One Cloud Story: Huawei + 3data = Cloud

    Three years ago, we adopted a new strategy, according to which the leading place in the company's development plans is given to cloud technologies. In 2018, Huawei, together with 3data, launched cloud services in Russia. Our country was the first outside of China, where a cloud was deployed under its own brand.


    3data HP-26 data center is one of the places where the Huawei cloud lives

    The Russian cloud is far from the only one built by Huawei using its own hardware and software. In China, Huawei is developing three very large cloud solutions: Huawei’s own public cloud, the public cloud of one of China Mobile’s largest telecom operators, and a cloud for government agencies. In addition, in China, we offer our customers a range of services comparable to those of the Big Western Three - Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Many of these services are already operating in Germany, France, Spain and in a number of countries, but under the brands of local partners.

    The Russian market for Huawei has always been special, with it began our success story outside of China. It is not surprising that the first foreign cloud under its own brand was launched here. It should be considered as part of a strategy for the development of cloud technology solutions that are integrated into many of the company's products: for telecom, the corporate segment, and even for end users.

    How to get started


    When the question arose of considering the possibilities of launching a public cloud in Russia, the first thing we did was to conduct a deep and comprehensive analysis of the Russian cloud services market in 2016-2017. The results of the analysis gave us confidence that the market is very vibrant and dynamic, but at the same time it is far from saturation. Many practical questions arose, in particular, of a legal and commercial nature: what licenses are needed to provide such services, how best to get them, how to formalize relations with customers, etc.



    As a result, cloud services were deployed at a partner site: 3data provided us with its own data center with engineering infrastructure and communication channels, which is Tier 3 in its characteristics. The cloud itself is completely built on Huawei products: all hardware and software components of the cloud, that is, servers , data storage systems, communication equipment, as well as software - all of its own production.

    The equipment is located in Moscow, and the services are provided under the brand name Huawei 3data Cloud: the partner provides the first line of cloud support and, partially, the second. 3data is also a front-liner for customers who sign a contract with 3data. The number of their own data centers is approaching two dozen, the company is quite capable of such large-scale projects.

    Our cloud software is based on the Huawei FusionCloud solution, in turn, based on OpenStack. KVM virtualization is used. It is worth noting that Huawei is one of eight platinum sponsors of the OpenStack project.



    We use the Huawei FusionSphere hypervisor based on KVM. It is very important to note that Huawei was one of the first companies to receive the FSTEC certificate for its hypervisor.

    What was launched first


    The Russian cloud services market is different from the Chinese or European. It is much smaller in volume, and Russian business still does not accept cloud technologies as well as Western ones. Also, our studies done in 2017 showed that advanced PaaS-class cloud services are not very much in demand, although there was an upward trend. There are also positive (for the provider) differences: the market is still far from saturated, and there is less competition in Russia. The most difficult thing was choosing products for the first phase of deployment. A serious market analysis was conducted with the involvement of third-party contractors, and for the initial stage in Russia only IaaS services were selected:

    • virtual data center (VPC)
    • virtual servers (ECS)
    • block storage (EVS)
    • Object Storage (OBS) supporting the S3 protocol
    • Auto Scaling
    • load balancers (ELB)
    • VPN as a service
    • Firewall as a Service
    • security groups
    • dedicated servers (Bare Metal Service) and some others.




    The first availability zone officially began operating in March 2018.

    Our cloud also offers a free cloud infrastructure monitoring service (Cloud Eye Service), an infrastructure change logging service (Cloud Trace Service), and a Simple Message Notification service that significantly improves the security and administration capabilities of the cloud infrastructure.

    Quite quickly, we had clients with requests for GPU virtualization. Especially for them, this service was quickly migrated from the Chinese cloud. At the end of 2018, servers with Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs arrived for these clients. In the second quarter of 2019, we plan to further expand the server cluster with GPUs.

    The Direct Connect service has proved itself to be excellent - a dark optics connection of a client’s physical data center with its virtual data center in the Huawei cloud. In this case, the client receives routing at the IP level with a high degree of security between their physical and cloud networks.

    In October 2018, the first PaaS class services were launched in test mode:

    • RDS, Relational Database Service (Databases as a Service). Now in the cloud are available products such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server;
    • DCS, Distributed Cache Service, which implements memory caching systems. You can choose a service based on memcached or based on redis).
    • DDS, Document Database Service: a document-based database management system based on MongoDB.

