Huawei Cloud: Everything as a Service

This Ubiquitous Cloud-Native Service is the industry's first distributed cloud-native product. Zhang Ping'an, CEO of Huawei Cloud and President of Huawei Consumer Cloud Service spoke about Huawei Cloud: Everything as a Service. In this keynote, two new regions were announced, and ten new services launched include MacroVerse aPaaS, OptVerse AI Solver, Huawei Cloud Stack 8.1, Pangu drug molecule model, and SparkRTC. Zhang also announced the first virtual human, Yunsheng, to join Huawei Cloud.

Four years into its development, Huawei Cloud has attracted 2.3 million developers, 14,000 consulting partners, 6,000 technical partners, and released 4,500 Marketplace products. Huawei Cloud has become an important platform for Internet companies and organizations to go digital. More and more enterprises have joined hands with Huawei Cloud to embrace digitalization. Emergencias, a top medical service company in Argentina, used Huawei Cloud for remote diagnosis and treatment. Wuliangye, a renowned brand for Chinese baijiu, underwent total digital transformation with Huawei Cloud, from brewing, distribution, to sales. Conch Cement deployed its IT system on Huawei Cloud and built a smart factory and greener industry through collaboration on technological innovation, including 5G, cloud, and AI.

Zhang used these success stories to illustrate the key to digital success. "For the past 30 years, Huawei has been relentless in connecting the world. For the next 30 years, we build the cloud foundation for an intelligent future – Infrastructure as a Service for global accessibility, Technology as a Service for flexible innovation, and Expertise as a Service for shared excellence," he said. "Digitalization is a wealth of opportunities, and we call on all to think cloud native, act cloud native. Let's dive into digital and into the potential of Everything as a Service.”

Infrastructure as a Service for global accessibility

Huawei Cloud continues to expand its global data center and network vision to connect the globe with a seamless media experience for customers. Ulanqab joins Mexico as the two new regions and the world's largest rendering base of Huawei Cloud, with the computing power of ten thousand cores for rapid rendering of images. By September 2021, Huawei Cloud and partners operate 61 Availability Zones (AZs) in 27 geographic regions worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions.

Huawei Cloud works with partners towards a global cloud alliance, giving customers and partners access to cloud resources with a single account, interface, and invoice. Christophe Ozer, Head of Orange Cloud (Orange Flexible Engine) APAC, shared his experience with Huawei Cloud in helping customers develop globally. He said, "From Asia Pacific to Europe, we provide one network and one cloud for data interconnection and global innovation."

Audiovisual network services are now a basic requirement for many digital applications. This year's Huawei Cloud saw the launch of SparkRTC, a real-time audio and video cloud service that covers more than 170 countries and regions with a reliability up to 99.99% and latency under 200 ms.

Technology as a Service for flexible innovation

Enterprise customers avoid "reinventing the wheel". They want solutions that will help them use cutting-edge digital technologies as conveniently as water and electricity. This will greatly reduce repetitive work, allowing them to focus on innovation, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Huawei will continue to share its advantages built by 100,000 engineers and an average annual R&D investment of USD10 billion. The solutions provider offers fundamental technologies such as operating systems, databases, AI, compilers, codecs, and algorithms to customers, partners, and developers across a wide variety of industries through cloud services.

At Huawei Connect 2021, Zhang Ping'an released innovations such as OptVerse AI Solver, Pangu drug molecule model, Blockchain Service, and the FunctionGraph function computing service. He also announced three technical upgrades to Huawei Cloud GaussDB, while Huawei Cloud Stack was upgraded to 8.1. Huawei Cloud Stack 8.1 now supports eight services, including AI inference, big data governance, and cloud desktop, to provide more than 80 cloud services in 12 categories, making it the solution with the widest range of on-premises cloud services.

Huawei Cloud’s OptVerse AI Solver pushes operations research beyond the limits of operation optimization. This innovation solves problems with hundreds of millions of variables, at 100 times computing speed thanks to distributed parallel acceleration. AI-enabled modeling is 30 times more efficient than manual modeling, while AI-based adaptive tuning is 30% more efficient than manual parameter setting. Thanks to these metrics, OptVerse AI Solver ranks first on the Hans Mittelmann Benchmark for Simplex LP solvers.

The OptVerse AI Solver has been used by Tianjin Port for global optimization scheduling. Wu Qiang, Vice President of Tianjin Port Holdings, said, "Tianjin Port is one of the world's top 10 ports, with an annual throughput of nearly 20 million containers. Huawei Cloud’s OptVerse AI Solver helps us make planning 100 times faster even with tens of millions of variables and constraints. We've maximized resource scheduling and greatly improved operation efficiency."

At the Huawei Developer Conference (Cloud) 2021, Huawei Cloud released the Pangu hyper-scale pre-trained AI model. Chen Haining, General Manager of IT Dept from Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB), shared how they built the SPDB Finwarehouse with Huawei. The Pangu large model identified the container type and quantity of goods in storage. "By deeply integrating digital technologies into industries, we can use digital capabilities to drill down into supply chain scenarios of various real economy industries. SPDB chooses to work with Huawei to boost the economy."

Following that conference, the Huawei Cloud Pangu drug molecule model was unveiled at Huawei Connect 2021. A joint release by Huawei Cloud and Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) of Chinese Academy of Sciences, this model learns the chemical structure of 1.7 billion small molecules and assists in drug design throughout the entire process for enhanced R&D efficiency. Among the first achievements of this model is a new broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug designed by the First Affiliated Hospital of Medical School of Xi'an Jiaotong University, who shortened the lead compound R&D cycle from several years to one month.

Expertise as a Service for shared excellence

Zhang Ping'an launched the MacroVerse aPaaS, positioned by Huawei Cloud as the aPaaS for industries. It takes expertise and innovations from industry digital transformation and builds them into cloud platform services for industry developers. MacroVerse provides mobile developers five digital engines: payment, search, browsing, map, and advertising. Mobile applications developed based on Huawei Cloud can be released to Huawei AppGallery with one click. In nine vertical markets, including industrial, automobile, retail, healthcare, interactive media, and news, Huawei Cloud MacroVerse provides more than 50 scenario-specific cloud services, 128 Kits, and over 20,000 APIs.

Huawei Hetu cloud integrates 2D or 3D digital information into any physical space to seamlessly merge the physical and digital worlds. It has been applied in more than 20 scenarios, including museums, shopping malls, and historical relics.

Huawei Cloud WeLink leverages Huawei's own digital office experience and has served 180 Fortune China 500 enterprises. In addition to a major upgrade, Huawei Cloud WeLink will be launched in more countries this October.

Huawei Cloud’s new digital media pipeline automates film and television production. Jiang Chuanrong, Chairman of Shanghai Mirror Pictures, took the stage as the first joint innovation partner to use this pipeline in industry. Building on Huawei Cloud’s digital content production line, Huawei Cloud created the first virtual human, Yunsheng, to join Huawei Cloud.

Digitalization is a wealth of opportunity. The key is to think cloud native, act cloud native, and apply this all-digital, all-cloud, AI-driven mindset to explore the potential of everything as a service. Huawei Cloud is committed to building the cloud foundation for an intelligent world with ubiquitous cloud and pervasive intelligence.

Huawei hosts Huawei Connect 2021 online from September 23 to October 31. The theme of this year's event is Dive into Digital – into the practical application of technologies like cloud, AI, and 5G in all industries, and how they can make organizations of all shapes and sizes more efficient, more versatile, and ultimately more resilient as the world moves towards economic recovery.