How Cloud‑Native Edge Collaboration Won Zhejiang’s Top Science Award

On November 22, 2023, the Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Award announced that Alibaba Cloud, Zhejiang University and other partners won the First Prize for their cloud‑native large‑scale cloud‑edge collaborative key technology and applications.

The evaluation committee praised the project’s high research difficulty, strong innovation, and significant impact on advancing key technologies and autonomous control, noting its wide influence in open‑source communities and successful applications in the internet, transportation, finance, logistics, and medical sectors.

With explosive growth in computing demand, traditional cloud architectures cannot meet the latency, bandwidth, and privacy requirements of massive data processing. Deploying cloud capabilities to the edge and enabling cloud‑edge collaboration is a crucial breakthrough for digital innovation in the era of ubiquitous connectivity, and cloud‑native technology has become the core approach for efficient cloud‑edge cooperation.

To promote autonomous, controllable, and scalable cloud‑edge collaborative technologies, Alibaba Cloud and Zhejiang University addressed challenges such as limited edge device resources, performance bottlenecks in cloud platform management, and insufficient real‑time cloud‑edge computing. They developed a cloud‑native integrated platform that supports lightweight custom containers, large‑scale edge node management, and real‑time cloud‑edge computation.

For efficient management of massive heterogeneous edge nodes, the project introduced an asynchronous execution method for node and service management, allowing tasks to run independently and greatly improving efficiency.

The method supports managing up to millions of edge nodes within a single cluster, offering strong scalability.

In real‑time cloud‑edge computing, the approach analyzes dynamic workload changes of each request and leverages underlying container runtime features to identify required micro‑services and their dependencies.

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

The cloud‑native large‑scale cloud‑edge collaborative technology has been widely applied in transportation, energy, healthcare, international events, and finance, generating significant social and economic benefits.

Using this technology, Alibaba Cloud provided unified management and operation for ticketing services at the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, achieving 100% ticket verification success and an average verification latency of 10 ms, earning high praise from the organizing committee. The same results supported the Hangzhou Asian Games in building the first one‑stop digital viewing platform, attracting over 6 billion visits.

In the automotive sector, Yuan‑Rong Qi‑Xing, a rising unicorn in autonomous driving, reduced onboard device resource usage by 50% and improved deployment and operation efficiency by 60% after integrating its vehicles with the cloud‑edge platform.

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