What I Know About Cloud Computing

The author shares a personal overview of cloud computing, originally written in Chinese, using the upcoming 9th China Cloud Computing Conference as a timely prelude and mentioning a limited‑time ticket discount.

It begins with the history of hardware servers, operating systems, and the shift to x86 servers and Linux, explaining how virtualization introduced hypervisors that abstract hardware resources into virtual machines, dramatically reducing costs.

The article then examines cloud resource management platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft SystemCenter, and OpenStack, describing the competitive landscape and the eventual dominance of open‑source solutions.

Next, it discusses the container era, highlighting the drawbacks of heavyweight OSes inside VMs and the rise of lightweight containers like Docker, as well as lightweight OS projects such as CoreOS and Unikernel that support containerization.

The piece reviews container orchestration systems—Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm—explaining their roles in managing large numbers of containers and their differing strengths.

It delves into cluster resource scheduling, comparing Mesos and Hadoop YARN, and explains a two‑layer scheduling model where a unified resource manager allocates resources to frameworks that perform fine‑grained scheduling.

The author then addresses application serviceization and microservices, contrasting monolithic architectures and SOA with microservice approaches that enable independent deployment, scaling, and faster development cycles.

Distributed databases are covered next, outlining the challenges of scaling, consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (CAP theorem), and describing middleware solutions that provide sharding, read/write splitting, and load balancing.

In conclusion, the article asserts that virtualization, containers, distributed databases, and microservices collectively aim to build a service‑oriented architecture, but stresses that successful adoption requires coherent strategy and organizational alignment.