Tencent'S Internal Force: QQ Achieves Full Volume Cloud Computing.

A year ago, the Tencent Technical Committee was formally established. This is regarded as the Tencent's "technical middle stage" organization, which integrates the technical force of the whole Tencent: the chairman of the technology and engineering group of Tencent, Lu Shan and Tang Daosheng, the president of the intelligent industry group, the two leading members of the general assembly.

At the beginning of its establishment, the Tencent Technical Committee set up two project groups, namely "open source collaboration" and "self research cloud". The former aims to promote the open source and synergy of Tencent's internal code, while the latter is to promote Tencent business integration in the cloud.

Recently, in twenty-first Century, economic news reporters learned from Tencent that up to now, Tencent's QQ products have achieved full amount of cloud. This is undoubtedly an important milestone for Tencent cloud in the period of rapid development.

In January 13th, the reporter interviewed many participants on QQ's cloud project. They explained the stories behind QQ from the different angles of their respective businesses.

Chen Tiegang, director of operations planning department of Tencent operation and management department, told reporters that cloud research is a trend in the industry, including Amazon, Microsoft, Ali cloud and so on. On the one hand, it can bring efficiency improvement and technical support to self research business, on the other hand, it is also the best way to prove the capability of cloud service to external customers.

Why QQ?

Although the Tencent Technical Committee was set up in early 2019, the cloud began last year to become a group project. However, it started early in Tencent, and QQ was the first product to try on cloud computing.

Xu Yongzhou, head of Tencent cloud operation and maintenance center, joined Tencent in 2005. It is the first full-time operation and maintenance of QQ backstage, and has always been responsible for QQ's operation and maintenance capability construction. He told the twenty-first Century business news reporter that before and after 2015, they had already seen the general direction of "going to the clouds", and in those years they tried to put QQ's business on sandbox clouds.

Sandbox cloud refers to the establishment of a logical isolated private network space on Tencent cloud. It uses the IaaS services of Tencent cloud and uses cloud virtual machine, network and computer room to support the service of self research business.

Xu Yongzhou said that although QQ business encountered many problems in the sandbox environment, and ultimately no large-scale promotion, but these attempts accumulated a lot of experience for QQ, so when the "self research cloud" project was confirmed, QQ as the company's highest preparation product, also became the first to promote cloud self research business.

Tencent cloud native architecture general manager, former QQ technology operations director Xiao Shi advertisement told reporters that Tencent did research on cloud is not to cloud up and cloud, but hope that business and cloud can have a real close combination. So for QQ, the cloud is not just used to use the IaaS capability of the cloud, but to fully reflect the IaaS and PaaS capabilities of the cloud to the QQ scenario.

In fact, for some small and medium-sized businesses, they do not need to prepare for the cloud. However, like QQ, a big Mac with a monthly life of over 700 million can not be achieved overnight, and there must be a preparatory process.

For Tencent cloud, it is an opportunity and a challenge to receive such a huge QQ. The opportunity is that cloud services require large volume of business to do traction. If Tencent cloud can support such a huge business like QQ, it can almost think that it is very stable and can fully support other massive businesses in the market.

But the challenge also comes from this. If Tencent can not even carry out the business of its own company, how can it win the trust of external customers? Therefore, the cloud on QQ is also a test that can not be blunders.

All increments up to three years.

Li Li, deputy general manager of Tencent cloud service, told reporters on twenty-first Century economic report that they also found some mismatches between demand and original capability in the process of QQ's gradual progress. For example, the original public cloud is a kind of tide management. Most customers have a general trend in cloud volume. However, QQ has a very strong burst capability and a higher demand for cloud emergency response.

This is because QQ's social scene has fission effects, for example, a user sends messages to the group, which is hundreds of times of fission. In some unexpected situations, the burst of data is even more difficult to predict. "Under such circumstances, we can only optimize the computing, storage, network and other aspects, improve the performance of the cloud, and also prepare more resources to meet the use scenarios of QQ." Li Li said.

In addition, network interworking is also a thorny problem in cloud computing over QQ. Xu Yongzhou said that the various businesses of the group are like high-speed trains, and the original infrastructure network and the cloud network are like two highways. First of all, they must not stop the business and then change the road. So his infrastructure team must ensure that the business is developing at a high speed while the Xiang Yun network will switch.

According to Xu Yongzhou, their team used nearly half a year to solve the problem of network interoperability. In the meantime, he also feels that Tencent cloud's capability is increasingly being understood by internal businesses. In the past, when a business needed to support an activity quickly, it usually applied for servers or even temporarily purchased some servers. But now, with the choice of cloud servers, this is a great benefit for both sides.

In 2017, all users of QQ were still on the private cloud; at the end of 2018, 15% of QQ users moved to the cloud; in June 2019, 30% QQ users were deployed on the cloud. Today, users of the entire QQ have moved to the cloud.

But this is not the end of Tencent's "self research cloud". According to the goal set out at the beginning of last year, Tencent will increase all incremental businesses in three years. This year's goal is to achieve 50% increments on the cloud.

In addition to QQ, Tencent cloud has another huge challenge: "WeChat on cloud." From the point of difficulty, the cloud on WeChat will be more difficult than QQ, because the development framework of WeChat and QQ is different, and WeChat's user volume is larger than that of QQ. According to Chen Tiegang, WeChat is now on the grayscale cloud and is gradually coming to the cloud at its own pace.

Chen Tiegang told reporters that in the past, the foundation of WeChat and QQ was completely different. But with the advance of the cloud, the two have begun to achieve some unification, such as the use of unified virtualization platform, the same mobilization capabilities, and so on, which is also the process of Tencent's technological capability from different to unification.

This is the main purpose of Tencent's Technical Committee. The structural adjustment in 2018 has sounded the horn of Tencent's entry into the industrial Internet. In the first three quarters of 2019, Tencent cloud revenue exceeded 10 billion yuan. When Tencent cloud wants to go further, it faces greater capacity challenges in the face of larger scale development.

For Tencent with huge product matrix, whether or not their products use Tencent cloud has become an important criterion for measuring cloud capability of Tencent. Therefore, the total volume of self research business is also a need for Tencent group to further develop the industrial Internet.

Chen Tiegang said, "we all know that open source collaboration is code opening, resource collaboration, and self research cloud is a final form of technology collaboration." In order to achieve self research, we need to increase manpower to support self research business, and self research business should also take the initiative to turn their own people to support Tencent cloud, which is a resultant force in Tencent.

From the point of view of product users, whether or not QQ changes to the cloud will not be too great. But for Tencent, the resultant force formed through self research and cloud computing is of great value.