "cloud computing".

In the English world, distributed computing technology needs to be used when processing extremely large data calculations. That is, when the server processes a large data program, it can be broken down into countless small programs. These small programs are processed and analyzed through a system composed of many servers, and then summarized to give the results.

Integrate these many servers into a "center" to form a cloud, and apply distributed computing technology on the cloud... It is called Cloud_computing in English.

Translated, it is "cloud computing".

This leads to conceptual differences.

In the English world, "Cloud_computing" is just a technical concept. After being translated into "cloud computing" in China, it became an industry and became the cloud computing industry.

In fact, it should be the Cloud industry. Translated into Chinese, it should be the "Cloud Industry" or the "Cloud Service" industry.

Because the "cloud computing" technology of "Cloud_computing" is only an early technical means in this industry, later a hybrid evolution of utility computing, load balancing, parallel computing, network storage, hot backup redundancy and virtualized computing gradually emerged. . In the cloud industry, there is not only cloud computing, but also many kinds of computing.

So this creates some disagreements.

For example, in the early days of cloud computing in China, there was a very interesting forum where Li Yanhong from Baidu commented on "cloud computing" as old wine in new bottles.

Later, he aroused public ridicule, saying that he was ignorant of cloud computing.

This is a deviation in understanding.

It was the early stage of the industry, and there was no real cloud computing industry in China. "Cloud computing" was just a technical concept. As a cutting-edge technical expert, Li Yanhong would of course follow up as soon as possible.

His understanding of cloud computing is to put distributed computing performed by server clusters on the cloud with "middle platform", "centralization" and "central concept".

This is really not too new for Baidu, it is really old wine in new bottles.

Because as early as after Google published its three famous papers, Baidu, as the Internet company with the best technology in the country, had already started doing it.

It's just that it wasn't called cloud computing at the time. Baidu's name was ibase, which was a common technical base within the company.

In fact, it is to solve the problem of high concurrency.

Alibaba engages in cloud computing because Taobao's customer traffic is too large and concurrency is too high. Without cloud computing, Alibaba's entire server system would collapse. Especially during major sales, one network card often burns out, and technicians quickly replace it with a new one. But as soon as it is plugged in, the new network card starts to smoke.

However, how can Taobao’s traffic be as high as Baidu’s?

At that time, "Super Girl" was the most popular in China, and "World of Warcraft" was the most popular in China. Baidu Tieba became the largest forum for public opinion. Li Yuchun Bar, World of Warcraft Bar, Emperor Bar, Zhang Liangying Bar... There were many products similar to Baidu Tieba at that time. Why was Baidu Tieba the most popular?

Because other platforms simply cannot withstand the high concurrency impact caused by millions of people using a web page at the same time.

Fans rushed in and the website crashed, possibly even setting the backend servers on fire and smoking.

Only Baidu Tieba withstood the impact of fanatical fans.

But even so, Tieba is still under huge load pressure, so much so that Tieba administrators often delete popular posts by super female singers like Li Yuchun and Zhang Liangying that have hundreds of thousands of replies on Tieba.

In order to solve this technical dilemma, Baidu built an internal general technology base around distributed computing. This technical base is actually a centralized and middle-end concept. All business calculations are handed over to this centralized technical base for execution.

This is what Boss Li calls "old wine".

It was still 2005.

Later, in order to further solve the problem of high concurrency and develop a domestic big data processing system, Baidu integrated a group of the best technical experts within the company into a team and began the development of the large-scale technology project "Pyramid".

But later the project failed, and Baidu finally gave up on self-research and chose the American open source project Hadoop.

Later, it was the era of Ziweixing.

Zhou Buqi rushed forward, taking advantage of the situation to take over the core development team of the "Pyramid" project, and poached Wang Jian and others from Microsoft, ushering in Ziweiyun's vigorous era.

Baidu just didn't call it "cloud computing". In fact, it had already done something similar and started almost at the same time as Silicon Valley. The reason why Baidu fell behind in the cloud computing industry was because it did not choose the right route.

Cloud computing in the usual sense mainly refers to IaaS services, which is infrastructure as a service.

It means building a server cluster to form a centralized "cloud", and then renting the server storage space and computing power in this cloud to other companies.

In the early days of Alibaba Cloud in its previous life, this was what it did.

This is a B-side business.

Baidu's direction is different.

This industry is so cutting-edge. How many domestic companies are willing to pay to purchase servers and computing power on cloud platforms? This stuff is too advanced, and its popularization is a very long process.

Alibaba has an advantage because Taobao is backed by hundreds of thousands of sellers and has strong B-end resources.

Not so with Baidu.

Baidu has little influence on the B-side. As an e-commerce company, Baidu was beaten by Taobao and made a big joke.

