Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud‑Native Edge Collaboration Wins Zhejiang Science Award

On November 22, 2023, the Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Progress Award announced that Alibaba Cloud, Zhejiang University, Alipay and Xieyun Technology jointly received the first‑prize for their cloud‑native large‑scale cloud‑edge collaboration key technology and applications.

Rapid growth in computing demand has exposed the inability of traditional cloud architectures to meet the latency, bandwidth, and privacy requirements of massive data processing. Shifting compute capabilities to the edge and enabling cloud‑edge collaboration is seen as a crucial breakthrough for digital innovation in the era of ubiquitous connectivity.

The project identified three core technical challenges: limited resources on edge devices, performance bottlenecks in cloud platform management, and insufficient real‑time capability for cloud‑edge collaborative computing.

To address these, the team built a cloud‑native integrated platform that supports lightweight, customizable containers and provides large‑scale edge‑node management and real‑time cloud‑edge collaborative computation.

Introduced an asynchronous execution method for node management and service management, allowing management tasks to run independently and dramatically improving efficiency.

The method can handle up to millions of edge nodes within a single cluster, delivering strong scalability.

For real‑time collaborative computing, the solution analyzes dynamic workload changes of each request, leveraging container runtime features to identify required micro‑services and their dependencies.

Based on this analysis, the team built a precise end‑to‑end latency model and proposed dynamic‑load scheduling and resource‑allocation algorithms, achieving fast task dispatch and fine‑grained resource distribution.

The technology has been widely applied in transportation, energy, medical, international sports events, and finance, generating notable social and economic benefits. In the Winter Olympics and Paralympics ticketing service, it delivered 100 % ticket‑validation success with an average latency of 10 ms, earning high praise from the organizing committee. It also powered the Hangzhou Asian Games’ one‑stop digital viewing platform, attracting over 6 billion visits.

In addition, Alibaba Cloud open‑sourced OpenYurt, the industry’s first non‑intrusive edge cloud‑native platform. Since its September 2020 release, OpenYurt became a CNCF sandbox project and has had a broad impact on the global open‑source community.