deltrittennovels Chapter 475 Deepening the Cloud Computing Strategy
Chapter 475 Deepening the Cloud Computing Strategy
The day Jiang Feng flew back from Shenzhen, Jinan had its first snowfall of the winter. The snowflakes were as fine as salt, melting as soon as they hit the ground. He walked into Ling Yun's office carrying a black briefcase, his hair still covered in unmelted snowflakes.
"Mr. Ling, the latest data from the Rock Platform is out." He placed his briefcase on the table and pulled out his laptop. Ling Yun was standing by the window watching the snow. He turned around, pulled up a chair, and sat down next to Jiang Feng.
"Our enterprise clients have exceeded two hundred. Last week, we signed four new contracts with large internet companies, one of which is a video company with over five million daily active users. They migrated their entire backend to PanShi because their self-built data center couldn't handle the peak concurrency during the evening hours." Jiang Feng opened a chart showing PanShi's client growth curve over the past six months. The curve became almost vertical in the last two months.
"How are the elastic load balancing and automatic scaling functions working?" Lingyun asked.
"Elastic load balancing has already been verified on Singles' Day. A certain e-commerce client's peak concurrency was seventeen times higher than usual, and PanShi automatically expanded by two thousand virtual machine instances within forty-five seconds without manual intervention. The response latency for automatic scaling was less than thirty seconds." Jiang Feng typed a few keys, and a set of technical indicators popped up on the screen. "Cloud monitoring has also been synchronized, and clients can see the real-time curves of CPU, memory, and network I/O for each virtual machine in the background. They don't need to call us if there are any problems; they can troubleshoot themselves."
Ling Yun moved the computer closer, carefully examining the metrics. The virtual machine creation time on PanShi had been reduced to under forty-five seconds, nearly twice as fast as three months ago. "What's the target for next year?"
"Within twenty seconds. We plan to reconstruct the virtualization layer, deeply prune the KVM kernel module, and cut out all unnecessary drivers." Ling Yun nodded. Jiang Feng closed his laptop and pulled a document from his briefcase. "Rock is the foundation. A stable foundation is important, but that's not what I want to talk about today." He placed the document on the table; the cover had four characters printed on it: Nebula Haina.
"The public beta version of object storage went live last week. We invited 100 enterprise customers to participate in the initial phase of gray-scale testing. Here is the test data." Lingyun opened the document, and the first page was a global distribution map of CDN nodes. The map was densely covered with red dots, with three dots in Southeast Asia, two dots in Europe, one dot in the Middle East, and one dot in North America.
Jiang Feng stood up, walked to the opposite side of Ling Yun's desk, and connected a StarPhone to the projector. "Let me demonstrate for you." He opened the Starfire Cloud Service App on his phone, tapped the upload button, and selected a photo. "This photo has a resolution of 40 million pixels, and the file size is about 18 megabytes." He pressed confirm, and the progress bar on the screen flashed briefly and then disappeared.
"Finished sending?"
"Upload complete." Jiang Feng exited the app, opened the Nebula console in his browser, logged in, and entered Haina's management interface. The photo he had just uploaded was now quietly sitting in the storage bucket, with four different resolution thumbnails automatically generated next to it—one for thumbnail preview, one for mobile screen, one for computer screen, and one for print size. "During the upload, Haina automatically triggered four events: image metadata parsing, multi-resolution transcoding, CDN preheating, and off-site redundant backup."
"Where is this photo currently located?"
Jiang Feng opened the CDN management backend. A world map popped up on the screen, with several lines of different colors originating from the Beijing node and pointing to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Singapore, Frankfurt, Dubai, and San Jose. "Six lines, completed synchronously. Check the latency." He opened a testing tool and requested the photo from the San Jose node; the response time was consistently below 180 milliseconds. From Frankfurt, it took 150 milliseconds. From Dubai, it took exactly 200 milliseconds.
Ling Yun stared at the numbers on the screen. "Is this the same latency for all nodes?"
"Currently, only Haina can do this," Jiang Feng said without any modesty. "Because we use a self-developed intelligent scheduling algorithm. Traditional CDNs use static scheduling based on DNS, choosing whichever node is closest to the user. But network quality changes dynamically; a node might be geographically closest but have its bandwidth fully utilized. Haina's scheduler monitors the load and network quality of all nodes in real time, dynamically selecting the optimal path for each request."
Who wrote this algorithm?
"A group of young engineers who had just graduated. The leader was a man named Chen Xi, who was recruited from the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University last year. When he came, he didn't even know what a distributed system was. He spent a year turning this algorithm from a paper into a product." Jiang Feng paused, "Last month he told me that he found that half of what he learned in university was useless after Haina went online."
