This comprehensive guide outlines the mindset, methodology, general and professional skills, core architectural concepts, design principles, and essential tools needed for anyone aspiring to become a proficient software architect in modern technology environments.
The article explains modern software engineering concepts such as microservices, containers, and serverless architectures, describing how they enable cloud‑native applications to achieve scalability, flexibility, continuous delivery, and reliability while also outlining their challenges and limitations.
Experts predict that multi‑cloud will dominate 2019, urging IT leaders to adopt flexible, well‑planned strategies, address skill gaps, leverage Kubernetes and AIOps, and focus on cloud data management to optimize performance, cost, and security across hybrid environments.
From the early mechanical hard drives to today's hyper-converged and software-defined storage, the article analyzes the historical cycles of integration and separation in data-center storage, highlighting three current cloud-era trends—fusion with servers, standardization for intelligent orchestration, and openness through API-driven services.
Tencent Cloud’s big‑data platform tackles massive, multi‑component clusters by deploying an AIOps framework that aggregates logs and metrics, applies statistical and machine‑learning anomaly detection, uses regression and reinforcement‑learning for job‑parameter optimization, and integrates offline‑online pipelines, achieving over 88 % precision while planning automated root‑cause analysis, productized tools, platformized algorithm integration, and cross‑domain model reuse.
This article introduces HBase's ecosystem, including its components like OpenTSDB for time-series data, Kylin for cube analysis, Phoenix for SQL operations, and GeoMesa for spatial data, along with the author's experience in deploying these in a production environment.
This article explains how Baidu Cloud's Noah intelligent operations product builds a unified operations knowledge base by categorizing metadata, status, and event data and applying three ETL approaches—Pull, Push, and Lazy—to handle offline, near‑line, and real‑time data integration.
This article presents the design principles, core and logical architectures, AI integration, and platform capabilities of Ctrip's cloud-based customer service system, highlighting its multi‑channel, multi‑region, multi‑business, multilingual support, containerized microservices, and intelligent routing features.
The article explains cloud computing infrastructure, covering internal vs public cloud, core components of compute, network and storage, IaaS benefits, hybrid cloud strategies, networking changes like SD‑WAN, and challenges such as noisy neighbors and latency, providing a comprehensive overview for enterprises transitioning to cloud environments.
Recent university research evaluated the performance, resource allocation, isolation, cold-start latency, billing accuracy, and DDoS resilience of AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions, revealing differences in concurrency limits, language impact on cold starts, instance lifetimes, and billing quirks across the three platforms.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of cloud computing, tracing its evolution from physical servers through virtualization and IaaS/PaaS models to modern container and cloud‑native architectures, and explains key concepts, major vendors, and the challenges of automation and resource pooling.
The 7th China Small‑and‑Medium Bank Development Summit held in Guangzhou on November 29‑30 2018 gathered over 200 banking and fintech leaders to discuss the latest trends, challenges, and strategies in financial technology, digital transformation, risk control, and emerging technologies such as AI, big data, cloud and blockchain.
The 2018 OpenStack User Survey, based on 1,483 responses from 858 projects across 63 countries, uncovers how OpenStack is expanding beyond IT, the rise of Kubernetes and bare‑metal services, multi‑cloud adoption patterns, and the top software and hardware vendors shaping the global cloud market.
Alibaba’s massive data‑center operations face growing hardware failures, so they built the DAM (Dammo) platform that integrates Tianji management, predictive fault detection, automated remediation, and self‑balancing cluster reconstruction, achieving near‑complete hardware issue coverage and reducing manual intervention across hundreds of thousands of servers.
This article outlines the ten most sought‑after technical skills for IT professionals in 2019, covering DevOps, Hadoop, Python/Django, data‑science tools, machine learning, AI, RPA, AWS, Tableau, and digital‑marketing analytics, with market trends and certification guidance.
This article traces OpenStack’s rise, decline, and recent resurgence, describing how the foundation refocused on core services, launched pilot projects in CI/CD, containers, edge computing, and AI, and positioned the platform as a mature, widely‑adopted private‑cloud solution.
