Cloud‑Native Large‑Scale Cloud‑Edge Collaborative Technology Wins Top Science and Technology Progress Award

On November 22, the Zhejiang Province 2023 Science and Technology Progress Awards were announced, and the project "Cloud‑Native Large‑Scale Cloud‑Edge Collaborative Key Technology and Application" jointly developed by Alipay, Zhejiang University, Xieyun Technology and Alibaba Cloud received the First Prize.

This technology constitutes a large‑scale cloud‑edge collaborative computing solution, a core enabling technology for distributed and cloud computing. It addresses unified scheduling of massive heterogeneous devices, enhancing elasticity, real‑time performance and peak‑shaving capabilities.

As a foundational technology, it underpins artificial intelligence, privacy computing and other advanced applications. After three years of research, the team introduced memory‑optimisation for lightweight containers, non‑intrusive pruning, and asynchronous node‑ and service‑management methods, achieving support for millions of edge nodes per cluster and improving system resource utilisation by 6 percentage points. The effort yielded 20 patents, 32 high‑impact papers and the authorship of one national standard.

The award committee highlighted the project's high difficulty, strong innovation and its significant impact on advancing key technologies and achieving autonomous control, noting that the results reach international leading levels.

Alipay’s contribution focused on a large‑scale node‑management controller, service auto‑profiling, and multi‑metric capacity planning for cloud‑edge distributed systems, which have been integrated into its products to ensure efficient and stable services, benefiting the broader payment industry.

The solution has been widely applied in payment, finance, government, healthcare and international events, delivering notable social and economic benefits. For example, from 2020 to 2022 Alipay saved 16.9 billion CNY through unified scheduling and resource‑pool optimisation, supported over 7 billion Ant Forest users, and enabled simultaneous digital torch‑lighting for the Hangzhou Asian Games.

Several core technologies have been open‑sourced, receiving praise from the international open‑source community; the security container technology Kata Containers has become a top‑level project of the Open Infrastructure Foundation.