How Baidu Smart Cloud Reinvents Cloud‑Native Infrastructure for the AI‑Native Era

This article compiles Baidu Smart Cloud's presentation at the 2024 Baidu Cloud Summit – Cloud Native Forum.

Amid rapid advances in cloud computing and AI, enterprises across industries are accelerating digital transformation and intelligent upgrades, driving higher innovation speed and better product and customer experiences.

Market reports show cloud services' share of IT spending continues to rise, while AI adoption has surpassed 70%, with generative AI accelerating from 33% to 65% in just one year, marking the onset of the AI‑native era.

To thrive, enterprises must base their digital foundations on comprehensive cloud adoption and cloud‑native architecture, shifting from CAPEX to OPEX and enabling flexible, elastic services.

In the AI‑native era, infrastructure must support three layers: intelligent computing for AI model training and inference, general computing for application hosting, and data infrastructure for storage, management, and analysis of AI training and deployment data.

Baidu Smart Cloud has rebuilt its infrastructure services to meet these demands, emphasizing extreme elasticity, AI‑optimized storage, and higher performance with easier operation and diverse deployment models.

Elasticity is a key capability: Baidu Smart Cloud offers a soft‑hardware integrated resource base with a scalable platform architecture, supporting various purchase models (annual, monthly, pay‑as‑you‑go, reserved instances), rapid instance creation (3‑minute provisioning), large‑scale container clusters, and flexible network configurations via NFV gateways.

For AI workloads, Baidu Smart Cloud built a data‑lake storage system on top of BOS object storage, supporting multi‑modal data management, optimized metadata and storage engines, and offering products such as RapidFS, PFS, and CFS to meet big‑data, machine‑learning, and deep‑learning analysis needs.

Performance upgrades include a 50% increase in compute power, stronger single‑core performance, elastic frequency scaling, 200 Gbps bandwidth, expanded VPC address space (300 w IPs) with rapid allocation, 100 Tbps dedicated line capacity, and a new streaming storage engine delivering over 70% higher read/write speeds for large files.

Operations management now covers the full lifecycle—resource migration, deployment, change, monitoring, alerting, fault analysis, scaling, and resource management—augmented by generative AI tools such as SmartTerm, which enables natural‑language driven server management, reducing operational costs and improving efficiency.

To address data locality, compliance, and latency, Baidu Smart Cloud offers distributed cloud infrastructure that can be deployed in public clouds, private clouds, edge locations, and on‑premises data centers, all managed through a unified cloud‑native platform.

Case studies include an automotive industry deployment where Baidu Smart Cloud provided a global network, high‑availability elastic infrastructure, and edge computing nodes to accelerate autonomous driving data processing, as well as a fintech private‑cloud solution delivering 100% autonomous control, multi‑region disaster recovery, and compliance‑ready compute and storage.

Global network connecting offices and production sites for integrated management.

Edge storage and compute for massive autonomous driving data back‑haul.

Database and big‑data services supporting OTA, accounts, and orders.

These examples demonstrate how Baidu Smart Cloud’s cloud‑native, AI‑native infrastructure enables enterprises to achieve digital transformation, intelligent upgrades, and sustained competitive advantage.