Embracing Cloud-Native 2.0 to Enable Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Almost all enterprises in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are accelerating their digital transformation in 2021, driven by diverse factors, such as the pandemic and the development of the Internet and the financial industry. Indeed, we've seen many enterprises enter a new stage of digitalization, accepting the idea of cloudification and accordingly moving to the cloud. This is not limited to Internet enterprises, either. All enterprises — in all industries — can now move to the cloud to become new, cloud-native enterprises, which will only facilitate their service development.

Enterprises Are Moving from "ON-Cloud" to "IN-Cloud"

In essence, cloud-native capabilities bring enterprises into a new stage of digital transformation. Huawei defines this as Cloud-Native 2.0, which has several important features. We believe that Cloud-Native 2.0 represents a new stage in the intelligent upgrade of enterprises, helping enterprises move from "ON-Cloud" to "IN-Cloud." As such, Cloud-Native 2.0 connects new and legacy capabilities so that they can co-exist and function together, allowing for higher resource utilization, more agile applications, and intelligent, secure, and trustworthy services.

Cloud-Native 1.0 featured the "ON-Cloud" model, where enterprises migrated their offline services to run on the cloud. This model has helped to resolve Operations and Maintenance (O&M), deployment, and capacity expansion issues. But it has proved unable to handle the range of problems caused by traditional monolithic architecture, which is siloed and inflexible. But Cloud-Native 2.0 shifts to the "IN-Cloud" model, in which enterprises develop and grow services in the cloud. They utilize cloud-native technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, audio and video, and edge computing, to pass through the "deep water zone" of digital transformation. However, enterprises also need to continue to build on and develop their existing capabilities, so that new and legacy capabilities co-exist and function together.

In the Cloud-Native 2.0 era, we hope to help enterprises grow these new capabilities. Moreover, many people in the industry may think that cloud-native is all about the Internet. Of course, many Internet enterprises are developed based on the cloud, and thus have full cloud-native capabilities. Yet, cloud-native is not limited to Internet enterprises. Today, many traditional enterprises also need cloud-native capabilities. And while their past development was not based on the cloud, they are still able to grow cloud-native capabilities, looking to the future. Indeed, this is the new answer that we bring to you with Cloud-Native 2.0.

Huawei's Cloud-Native Practices: Develop and Grow New Capabilities in the Cloud, Which Function Together with Legacy Capabilities

This concept of new cloud-native enterprises and relevant practices are all derived from Huawei's own digital transformation experience. Most people see Huawei as a traditional manufacturing enterprise. However, our own Information Technology (IT) systems have gone through the digital transformation process to become cloud-based. And at the core of Huawei's cloud-native practices is the idea of developing and growing new capabilities in the cloud, where they co-exist and function together with legacy capabilities.

For example, Huawei's Research and Development (R&D) operations have been fully cloudified, and a large number of enterprise cloud-native R&D applications have been deployed. This greatly improves our efficiency, increasing the resource reuse rate by three times and improving deployment efficiency by 10 times. In this digital R&D environment, online and offline resources are integrated to implement digital twins and reconstruct R&D operations. Digital labs utilize Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud computing to flexibly and quickly set up R&D testing environments, on-demand and in real-time. Now, in our labs, a testing environment can be automatically set up within minutes with no coding required, improving testing efficiency by 10%. With an R&D desktop cloud and other digital R&D tools, Huawei's 150,000 R&D personnel worldwide have all moved their coding tasks to the cloud.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, telecommuting and online exhibitions have become necessities and a new normal. Throughout the pandemic, Huawei has carried out online exhibitions with cloud-native technologies, in order to maintain sound customer relationships and ensure service continuity. We have addressed uncertainties related to exhibitions through our cloud resource platform, which is based on cloud-native architecture. The platform can be flexibly used to quickly set up an exhibition on-demand, which improves the resource reuse rate and reduces costs. Over the past year, we have organized more than 1000 exhibitions. We have also responded to the demand for meetings and held an average of 107 high-level online meetings or summits per month, up from an average of 30 offline meetings before the pandemic struck. In the past, we could only hold an event in one country at a time. Now, we are able to open online exhibitions in more than 20 countries at the same time, through online and digital platforms.

Meanwhile, Huawei has built an Operation Web Services (OWS) global O&M service platform, to quickly respond to customer demands and provide personalized services. Based on cloud-native technologies, this platform adopts a unified global O&M architecture that enables easy and fast deployment, as well as convenient access to abundant resources around the world. By connecting with third-party applications, the platform provides three key capabilities: low-barrier, configuration-based development; cloud-based deployment; and an open ecosystem. These all support frontline personnel in their independent R&D and rapid deployment of online applications.

Huawei has also deployed a large number of AI applications to support automatic financial reimbursement, identification of the authenticity of contract signatures and seals, and intelligent acceptance of site delivery. These applications have improved our work efficiency, reduced labor costs, and allowed employees to focus on key and difficult tasks.

Cloud-Native 2.0 Accelerates Digital Innovation in Industries

HUAWEI CLOUD leverages Huawei's own experience in digital transformation to help more enterprises become cloud-native.