This article outlines the ten most sought‑after technical competencies for 2019—including DevOps, Hadoop, Python/Django, data‑science tools, machine learning, AI, RPA, AWS, Tableau, and digital‑marketing analytics—explaining why each skill matters, key tools to learn, and the market demand behind them.
The article details Suning’s Internet‑plus transformation, describing its strategic “one body, two wings, three clouds, four ends” model, the evolution of its enterprise architecture across three generations, the adoption of cloud, SOA, micro‑services, big‑data and AI platforms, and the accompanying R&D and organizational reforms.
Meituan’s HULK platform is a custom container‑cluster manager that integrates service governance, deployment and monitoring, while employing kernel patches, enhanced cgroup controls, dynamic CPU/memory isolation, P2P image distribution and in‑container core‑dump handling to overcome stability, performance and resource‑reporting challenges.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of Platform as a Service (PaaS), covering its definition, service model distinctions, historical milestones, major vendors, technical characteristics, container foundations, and the most prominent open‑source and commercial PaaS platforms.
The article examines how Alibaba’s 2009 Double 11 promotion grew into the world’s largest shopping festival, mirroring China’s transition from an investment‑export‑driven economy to a consumption‑led one, while spurring advances in cloud computing, IoT, and digital manufacturing over the past decade.
From the first tentative steps of Alibaba Cloud in 2006 to the fierce CDN price wars and the rise of new players like UCloud and QingCloud, this article chronicles a ten‑year saga of how cloud computing emerged, matured, and reshaped China’s internet ecosystem, highlighting key investments, strategic battles, and the shifting attitudes of industry giants.
The article analyzes the massive technical challenges of Alibaba's Double 11 flash‑sale event and explains how cloud elasticity, distributed messaging, containerization, real‑time data processing, AI, front‑end optimization, caching, monitoring, and database sharding together enable billions of transactions within minutes.
In November 2018, ACM honored Alibaba Damo Academy’s chief database scientist Li Fei‑Fei with the Distinguished Scientist award, recognizing his pioneering work on distributed, intelligent, and secure database systems, his transition from academia to industry, and his vision for future cloud‑native database technologies and academia‑industry collaboration.
Marking the 10th anniversary of Double 11, ZTO Technology details how it tackles massive traffic spikes with an automatic sorting management platform, a high‑availability IDC and private cloud, smart voice and face‑recognition services, real‑time data dashboards, and extensive performance testing to ensure stable, fast, and accurate order fulfillment.
Enterprise WeChat (WeCom) is Tencent’s B2B platform that separates work from personal chat while leveraging familiar WeChat interactions, integrating cloud, AI and security services, offering real‑name address books, read receipts, lightweight OA tools, open APIs for ERP/CRM, and extensible mini‑programs to enable smart enterprise connectivity and workflow automation.
From the humble 2009 launch of Double 11 to the massive, cloud-native, multi-region architecture of 2018, Alibaba’s engineers chronicle yearly technical hurdles—traffic spikes, system crashes, CDN limits, over-selling, and the evolution of stress-testing, capacity planning, and operational safeguards that turned the shopping festival into a global engineering showcase.
This article chronicles Red Hat’s journey from its Unix roots in the 1960s through key milestones like the GNU project, Linux adoption, major product launches, strategic acquisitions, and its eventual $34 billion acquisition by IBM, highlighting its impact on open‑source and cloud computing.
This article chronicles the strategic shifts of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent over the past decade, analyzing how Baidu’s late entry into cloud storage, its focus on AI, and its unique technical choices allowed it to outlast rivals in the fierce cloud‑storage battles that reshaped China’s internet landscape.
This essay explores how differing philosophies between closed‑source and open‑source software drive distinct business models, legal risks, and innovation pathways, highlighting open source's growing influence across AI, blockchain, DevOps, licensing, and cloud computing.
The article provides a detailed market and application analysis of graph databases, highlighting rapid growth, key use cases in finance and social networks, Tencent's StarGraph solution, advantages over relational databases, current limitations, and future industry adoption trends.
This article explains the rapid rise of open‑source technologies, outlines common questions and risks associated with open‑source license usage, summarizes a guide covering eleven major licenses, and announces the OSCAR Open Source Pioneer Day where experts will discuss compliance and best practices.
