Text | Intelligent relativity

Author | Chen Bocheng

Today, a Chinese company may face the situation of using digital technology to improve its operational efficiency, while adopting AI to optimize products and services, and finally bring these advantages to the international market through the global strategy, and finally complete the upgrading and creation of a global brand.

The wave of digitalization, the wave of AI, and the wave of going global – the three major trends facing contemporary enterprises are intertwined and jointly promote the development of the global economy and technology. Behind these waves, it is inseparable from the drive of a megatrend, that is, the support and transformation of cloud services.

At present, cloud services have become the basic needs of enterprises, and they are an indispensable part of the development of contemporary enterprises by virtue of their own advantages such as cost optimization, flexibility and scalability, high availability and disaster recovery backup, and technological innovation.

For modern enterprises, going to the cloud is no longer a concern, but a must. However, how to choose the right cloud server is still bothering most enterprises, and it is not only a technical problem to consider behind it, but also a series of comprehensive problems around the "economic account".

It is not difficult to find that since the beginning of this year, the war of cloud services has become more and more fierce in the face of the continuous growth of enterprise demand, and has spread from the technical field to the economic field.

The war of cloud services is burning from the technical field to the economic field

There is a more interesting phenomenon this year, cloud vendors are "fighting" in the live broadcast room.

Luo Yonghao made a strong attack and brought goods to "sell clouds" for the first time in Taobao Live "Make a Friend Fourth Anniversary Special". With the blessing of Lao Luo's consistently wonderful golden sentences, this live broadcast poured into more than 2.3 million people to watch, making the cloud server popular on the Internet through the huge traffic of live broadcasting.

Immediately afterwards, JD Cloud and Tencent Cloud were not far behind, and successively logged in to the live broadcast room, competing with each other for product prices and brand benefits, and started the process of "selling cloud" in live broadcasting.

For a time, in the commercial home of live broadcast sales, cloud vendors who were good at technology have entered the "short-handed encounter" dominated by commercial behavior. This also makes it clear to the industry once again that the competition in the cloud service market is not only about technology, but also about economics.

In fact, in the early stage, cloud computing was an emerging technology, and many enterprises did not know much about it. Therefore, when deciding whether to adopt cloud servers, enterprises are more concerned about the technical aspects. For example, technical feasibility, can it meet existing business needs? How is security, data and application security guaranteed in the cloud? Stability and reliability, what is the availability and stability of cloud services? The difficulty of technology migration, the ease of migrating existing systems and architectures to the cloud or between different brands of cloud servers, etc.

With the maturity of cloud server technology, and more and more enterprises have begun to touch cloud services, they have more practical experience, so economic concerns are also added to the later decision-making. For example, after migrating to the cloud, are the tools and applications in the cloud perfect, easy to use, flexible and scalable, so as to better support the company's business development? What is the brand behind the cloud server, and is the reputation of the cloud vendor good to ensure sustainable cooperation in the future? Whether the long-term cost-effectiveness and resource utilization after cloud migration are in line with the company's economic considerations, including how to calculate indirect costs such as operation and maintenance and management in the later stage.

It is not difficult to understand why cloud vendors have begun to "sell cloud" in the live broadcast room since the beginning of this year, mainly because the company's understanding of cloud services has gradually deepened, and the focus has become more pragmatic and more focused on economic benefits.

The choice of cloud server lies in the comprehensive optimal solution

Once the economic problem is taken into account, for enterprises, the selection of cloud servers needs to integrate a series of factors such as technology, price, cost, service, brand, short-term investment, long-term development, and benefits to seek the optimal solution. Specifically, the focus of enterprises will fall on the following three levels.

1. The combination of price and performance is optimal.

To put it simply, this is a cost-effective topic. The higher the performance and the lower the price, the better the corresponding cost performance, and the more impressive the enterprise customers. The key question is, the price is easy to understand, but how to judge the performance? The answer is to look at practical verification.

Taking Volcano Engine as an example, its cloud services are reused and shared with Douyin's million-level server resources, which not only has experienced the long-term continuous polishing of hundreds of millions of DAU applications such as Douyin, but also has large-scale concurrent processing capabilities, can handle extremely high concurrent requests, and ensures the stability and response speed of the service in terms of performance, thereby continuously supporting a large number of user bases and complex business scenarios. Moreover, it also has strong technical uniqueness, and its self-developed DPU, mGPU and other technologies have well achieved zero loss of computing power and improved resource utilization and overall performance.

At the same time, due to the adoption of the tidal resource reuse strategy, Volcano Engine has further improved resource utilization through cross-regional and cross-time resource scheduling on the basis of Douyin's millions of servers, and has successfully achieved the advantage of scale, which can provide services to the outside world at a lower cost, thereby bringing higher cost performance to enterprise customers. At the same time, Volcano Engine is doing new preferential activities, it is understood that compared with first-line cloud manufacturers, the discount is very large, and the overall cloud service can reduce the cost by up to 30%.