For example, the express delivery industry is growing at lightning speed and delivery service companies are struggling to keep up with all kinds of new IT requirements. Proactive action is difficult, if not impossible. Service deployment across multiple countries and regions is expensive and procurement is slow, making it difficult to aggregate and manage service data.

In response, Indonesian courier service provider J&T Express deployed their service systems on the HUAWEI CLOUD node in Singapore, allowing these systems to be accessed from anywhere in the world. In countries with heavy service loads, such as Indonesia and Thailand, our Cloud Connect services have been deployed (in China) to ensure access even in peak hours. After service deployment, elastic scalability now allows for scaling up and Cloud Connect services ensure smooth access.

Elsewhere, e-commerce giant Aladdin also struggled to deal with the massive surges in traffic seen during promotions and sales, due to the changes in customer behavior caused by COVID-19. Indeed, the company was experiencing 100-fold increases in user visits. As a result, servers were regularly overloaded, resulting in slow system responses and, at times, even causing the entire platform to crash.

HUAWEI CLOUD features preset scaling policies to handle traffic surges during large-scale promotions, which helps maintain service stability. Computing which resources can be scaled up or down, so that services meet immediate requirements, HUAWEI CLOUD has helped Aladdin reduce server expenditure by approximately 20%, while providing shoppers with an enhanced user experience.

As Aladdin continues to expand its platform in 45 countries, the HUAWEI CLOUD e-Commerce Cross-Border Solution has enabled Aladdin to easily deploy multiple systems worldwide, ensuring accelerated service roll-out.

One final example can also be found in the innovative e-commerce live-streaming platform MeOne, which operates across Southeast Asia. It offers cost-effective supplies and novel entrepreneurial support to its users. But despite MeOne's ability to integrate cross-border supply chains, it was still struggling to make major breakthroughs in Southeast Asia. During the ongoing pandemic, data restrictions also made it more difficult to expand its business.

HUAWEI CLOUD's high-performance, low-cost services allowed MeOne to reduce its IT expenditure by approximately 50%. With a Relational Database Service (RDS), MeOne has since established a more reliable system and its data access speeds have increased by 30%, helping the company expand its business into markets with poor Internet support, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) market.

Through Cloud-Native 2.0, HUAWEI CLOUD enables enterprises from multiple sectors, including logistics, e-commerce, and media, to explore new businesses, new ecosystems, new business models, and new technologies. Simply put, HUAWEI CLOUD helps enterprises go digital and accelerate innovation in both services and digitalization.

Digital Entrepreneurship Enabled by the Huawei Spark Program

All startups can make a difference. Every single one of them has the potential to reshape the world. Indeed, many of today's technology giants started as experiments in garages. But the harsh reality remains that 99% of startups ultimately fail. And a big reason for this is a lack of experienced support and guidance.

The Huawei Spark program was created to address this precise problem. It gives startups access to general technology platforms and industry capabilities, as well as to Huawei's own technical, ecosystem, and market resources. We are committed to empowering startups so that we can grow together — and grow better. Participating in the Huawei Spark program allows startups, as well as Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), to get the head start they need, driving their digital transformation and supporting their spirit of entrepreneurship. Huawei's platforms and sales channels help startups and SMEs alike more easily develop in the Chinese market and go global. Meanwhile, these organizations help us to build up the Cloud-Native 2.0 ecosystem, which will in turn improve Huawei's own business environment and its social and business influence.

One of Singapore's fastest-growing online car marketplaces, UCARS, for example, is designed to make buying cars easier. The company was founded in 2019, but its user base fluctuates drastically, making the app susceptible to online attacks. In addition, UCARS needs to continue providing more and more value-added services, to make transactions easier for both sales staff and buyers.

HUAWEI CLOUD is helping UCARS develop and deploy applications faster, as well as manage and monitor applications more effectively, with an Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), load balancers, associated databases, cloud container engines, firewall tools, and application O&M services. With AI-powered image search and quick match capabilities, buyers are more efficiently matched with car dealers who are increasingly likely to offer what they're looking for. This has made UCARS a truly cloud-based business.

Another example can be found in the NextBillion.AI platform that sells map Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and tools to enterprises. It participated in the 2020 Huawei Spark program within its specific category. A spokesperson for the company commented: "We have benefited greatly from the Spark program and have received significant support from HUAWEI CLOUD in terms of cloud architecture, talent, and business development. Especially in terms of business forms, HUAWEI CLOUD's containerized platform allows us to flexibly deploy solutions in any other HUAWEI CLOUD user environment, and with very low deployment and O&M costs. This has won us more valuable enterprise customers."

To further drive a boom in the cloud-native industry, HUAWEI CLOUD APAC has launched the Cloud-Native 2.0 Action Plan, which focuses on joint innovation, industry promotion, community contributions, and comprehensive enablement. Through this plan, we are committing ourselves to providing stable, reliable, secure, sustainable, and innovative cloud services, creating fertile soil in which the intelligent world can flourish. We want to help enterprises across all industries become truly cloud-based as they go digital, and jointly build exemplary models of Cloud-Native 2.0 enterprises.