The article reviews recent advances in cloud computing hardware‑software integration, including Alibaba's FusionEngine storage engine, AI‑driven reliability and performance challenges, near‑data network acceleration, and the concept of server hardware AI, while also highlighting related research talks and recruitment notices.
The article provides an in‑depth technical overview of OpenStack Magnum, covering its community contributions, architecture, Nova and Heat Docker drivers, core concepts such as Bay and Baymodel, supported back‑ends like Kubernetes and Swarm, and the workflow for provisioning container clusters.
The 2018 Cloud Native Best Practices Summit in Beijing gathered over 200 industry leaders and experts who shared insights on cloud native trends, standards, Kubernetes, service mesh, product launches, and the formation of the Cloud Native Practice Alliance, marking a milestone for China's cloud native ecosystem.
The article examines Docker’s origins and container technology, contrasts its performance and use cases with OpenStack and KVM, clarifies common misconceptions, and concludes that OpenStack, KVM, and Docker are complementary tools rather than mutually exclusive solutions.
This article examines OpenStack’s evolution over the past eight years, analyzes its current positioning against VMware and AWS, discusses the challenges of its “big tent” model and core services, and speculates on possible future paths for the platform from a user’s viewpoint.
The JD.com Rental platform, launched in early 2018, combines e‑commerce and service models to offer a full‑cycle online rental experience across eight cities, leveraging custom front‑end channels, cloud‑based infrastructure, big‑data ranking algorithms, and the "Zhouzi" integration to sync millions of listings and streamline merchant operations.
This article compares Microsoft Flow, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and WebJobs, outlining their integration capabilities, typical use cases, and key differences to help developers choose the most suitable Azure service for automating business processes and building serverless workloads.
This article explains the core features of Tencent Cloud API Gateway, how it integrates with Serverless Cloud Functions (SCF) to provide a unified, secure, and high‑performance serverless architecture, showcases typical use cases, discusses pricing, and answers common deployment questions.
The 2018 half‑year report of 360 Security reveals a 13.95% increase in revenue to 6.025 billion yuan, strong performance of its core security products, rapid growth in IoT hardware, a 24% rise in advertising revenue, and substantial R&D investment in AI, big data, and cloud technologies.
This article introduces Docker as a container engine, explains continuous integration and continuous deployment practices, and surveys major PaaS solutions—including OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Heroku—as well as automation tools like Ansible and Cloudify, highlighting their roles in modern cloud computing.
The article describes how 58's search technology team standardized and modularized their vertical search services into a cloud-native platform, detailing the overall architecture, Kubernetes‑based deployment, service and deployment designs, stateful indexing challenges, and solutions for high‑availability and scalability.
The article explains cloud computing fundamentals, details Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and their metrics, compares the availability and compensation policies of major Chinese cloud providers, and concludes with a brief DevOps recruitment notice, highlighting both technical insights and industry context.
China’s 2018 Cloud Computing Development White Paper reveals that the public cloud market grew over 50% in 2017, predicts continued rapid expansion, highlights fierce competition among industry clouds, the rise of hybrid and multi‑cloud strategies, growing security concerns, open‑source adoption, and evolving policy and technology trends.
This talk by Tencent’s monitoring R&D lead outlines a decade of evolution in large‑scale monitoring, covering real‑world incident cases, the three drivers behind architectural upgrades, the implementation of a three‑dimensional monitoring framework, and the application of AI‑powered AIOps for precise, rapid anomaly detection.
Fibonacci is JD.com's enterprise-grade serverless function platform combining container technology, serverless architecture, and event-driven mechanisms to provide high-availability, high-efficiency, and high-usability FaaS solutions.
This article provides a step‑by‑step tutorial on deploying trained deep‑learning models to production, covering client‑server architecture, load balancing with Nginx, using Gunicorn and Flask, cloud platform choices, autoscaling, CI/CD pipelines, and additional tools such as TensorFlow Serving and Docker.
Google Cloud NEXT 18 in San Francisco unveiled the alpha‑tested Cloud TPU 3.0, major AutoML enhancements, and the Contact Center AI solution, while CEO Diane Greene highlighted AI and security investments and the cloud’s rapid revenue growth, signaling Google’s push to outpace AWS, Azure, and IBM.