Why?
"Because textbooks don't cover scenarios with such high traffic. He said that the CDN scenarios described in textbooks assume hundreds of nodes and hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections. Our current stress tests are run on five million concurrent connections, and many theoretical models fail directly, so we have to start from scratch."
Ling Yun stood up and paced a couple of steps in front of his desk. The snow outside was still falling, melting as it landed on the windowpane. "Give Chen Xi a raise. Also, tell him—the problem he's facing isn't unique to Xinghuo; it's a problem the entire industry has never encountered before. Have him write his solution into a paper, and Xinghuo will help him submit it to a top conference."
"Are you serious?"
"If we don't do it, others will have to fall into the same traps again. Publishing a paper will move the entire industry forward. Having Xinghuo's name listed at the end of the paper is our best recruitment strategy." Ling Yun sat down again, flipping to the last page of Haina's test report, which listed the problems discovered during the public beta: during one off-site backup, latency spiked to seven seconds because the transoceanic fiber optic cable was snapped by a fishing boat's anchor; a customer misconfigured storage bucket permissions, resulting in all files being publicly readable, and the security team urgently fixed the default permission verification policy. Ling Yun carefully read through this section.
"Let's add another layer of security. The storage bucket is private by default—this is already done, but we also need to add an abnormal behavior detection: if someone downloads a large number of files from the same storage bucket in a short period of time, the system should automatically alert and freeze the bucket."
"It's already in progress. The next version will be released."
Ling Yun closed the file, stood up, and walked to the whiteboard. The StarPhone supply chain diagram drawn at the last meeting was still on the whiteboard. He erased the diagram with an eraser, picked up a marker, and wrote four words: rock-solid, inclusive, PaaS, SaaS.
"We've laid the foundation for IaaS with PanShi and object storage with HaiNa. Next, we'll move up to the PaaS layer—providing cloud database services, message queues, and application hosting. At the SaaS layer, we'll develop enterprise collaboration tools, starting with Xinghuo's own needs—can we productize and sell our internal CRM and SCM systems to other companies?"
Jiang Feng was taken aback. "PaaS is manageable; we have the Nebula Database as a technical foundation. But SaaS—that's a completely different business model. Our current team all come from infrastructure backgrounds; none of us have experience with application-layer products."
"Then hire people. Chen Zhongming previously worked in enterprise software sales at IBM; let him help you build a sales team." Ling Yun drew a vertical line on the whiteboard, connecting the technology stack from the bottom to the top. "Back in 2003 in Hong Kong, I told you—cloud computing is the infrastructure for the next decade, and we must secure our place in advance. We've secured our place in IaaS now, but there's still a lot of room above that. Amazon will enter this market sooner or later, and Microsoft is watching too. If we don't move, others will fill it."
Jiang Feng stared at the whiteboard for a long while. The conference room fell silent; the soft patter of snowflakes hitting the glass could be heard outside. He spoke. "President Ling, tell me the truth. What is your ultimate vision for cloud computing?"
Ling Yun drew a circle on the whiteboard, enclosing all the words. "The Nebula of the future isn't for developers. It's like infrastructure, like water, electricity, and gas. You turn on the tap, and the water comes. You plug in the socket, and the electricity is on. You turn on your phone—cloud computing is supporting everything behind the scenes. Users don't know it exists, but it's everywhere."
Jiang Feng was silent for a few seconds. "Your idea might take five or even ten years."
"It's alright. Let's set off now."
When Jiang Feng left, the snow fell heavily. Ling Yun stood at the window watching him walk through the park. Snowflakes landed on his head, and he shrank his neck, jogging into the doorway of the research and development building across the street. Ling Yun picked up his phone and dialed Chen Zhongming's number.
"Zhongming, Jiang Feng needs to build a SaaS sales team. You previously worked on enterprise software at IBM; do you have any suitable contacts?"
Chen Zhongming thought for a moment on the other end of the phone, "I have a few former subordinates. But they're all used to working in foreign companies and might not be willing to come to a private enterprise."
"Tell them that coming to Xinghuo isn't about working for someone else. It's about building China's own cloud computing," Ling Yun said. "Double the salary, and continue giving stock options. Whether they come or not is up to them."
He hung up the phone and stood in front of the whiteboard for a while. The circle drawn on the whiteboard was still there, and the words inside were slightly reflective under the light. He added a larger circle outside the original circle with a marker and wrote the word: Person. Then he put down the marker, put on his coat, and went out the door. In the hallway, several young people were arguing loudly about something. Someone typed a line of code on the keyboard, pointed to the screen, and said, "Look, this problem can be solved like this." No one noticed Ling Yun walking past them; the snow was still falling.