Technical Drivers

In the digital era, cloud computing has become the core of enterprise technology strategies. For CIOs, CTOs, and technical directors, cloud transformation is not only a business development requirement but also an inevitable choice for technological innovation and transformation. Cloud computing provides technical advantages in terms of resource elasticity, system resilience, scalability, security, and O&M efficiency. These technical drivers are the underlying technical support for business drivers and financial drivers.

• Improve resource elasticity
  Resource elasticity is one of the core features of cloud computing. It means that the cloud platform can quickly expand and reduce the compute, storage, and network resources required by the service system based on service requirements. Improving resource elasticity can effectively improve service agility and continuity.

  • Dynamic resource allocation: Cloud computing supports on-demand resource allocation. Enterprises can quickly expand the resource scale during service peak hours to cope with traffic surges. During service off-peak hours, enterprises can release idle resources to reduce costs.
  • Automatic scaling: Cloud platforms can automatically scale resources based on preset policies and real-time load conditions through automatic monitoring and scheduling.
  • Quick deployment and reclamation: Compared with the traditional hardware procurement and deployment, the creation and destruction of cloud resources can be completed within minutes or even seconds. This greatly improves the elasticity speed of resources.
• Improve system resilience

  System resilience refers to the ability of a system to maintain normal operation or quickly recover when facing various external disasters and internal software and hardware faults. Cloud platforms and cloud services can greatly improve the resilience of application systems, thereby effectively improving service continuity.

  • High-availability architecture: Cloud service providers provide multi-region and multi-AZ deployment modes and allow application systems to adopt cross-data center, cross-region disaster recovery (DR) and active-active solutions, or even cross-region, multi-active solution. These solutions can greatly improve the availability and DR capabilities of application systems.
  • Backup and DR: Cloud platforms provide built-in functions such as data backup and DR switchover to help enterprises build a comprehensive disaster recovery solution and ensure system availability in emergencies.
  • Service level agreement (SLA): Cloud services usually provide SLAs of more than 99.9%. This effectively ensures the reliability SLO of application systems built based on these cloud services.
  • Automatic fault handling: Cloud platforms can automatically detect and rectify faults, reducing manual intervention and shortening the fault handling time.
• Improve scalability

  Scalability refers to the ability of a system to maintain stable performance and efficiency by adding or adjusting resources (such as servers, storage, and bandwidth) without changing the system architecture or making minimum modifications to the system when the system is faced with increasing workloads or requests. Cloud platforms and cloud services can greatly improve the scalability of application systems and smoothly handle the increasing number of users, data, or transactions without causing performance degradation or system breakdown. Improving system scalability can effectively improve service agility and continuity.

  • Distributed architecture: Cloud platforms support distributed system architecture design, allowing applications to run on multiple servers or nodes and distributing loads to avoid single points of failure. This improves system scalability and availability.
  • Auto scaling: Cloud platforms provide the auto scaling function. Systems can automatically add resource instances based on preset policies to cope with traffic peaks and ensure stable performance.
  • Microservice architecture: Cloud platforms are suitable for microservices and containerized deployment. They support application splitting and separate expansion to improve flexibility and maintainability.
  • Serverless computing: Cloud platforms provide serverless compute services (such as FunctionGraph) that allow users to deploy code on the cloud without managing servers. Cloud platforms automatically allocate compute resources based on requests and release resources after requests are processed. This greatly simplifies scalability management.
• Improve security

  Security refers to the ability to protect data and application systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, tampering, destruction, or loss. Cloud service providers invest heavily in information security to provide enterprises with multi-layer security protection. Improving security can effectively improve service continuity.

  • Cloud platform security: Cloud platforms comply with strict security standards and certifications, such as ISO 27001, CSA, SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, DJCP, PCI-DSS, and NIST CSF.
  • Abundant cloud native security services: Cloud service providers provide many kinds of cloud native security services, covering the host, data, application, network, identity, and O&M security, to help enterprises quickly build a comprehensive security defense line for application systems on the cloud.
• Improve O&M efficiency

  O&M efficiency refers to the ability of the IT O&M team to manage as many IT resources as possible with the minimum resource investment (labor, time, and cost) and maintain high service quality and stability. It reflects resource utilization and personnel productivity. After adopting cloud computing, enterprises can greatly improve O&M efficiency and effectively reduce O&M costs.

  • No need to manage IT infrastructures: Cloud service providers are responsible for the O&M of IT infrastructures, such as cloud data centers, hardware, networks, and virtualization. Enterprises only need to focus on the O&M of application systems.
  • Intelligent monitoring systems: Cloud service providers provide full-stack, intelligent monitoring systems to collect and analyze cloud resource and application performance metrics in real time, automatically identify exceptions, predict potential risks, and provide alarms and visualized reports, helping O&M personnel quickly locate faults.
  • Automated O&M: Cloud service providers provide tools for automated deployment, configuration management, monitoring, alarm reporting, and O&M, reducing the workload of O&M personnel and improving O&M efficiency. Automated O&M also reduces the risk of human errors, thereby reducing unnecessary troubleshooting.
  • Serverless architecture: If enterprises use serverless services such as function computing, they only need to write service logic code and do not need to manage any server, which further reduces the O&M burden.
• Improve performance efficiency

  The goal of improving performance efficiency is to process more service requests with fewer IT resources, which is ultimately reflected in higher throughput, response time, or number of concurrent users. With excellent architecture design principles and performance detection and optimization tools provided by cloud service providers, enterprises can effectively improve their system performance metrics.

  • Selecting appropriate resources: Select the most appropriate specifications for compute, storage, middleware, and database resources based on service requirements, and avoid over-provisioning to reduce resource waste.
  • Performance testing and planning: Use performance test tools provided by cloud platforms to evaluate the current performance metrics of application systems, and plan the capacity based on the service growth trend in advance.
  • Performance tuning: Explore the performance potential of existing resources, including database query optimization, code optimization, and using cache and CDN acceleration, to improve system throughput and response speed.
  • Architecture optimization: Use more efficient architectures. For example, use asynchronous processing and message queues to decouple system components and improve the concurrency processing capability.

Technical drivers of cloud transformation bring profound changes to the IT strategy and technical architecture of enterprises. For technical leaders, a deep understanding and good use of these technical drivers will help:

• Formulate forward-looking technical strategies to lead the digital development of enterprises.
• Optimize the IT architecture and resource configuration to improve the contributions made by technical departments.
• Promote technological innovation and service convergence to support enterprises in gaining competitive advantages.