This article explains how OpenStack Ironic enables bare‑metal provisioning as a cloud service, outlines scenarios where physical servers outperform virtual machines, details Ironic’s architecture and evolution, compares billing models, and highlights future trends for bare‑metal cloud offerings.
iQiyi improved OpenStack Swift’s video‑streaming performance by redesigning its storage engine to merge numerous tiny objects into larger files, replacing Swift’s per‑object directory structure with RocksDB‑managed metadata, eliminating file‑ID overhead, using prefix scans for fast listings, and adding lazy deletion, achieving dramatic speedups with only about 3,000 lines of new code.
The article introduces the ZhiYun Job Platform, detailing its evolution from basic tool construction to advanced orchestration and API integration, highlighting how it standardizes, automates, and secures repetitive operational tasks for enterprises across cloud environments.
Cloud Foundry is an open‑source PaaS that abstracts cloud, framework, and service choices, offering features such as multi‑cloud deployment, standard frameworks, built‑in services, and a modular, message‑driven architecture composed of Router, Cloud Controller, DEA, Health Manager, Service Broker, and NATS, with flexible deployment options for both private and public clouds.
This tutorial walks you through creating a virtual network, defining a tiny m1.nano flavor, generating key pairs, configuring security groups, launching an OpenStack instance, accessing it via a virtual console, and installing and configuring the OpenStack Horizon dashboard, complete with command examples and screenshots.
Alibaba Cloud introduces the F3 FPGA instance, a dual‑chip VU9P‑based accelerator that combines a unified HDK/SDK platform, secure IP marketplace, and ultra‑high‑speed interconnects to make FPGA acceleration more accessible, flexible, and cost‑effective for cloud users.
This guide walks you through installing and configuring OpenStack Compute (Nova) and Networking (Neutron) services on controller and compute nodes, covering database creation, service and endpoint registration, configuration file adjustments, package installation, and verification steps to achieve a functional IaaS cloud.
This tutorial walks through the complete installation and configuration of OpenStack's identity (Keystone) and image (Glance) services, covering database setup, service and endpoint creation, Apache integration, token management, client environment scripts, and verification steps, with detailed command examples and configuration snippets.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of OpenStack's architecture, details each core service with its role, and walks through step‑by‑step commands to configure a functional OpenStack Pike environment on CentOS, including networking, database, messaging, and storage components.
At the 2018 GTLC Global Technology Leadership Summit, Suning's IT executive Jo Xinliang shared strategic insights on technology management, decision‑making frameworks, and the evolution of Suning Cloud, highlighting how perspective, data, and governance shape effective corporate tech decisions.
The article analyzes the challenges of declining online traffic and low in‑store conversion, then details how Tencent Cloud’s AI‑driven retail suite—covering scientific site selection, commercial‑area insights, computer‑vision store management, one‑code product tracking, and brand sentiment analysis—offers data‑powered solutions for modern retailers.
The article examines OpenStack’s open‑source advantages—free licensing, broad compatibility, and extensibility—while also highlighting its drawbacks such as limited monitoring, billing, DNS, and storage features, vendor conflicts, high integration costs, frequent releases, and security concerns like authentication, password handling, token management, and data encryption.
This article explains OpenStack's Keystone service, describing how token‑based authentication enables unified identity, authorization, and accounting across Nova, Glance, and Neutron components, and compares the approach with public‑cloud AK/SK mechanisms.
This article explains how container technologies like Docker and Amazon ECS enable the transition from monolithic web applications to scalable microservices architectures by improving development agility, resource isolation, and deployment flexibility across cloud environments.
This article provides a comprehensive, beginner‑friendly overview of OpenStack, covering its history, version‑naming scheme, core components, community governance, reasons for its popularity, industry adoption, and practical advice on how to start learning the open‑source cloud platform.
The Think in Cloud 2018 conference in Beijing showcased how cloud platforms enable rapid AI deployment across sectors such as autonomous driving, intelligent customer service, and education, highlighting challenges, platform‑centric solutions, and real‑world case studies that illustrate the growing synergy between cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Senior Alibaba engineer Xiao Xie recounts his decade‑long journey from the early Taobao Mall project to leading the Cloud Computing “Flying‑Sky Eight” team, detailing pivotal initiatives like the Five‑Color Stone integration, full‑link stress testing for Double‑11, and the evolution toward self‑developed, distributed cloud technologies.
