Apsara Conference | Cloudchef Builds Ultra-Automated Cloud Service Capabilities

Apsara Conference | Cloudchef Builds Ultra-Automated Cloud Service Capabilities

Published: 2021-10-26

On October 22, the four-day 2021 Hangzhou Apsara Conference drew to a close. This year's Apsara Conference once again showcased a panoramic view of the thriving ecosystems of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence at the highest level — truly a grand event for the technology community.

As an ecosystem partner of Alibaba Cloud, Cloudchef was invited to attend the conference and jointly delivered an in-depth presentation titled "Upgrading the Cloud Automation Capability System" with Alibaba Cloud solution experts, comprehensively analyzing best practices for multi-cloud management in cloud-native environments, exploring new directions in cloud management, and empowering a digitalized and intelligent cloud future.

Enterprise Cloud Is the Trend: Intelligent IT Management Addresses Cloud Management Pain Points

Currently, the cloud computing market is thriving. According to iiMedia Research, China's cloud computing market reached 177.64 billion RMB in 2020, a 33.41% increase from 2019, and is projected to maintain this growth rate and reach 233.06 billion RMB in 2021.

Enterprises are accelerating their cloud adoption, but traditional IT resource management — still predominantly manual and resembling an "artisan workshop" approach — is severely slowing down digital transformation. The analysis and judgment of IT requests, resource creation, modification, reclamation, incident handling, execution analysis, optimization analysis, and operations are not only inefficient and costly but also error-prone, seriously hindering business departments.

Gartner defines hyperautomation as "automating everything that can be automated" and predicts that hyperautomation will be a major trend in 2021.

Unlike traditional IT management approaches, intelligent IT management achieves full automation of the enterprise IT management pipeline, similar to an "unmanned factory." Enterprise IT departments form a unified automated management system where all data can be processed on the platform, avoiding human errors. Unified usage policies, security compliance policies, and automatic execution policies are enforced. Multi-cloud operational visibility enables fault prevention and self-healing. This reduces manual O&M costs, improves IT service efficiency, and better supports digital transformation.

Fang Li, CEO of Cloudchef, stated: "The cloud simply provides a new form of computing capability similar to electricity, eliminating the need for enterprises to build their own data centers. However, the cloud does not solve many of the traditional IT management challenges. Cloudchef's platform leverages cloud APIs to help enterprises build ultra-automated cloud service capabilities, creating an IT service department akin to a robotic unmanned factory. Through such ultra-automated capabilities, we can achieve rapid resource delivery, accelerate business system deployment, and enable continuous automatic optimization of cloud usage. This capability is also a critical foundation for building digital enterprises."

Service Orchestration + Self-Service: Building DevOps Best Practices

Cloud computing is redefining the software development process. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic, software — as the new lifeline connecting our daily lives with the global economy — has become even more critical. Traditional software development is characterized by long timelines, slow iteration, and poor flexibility. The evolution of cloud computing has driven reform in the software development process. The DevOps philosophy has established standards for the full software lifecycle — from project management and application development to software testing and operations — providing clear practice frameworks for developing cloud-ready software applications with multi-cloud deployment capability, portability, scalability, and high availability.

At the Apsara Conference C-Hall "Yuanli Show" session, Cloudchef solution architect delivered an in-depth presentation titled "Continuous DevOps Delivery Solutions in the Cloud-Native Era." DevOps is a collaborative culture dedicated to breaking down the barriers between development and operations, improving IT department efficiency. Most current continuous delivery solutions in the industry are container-based, while Cloudchef's cloud continuous delivery platform is an enterprise-grade platform for public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud environments, integrating DevOps practices with cutting-edge industry R&D concepts and providing visual pipelines.

Cloudchef's cloud continuous delivery is efficient, controllable, and replicable. Through continuous delivery pipelines, it supports various trigger conditions (manual, scheduled, Webhook, Jenkins, etc.) and automatic task execution (Jenkins jobs, service deployment, application updates, resource changes, waits, manual judgment, etc.). Through TOSCA-standard blueprint orchestration, it can build cloud-native immutable infrastructure, rapidly construct environments, and ensure consistency between production and development environments, addressing the challenges of increasingly smaller resource granularity and faster release changes in cloud-native and DevOps scenarios.

Deep Partnership with Alibaba Cloud: Embarking on a New Journey in Cloud Automation

Cloudchef is a core partner of Alibaba Cloud in the cloud computing domain. Based on its pioneering integrated platform of ITSM + ITOM + ITBM, Cloudchef provides users with a unified management framework oriented toward self-service and DevOps, helping enterprises achieve AI-driven, highly automated unified management and an optimal user experience, deeply empowering enterprise digital transformation.

To date, Cloudchef has successfully served thousands of large enterprise customers across industries including finance, government, higher education, manufacturing, and healthcare. The company has also successfully expanded internationally, delivering multiple large-scale international projects. In its deep partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the two companies have collaborated closely and successfully completed the implementation of multiple projects.

"Our goal is to help enterprises achieve digital transformation and enable them to better leverage the power of the cloud. Through our ongoing partnership with the Alibaba Cloud OpenAPI team, we hope to help our users and partners take cloud automation to the next level," said Fang Li.

About Cloudchef

Cloudchef (Shanghai Qianyun Information Technology Co., Ltd.) is a leading provider of cloud management and IT operations solutions in China. With its core product SmartCMP, Cloudchef helps enterprises manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments efficiently through a unified platform that integrates ITSM, CMDB, FinOps, observability, and automation capabilities. Cloudchef serves a wide range of industries including finance, telecommunications, energy, and government, empowering organizations on their digital transformation journeys with innovative, secure, and reliable cloud operations solutions.