    Here's what our product list looks like as of February 2019:



    Small customers are usually satisfied with basic IaaS services, and medium and large companies need a wider range of services, including PaaS: container management, building data warehouses, message brokers.

    The needs of our customers in reality turned out to be such that in the third quarter of 2018, we exhausted the capabilities of the data center used at that time and began to look for opportunities for further expansion.

    Road map


    Huawei’s Russian cloud offers customers more than two and a half dozen services, and at the end of the first quarter of 2019 their number will increase to more than 50. We plan about 30 new services, including the following:

    • Cloud Container Engine - Kubernetes-based container management;
    • Elastic File Services - shared file storage;
    • Domain Name Service;
    • MapReduce Service - work with big data based on Apache Hadoop;
    • Data Lake Insight - processing and analysis of big data based on Apache Spark;
    • Distributed Message Service - high-performance message queues of various types, in particular, Kafka, ActiveMQ, etc.

    Also, at the end of the first quarter of 2019, the number of access zones will increase to three - in March it is planned to launch three new sites, into which we will quietly move for our customers from the existing data center. Two sites are rented in the two largest data centers in Moscow, and the third site is provided by our 3data partner. Due to the specific centralization of business in our country, we are currently focused on taking a firm position in the central region of Russia, but in the next couple of years we plan to expand to other geographical regions of our country.



    On the basis of cloud products, customers will be offered complete turnkey solutions: the backup solution to the cloud based on Commvault RBaaS, as well as a solution for automated migration to the Huawei cloud from other environments based on Hystax Acura are now being prepared for launch.

    Developing the project, in 2019 we pay special attention to partner channels. On the one hand, we plan to expand our sales network and portfolio of joint integration services. Secondly, one of our goals is to launch such an ecosystem so that Russian technology companies can create their own solutions based on Huawei cloud products and offer them to their customers. The third area for cooperation is service partners who will help us provide our customers with some specialized services, for example, launching and supporting Oracle DBMS in our cloud.



    Artificial Intelligence


    As we have said, the Russian project should be considered as part of the overall context. Huawei's strategy involves the development of a global cloud platform, and in the future, services based on machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies will be added to the list of services. In China, a significant number of them are available to customers now, namely:

    • Text recognition (OCR);
    • Reading text (Text-to-Speech);
    • Speech recognition;
    • Music recognition;
    • Highlight objects on video and much more.

    В соответствии с нашей стратегией Huawei планирует стать ведущим игроком на рынке облачных услуг для задач искуственного интеллекта. В октябре 2018 года на Huawei Connect в Шанхае были представлены оптимизированные для решения задач ИИ чипы серии Ascend. Их можно использовать как вспомогательные процессоры для решения специализированных задач в новых серверах Huawei. Созданная по технологии 12 нм модель Ascend 310 уже доступна, а более продвинутая Ascend 910 выйдет во втором квартале 2019 года. Созданный по технологии 7 нм чип станет ближайшим конкурентом Nvidia Tesla V100, при несколько большем энергопотреблении он будет обладать производительностью в 256 TFLOPS.

    The exact dates for the appearance of hardware-based AI server solutions in Russia are still unknown, but this will approximately happen in the second half of 2019. It is expected that servers with Ascend 910 chips will occupy an important place among the hardware components of our cloud and the corresponding services will rely on them. cloud computing.

    Competitors


    Globally, Huawei Cloud competes with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud, and we set ourselves the goal of becoming one of the five largest cloud providers in the world. We respect our competitors, but we are absolutely sure that we can do this task. Today, the Western Three offers a wider range of services than Huawei in Russia, however, our Russian cloud has a powerful donor. Huawei services in China have been operating for many years, offering users more than a hundred diverse services and several hundred partnership solutions built on them. This is of particular value, because we do not have to create new products from scratch, the process of their migration from the parent cloud is ongoing. In addition, Amazon, Google and Microsoft do not have Russian data centers,



    Among the major domestic competitors, Mail.ru Cloud Solutions and Yandex.Cloud can be mentioned, but Huawei has its advantages here: it includes several thousand employees working in the R&D sphere, a full range of equipment of its own production (including servers, network equipment and storage systems) and all the same developed Chinese cloud, from where it is easy to transfer new services in the presence of customer requests. The Russian market for cloud services is really far from saturation, and there is still enough space for it on everyone, but this will not continue indefinitely. The emergence of another global player should speed up the process.

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