The 2018 UCloud Think in Cloud conference showcased how cloud infrastructure accelerates AI applications in customer service, education, and embedded devices, while also presenting blockchain use cases and security challenges across finance, insurance, and IoT, highlighting practical solutions and emerging platforms.
This tutorial walks you through downloading an Ubuntu 14.04 cloud image, converting it with Glance, configuring OpenStack credentials, creating a key pair, launching a VM from the image via the dashboard, and accessing the instance securely using SSH.
The article recounts how Alibaba and Ant Group were forced by the massive Double‑11 transaction surge to develop their own OceanBase database, explores the five‑year struggle, the broader fintech innovations, and the strategic mindset of autonomous R&D and open‑source sharing.
PhoenixGo, an open‑source Go AI built on AlphaGo Zero's reinforcement‑learning algorithm, leveraged Tencent's idle cloud servers to achieve professional‑level play, won the 2018 World AI Go Championship, and was released with a strong model for researchers and hobbyists alike.
The talk details Ele.me’s rapid growth from 300k to over 10 million daily orders, describing the challenges of high‑concurrency, multi‑active micro‑service architecture, IDC planning, database refactoring, disaster‑recovery, NOC operations, and the systematic processes that enabled stable, scalable delivery across two data centers.
The article explores how software‑defined storage (SDS) can be combined with blockchain technology to address security, cost, performance, and efficiency issues of public cloud storage, detailing common principles, practical advantages, and examples such as IPFS and StorJ.
Suning’s executive vice president outlines how digital empowerment—through AI, cloud computing, and big‑data analytics—creates a new smart‑retail ecosystem, emphasizing user‑centric services, data‑driven operations, and technology platforms that blend efficiency with a human touch.
This article surveys Qihoo 360’s notable open‑source projects—including distributed system testing tools, high‑performance storage services, AI scheduling platforms, database alternatives, frontend frameworks, mobile plugin solutions, and development utilities—highlighting their purposes, key features, and public GitHub repositories.
The article explains how heterogeneous parallel computing—leveraging CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other specialized units—addresses the performance limits of traditional serial programming by distributing tasks across diverse hardware, detailing its concepts, architectures, development models, and relevance to AI and cloud workloads.
The article examines Tencent Cloud’s “Mi Master” payment platform, detailing its background, three‑tier system architecture, real‑time transaction consistency mechanisms, traffic‑scheduling strategies, scenario‑based stress testing, and multi‑dimensional risk‑control measures that together ensure high availability and security for large‑scale mobile payment services.
This article explains how cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are interrelated, describing the evolution from physical resource management to virtualized, elastic services, the roles of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how each technology benefits the others in modern applications.
This article reviews recent HPC market size and growth trends, highlights AI‑driven investment, and evaluates Huawei’s hardware, cloud, and industry‑specific solutions—including supercomputing, automotive, oil & gas, and entertainment—while offering personal insights on storage challenges and future directions.
This step‑by‑step guide shows how to configure Route53 DNS, prepare a VM with required tools, create an S3 state store, provision a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using kops, validate it, expose a sample service, and clean up the resources.
In his Money 20/20 Asia keynote, Ant Group CTO Cheng Li outlines the company’s fintech roadmap, highlighting AI‑driven risk engines, blockchain‑based trust mechanisms, cloud‑native infrastructure, and innovative mobile payment solutions that aim to make financial services more inclusive and efficient.
This article explains why X86 bare‑metal services are essential for high‑performance, security‑critical workloads, describes their architecture and management processes, and outlines the steps—standardization, automation, service‑orientation, and self‑service—used by Hengfeng Bank to implement and operate them.
This article explains the origins and goals of cloud computing, how virtualization adds flexibility in time and space, the evolution from physical servers to public and private clouds, the role of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how big data and artificial intelligence intertwine with cloud services to enable modern intelligent applications.
This case study examines the shortcomings of traditional smart gas meters and explains how NB‑IoT combined with Huawei's OceanConnect platform delivers a cloud‑based, low‑power, real‑time smart gas solution that improves meter reading, safety, billing, and operational efficiency.