2. The combination of short-term investment and long-term development is optimal.

As the value of cloud migration is verified by more and more practices, contemporary enterprises should not only consider short-term investment in the process of choosing cloud servers, but also consider long-term development. Among them, short-term investment includes initial cost, migration cost, training cost, etc., while long-term development needs to consider scalability, security and compliance, technical support and services, manufacturer branding, etc.

These are all important capabilities that enterprises must consider at this stage and cloud vendors cannot ignore. For example, taking migration costs as an example, most enterprises have their own applications or data, and how to complete application adaptation and data migration at the lowest cost is often the key to impress enterprises to choose third-party cloud servers. In this regard, Volcano Engine provides a series of migration tool support, including server migration tools, database migration tools, storage migration services, etc., so as to solve the migration problem that enterprises are primarily concerned about, so that enterprises can take the first step to the cloud with their important assets.

In addition, Volcano Engine adopts a cloud-native architecture, combined with the launched distributed cloud-native platform, which will also well support multi-cloud interconnection and cross-cloud collaboration, and meet the needs of enterprise customers to realize the interconnection of resources and services between Volcano Engine and other cloud vendors. At the same time, Volcano Engine will also provide 7✖24-hour all-round business response, professional service engineers to provide technical support, and help enterprise customers reduce the cost of short-term investment in an all-round way.

In terms of long-term development, Volcano Engine provides a full-stack security solution from hardware to software, as well as security management for the entire data lifecycle, ensuring that enterprises can meet the high standards of security and compliance when using cloud services. At the same time, Volcano Engine's cloud server will continue to invest in R&D and iteration, and will provide more product tools, application software, functions, software environments, etc., so that users can share ByteDance's technical advantages at the fastest speed.

To put it simply, for long-term development, what enterprises need is to quickly realize their technological advantages and solve business development problems on the basis of security and compliance, which in turn will bring significant enterprise efficiency. Such a combination of technical and business dimensions is the main competitive trend in the current cloud service industry.

3. Continuous evolution and application implementation are comprehensively optimized.

As the underlying technology of contemporary enterprise transformation and upgrading, cloud services are also facing two major development considerations: first, the pace of technology iteration cannot be stopped, and continuous evolution must be maintained. Second, the ability to apply is strong enough to bring significant innovation growth to enterprises. Generally speaking, cloud services have to repeatedly use new technologies to stimulate the innovation ability of enterprises, which is also one of the most needed capabilities for enterprise business innovation and development.

At present, in the B-end field, the bean bag model is widely used in the Internet, education, medical care, finance, consumption, scientific research and other industries, providing business innovation opportunities and capabilities for enterprises in the industry. At the same time, ByteDance has also created an intelligent AI assistant bean bag with the same name as the large model for the C-end field, bringing a new large model application experience to the majority of users.

It is understood that after the launch of Doubao, its downloads in the App Store have risen rapidly, and it has now exceeded 100 million, continuing to dominate the list and being favored by users. At the same time, the average daily tokens call volume of the Doubao model exceeded 500 billion, and the average daily tokens usage of external enterprise users increased by 22 times compared with the time when the large model was first released in May.

It is not difficult to find that whether it is a C-end user or a B-end customer, what they favor is only high-quality technological innovation, which can be an application or a solution, and the key is that technological innovation can be quickly implemented.

epilogue

Today, the development of enterprises is inseparable from the support of cloud services. Both startups and large enterprises rely on cloud services to drive their businesses to varying degrees. Cloud services not only provide significant financial benefits to businesses, but also help them stay ahead of the curve in a competitive market – by adopting cloud services, businesses can focus more on their core business and development strategy, rather than being tied down by the management and maintenance of IT infrastructure.

Within ByteDance, there are more than 50 business departments using the Doubao model, which covers collaborative office, data analysis, copywriting, assisted programming, content moderation, customer service, game NPC, character dialogue, education and other fields, and the capabilities of these corresponding subdivisions will soon achieve "technology spillover" with the support of cloud services, so that they can be applied by more industries and enterprises, and quickly complete the innovation of the core business of the enterprise.

Such innovative applications also mean that the choice of cloud service providers by contemporary enterprises is not only a technical consideration, but also a series of comprehensive considerations such as application involvement, research and development, and implementation.

Everything starts in the cloud, and many opportunities that enterprises can grasp at this stage, such as digital transformation, AI empowerment, and overseas growth, need to use cloud services to further expand their advantages. Then, how to choose a high-quality cloud service provider and cloud server products will also be a compulsory course for contemporary enterprises.

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