What Baidu is best at is the C-side, which is for individual users.

The cloud service for individual users is of course the cloud disk business, which is the Baidu Netdisk launched by Baidu. It means that the storage space and computing power in the cloud are not rented to merchants, but to individual users, so that users can spend money to buy more storage space.

Judging from the current domestic industry status alone, it is obvious that the cloud disk business is more in line with reality.

This is also the reason why major companies are developing network cloud disks.

Of course, in terms of technical difficulty, cloud disks are much simpler than IaaS.

The reason why Baidu was marginalized in the domestic cloud computing industry was mainly because it made a wrong direction in the early stage and spent all its energy on building Baidu Netdisk.

This product has been made, but it is still a long way from making money in China.

Personal cloud disk is a type of cloud service and should also be applied to cloud computing.

And this is the fundamental reason why Zhou Buqi is unwilling to agree to Liu Qiangdong.

He does not want JD to use JD Cloud as a stepping stone to open up the development path of JD Cloud.

Just a Jingdong cloud disk is actually nothing, and helping Jingdong do it is also insignificant. But once JD.com builds its own JD Cloud, it will be inconsistent with Zhou Buqi's long-term strategy tailored for Ziwei Cloud.

The platform model must be "self-operated + third party".

When Ziweiyun was providing e-commerce services, its self-operated capabilities were not strong enough, at least far behind cloud computing platforms like Alibaba and Amazon, which have their own powerful e-commerce platforms.

This requires finding help.

There are Jingtao in Japan, JTmall in South Korea, Farfetch in the UK, Shopify in Canada, and eBay in the United States... On-campus group buying in China is an important pillar, but the most important one is JD.com.

If Ziweiyun wants to provide its cloud services in "e-commerce", "retail" and "logistics" well, it cannot do without the full support of JD.com. What if JD.com comes up with its own JD Cloud... Ziwei Cloud?

In the domestic market, Ziweiyun gave up relevant shares to JD Cloud, which actually had little impact.

They are all family members.

But it doesn’t work abroad.

In overseas markets, Ziweiyun still has to compete with Amazon Cloud! If you want to compete with Amazon Cloud, you must attack the opponent's core hinterland!

The core cloud service of Amazon Cloud is the e-commerce field.

Ziweiyun must rely on JD.com to become stronger, make up for this shortcoming, and then compete with Amazon Cloud overseas. At this time, from the perspective of grand strategy, we have to be selfish and cannot let JD.com develop its own cloud computing platform and then break away from Ziweiyun's control.

Jingdong must be allowed to live under Ziweiyun for a long time, so that Ziweiyun can obtain relevant data, accumulate relevant experience, improve related projects, and develop related services, so as to make up for the incompetence of Ziweiyun and Amazon Cloud in e-commerce and logistics. , retail and other fields of cloud services.

Therefore, Jingdong Cloud Disk must not succeed!

Not only cannot we help, we should also suppress them!

Just like what Zhang Yiming and He Yang did, Liu Qiangdong must be given a proper warning and the hole in JD Cloud Disk must not be opened.

But at this time, it’s hard to say clearly.

Zhou Buqi can't tell him that you should be my little brother, don't think about leaving me and becoming the big brother on your own, right?

Just when he was in trouble and didn't know how to explain, Liu Qiangdong suddenly talked about an American cloud disk service provider, Dropbox, and said that JD Cloud Disk was inspired by this product.

And this also gave Zhou Buqi inspiration to deal with the problem.

Dropbox, he is so familiar with this!

In the current network disk business in overseas markets, the first one is Google Cloud Disk, the second is Dropbox, and the third is Impression Cloud Disk under Ziweixing International.

It is almost impossible for Impression Cloud Disk to surpass Google Cloud Disk.

Google is playing a monopoly and has bound Google Cloud Drive to the Android system through Google Framework Services. It is a must-have App for Android phones. Therefore, the more realistic goal for EverDrive is to surpass Dropbox.

This is actually not difficult at all.

Kurian doesn’t know much about C-side business yet. Relying on the channel resources of Ziweixing International, he quickly made EverDrive the second in the industry in just two years.

Now, Zhou Buqi has adjusted the business and handed over the three C-side business products of EverNote, EverBook and EverDrive under Ziweiyun, which Kurian is responsible for, to Tang Binchen.

Tang Binchen is obviously better at the operation of C-side business, can do better, and will be more competitive.

Liu Qiangdong still didn't know why. He didn't know that in this flash of lightning, boss Zhou sitting next to him had countless thoughts flashing through his mind. He just asked in confusion: "Dropbox defrauded Wall Street investors? How can this happen?" understand?"

Zhou Buqi smiled and said, "It's a long story."