How Leading Chinese Tech Companies Master Cloud‑Native at Scale

The inaugural Cloud‑Native Practitioners Conference was held on June 28, both online and offline, gathering dozens of R&D engineers from companies such as Zuoyebang, Zhihu, Zhuanzhuan, 58.com, Tongcheng and experts from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) Cloud Lab.

Zuoyebang’s Cloud‑Native Journey

Dong Xiaocong, head of infrastructure at Zuoyebang, explained that the company adopted cloud‑native in early 2020 to address stability, efficiency and cost challenges. By letting the infrastructure handle non‑functional logic, Zuoyebang achieved elasticity, observability, resilience, automation and sustainability. In June, the company was recognized as an outstanding cloud‑native case by CAICT in 2022.

Industry Outlook

Du Lan, researcher at CAICT’s Cloud Computing and Big Data Institute, presented the development history and trends of the cloud‑native industry. She noted that cloud‑native is the standard path to the cloud, maximizing cloud efficiency. A CAICT survey predicts the Chinese cloud‑native market will reach a trillion yuan in 2021, with rapid penetration into vertical industries and a surge of small‑ and medium‑size enterprise users. Adoption of key technologies such as containers, micro‑services and serverless has risen significantly, with over 40% of users deploying cloud‑native in core production workloads.

Company Presentations

Four companies shared their cloud‑native practices:

Zuoyebang : Senior engineer Bie Lu presented “Zuoyebang k8s serverless large‑scale application practice”, covering virtual node usage in Kubernetes, benefits of serverless, encountered issues, innovative scheduling solutions, and observability of pods on virtual nodes.

Zhihu : Core architecture engineer Xie Chuyu described “Zhihu’s Istio journey”, explaining how Istio was adopted in a massive cluster to upgrade the micro‑service architecture, enable communication between Istio‑managed and legacy services, solve migration challenges, and improve performance and metrics.

Zhuanzhuan : Infrastructure lead Liang Huaibin discussed the company’s k8s practice, highlighting containerization advantages (resource isolation, lightweight deployment, high availability) and challenges such as dynamic IPs, log collection, service governance, and monitoring, along with solutions like image management, release upgrades, container monitoring and log aggregation.

Following the talks, participants engaged in in‑depth discussions on cloud‑native topics. Nearly 50 technical staff from various tech firms attended both online and offline. Du Lan praised the event, stating that gathering leading engineers to share and discuss cloud‑native practices helps more companies understand and adopt these technologies, thereby supporting digital transformation.

The conference also marked the first “Tech Edge” tech salon organized by Zuoyebang, a company founded in 2015 that provides educational technology solutions, including the Zuoyebang app for K‑12 learning assistance and various smart hardware products.