Large‑Scale Cloud‑Edge Collaborative Technology Based on Cloud‑Native Wins Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Progress Award

On November 22, 2023, the Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Award results were announced, and the joint effort of Alibaba Cloud, Zhejiang University, Alipay and Xieyun Technology on a cloud‑native large‑scale cloud‑edge collaborative key technology and its applications won the first‑prize for Science and Technology Progress.

The technology appraisal committee highly praised the project, stating that the research difficulty was great, the innovation strong, and the achievements significant for advancing key technologies and autonomous controllability, with broad impact in open‑source communities and successful applications in internet, transportation, finance, logistics, and medical sectors.

With the explosive growth of computing demand, traditional cloud architectures cannot meet the latency, bandwidth, and security‑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 technologies have become the core enabler for efficient cloud‑edge cooperation.

To promote autonomous, controllable, and scalable cloud‑edge collaborative core technologies, Alibaba Cloud partnered with Zhejiang University and others to develop a cloud‑native integrated platform that supports lightweight custom containers, large‑scale edge node management, and real‑time cloud‑edge collaborative computing.

• The project introduced an asynchronous execution method for node management and service management, allowing tasks to run independently and greatly improving efficiency. • This method enables a single cluster to manage up to millions of edge nodes, providing strong scalability. • For real‑time cloud‑edge collaborative computing, the approach analyzes dynamic workload changes of each request, leveraging container runtime features to identify required micro‑services and their dependencies. • Based on this, the project built an accurate end‑to‑end latency model and proposed dynamic scheduling and resource allocation algorithms for fine‑grained, rapid task dispatch under varying loads.

The cloud‑native large‑scale cloud‑edge collaborative technology has already been widely applied in transportation, energy, medical, international events, and finance, delivering notable 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 technology supported the Hangzhou Asian Games in building the first one‑stop digital viewing platform, attracting over 60 billion visits.

In the automotive manufacturing sector, the autonomous‑driving unicorn Yuanrong Qixing integrated its vehicle‑mounted devices with the cloud‑edge platform, reducing resource consumption by 50% and improving deployment and operation efficiency by 60%.

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud open‑sourced the industry‑first non‑intrusive edge cloud‑native platform OpenYurt, which became a CNCF sandbox project in September 2020 and has generated extensive influence in both domestic and international open‑source communities.