This tutorial explains how to efficiently clone a powered‑off virtual machine in vSphere Client by creating a dedicated folder, copying the source VM files, adding them to inventory, and powering on the new instance, complete with illustrated steps.
This article chronicles a game company's operations team evolution over seven years, detailing how it grew from a tiny manual crew to a large, automated, cloud‑native organization that built its own CDN, monitoring, and platform solutions while tackling scaling, reliability, and service‑orientation challenges.
This article explains Alibaba's co‑location (混部) technology that mixes online services and batch compute on the same physical servers, detailing its background, key characteristics, scheduling architecture, resource isolation mechanisms, cost‑saving formulas, and future roadmap, showing how it boosts utilization and reduces expenses.
This article provides a comprehensive introduction to container technology—covering Docker's architecture, networking models, storage solutions, integration with PaaS/IaaS platforms, orchestration tools, and its impact on DevOps, micro‑services, and cloud computing ecosystems.
Amid the rise of multi‑cloud strategies, China’s nascent multi‑cloud management platform market faces a lack of standards, prompting TrustCloud to launch the first domestic evaluation framework that assesses information authenticity, platform quality, and service completeness, with results to be revealed at the 2018 Cloud Computing Open‑Source Industry Conference.
Serverless computing, the latest cloud paradigm merging microservices and serverless architectures, evolves from on‑premise monoliths through SOA and containers, offering rapid deployment, cost efficiency, and scalability, while also presenting challenges such as vendor lock‑in, complexity, limited long‑running tasks, and security considerations.
This article examines the challenges faced by water utilities such as high leakage and meter errors, explains why traditional smart meters fall short, and details how NB‑IoT‑based smart water meters provide secure, low‑power, wide‑coverage solutions that enable real‑time analytics, cost reduction, and large‑scale digital transformation.
This article examines the rapid growth of China’s government cloud market, the challenges revealed by low‑price bidding scandals, and the four‑dimensional assessment method introduced in 2017 to evaluate policy compliance, application impact, platform capability, and security safeguards.
This article explains why elastic scaling is needed for variable web traffic, describes how to build a cost‑effective, automatically adjustable service on Alibaba ECS using message queues, service refactoring, Docker deployment, logging, and a real‑time allocation algorithm, and shares practical lessons learned.
In an exclusive interview, UCloud’s R&D Director Ye Lideng shares how the company’s CBA strategy, AI‑first products, and innovative cloud services empower startups, drive industry adoption, and shape the future of artificial intelligence and cloud computing in China.
A 2017 analysis of China’s high‑end internet talent market reveals that cloud computing, big data and gaming lead salary rankings, while company financing stage, job role demand, city location and candidate age all shape hiring trends and compensation levels.
The article provides a detailed market analysis of high‑performance computing from 2016 to 2021, covering market size, budget allocation, regional shares, key applications, the rise of AI and cloud integration, and emerging hardware and networking technologies driving future growth.
This article explains how server‑side service discovery enables clients such as API gateways to locate dynamically changing microservice instances via a router or load balancer that queries a service registry, outlining requirements, solution architecture, examples like AWS ELB, benefits, drawbacks, and related patterns.
The case study details Donghua Software’s smart flood‑control and drainage solution, which integrates IoT sensors, NB‑IoT/eLTE networks, Huawei’s FusionSphere cloud platform, big‑data analytics, and GIS to provide real‑time monitoring, predictive warnings, automated gate control, and efficient emergency dispatch for urban water management.
The 2017 China Cloud Computing Evaluation Report by Tingyun analyzes major cloud providers across user experience, performance, availability, and ease of use, using a 132‑item questionnaire and verification tests to deliver regional performance scores and comprehensive provider rankings.
The author reflects on five years of cloud computing evolution, predicts that cloud services will replace half of IT's backend functions, outlines the upcoming consolidation of vendors, and examines how PaaS, staffing, and business models will reshape the industry over the next three to five years.
This 30‑minute, 120‑point quiz challenges you with multiple‑choice questions on the correct pronunciation of popular tech terms, cloud computing fundamentals, AI scope, industry vendors, and other essential technology concepts.
