Frost & Sullivan releases the 'Market Research Report on Cloud Native Markets - Containers' (2022)

Cloud-native refers to the design and construction of business applications based on an open, standard cloud technology system. It is a new software development, release, and operation model aimed at fully leveraging the value of the cloud. At the initial cloud adoption stage of enterprises, the core lies in unifying resources and achieving resource automation. The construction of business applications still follows traditional architectures, which suffer from long application deployment and release cycles, complex development and operation processes, and other issues that limit the iterative speed and business innovation capabilities of enterprise applications. In addition, due to incomplete shielding of infrastructure differences among vendors, applications cannot be built in a standardized manner, making it difficult for vendor capabilities (such as commercial enhancement) to be shared, thus preventing the full realization of cloud value.

In the cloud-native phase, with a cloud-native platform based on cloud-native infrastructure, applications can run, monitor, and be governed in a standardized manner. The general capabilities of the business can be deployed to the platform side for management and enhancement by cloud service providers, endowing enterprise applications with lightweight, agile, and highly automated characteristics. This simplifies the application development and operation process. In a cloud-native platform, enterprises can maximize the utilization of cloud service providers' services to improve resource efficiency and flexibility, fully leverage the value of the cloud, thereby conducting application development and operation more efficiently and focusedly, and further promoting the development of business applications. Additionally, cloud service providers can also use AI technology to tap into the value of enterprise application data, empowering enterprise applications again and further enhancing the iteration speed and business innovation capabilities of enterprise applications.

The key technologies of cloud-native include containers, immutable infrastructure, microservices, service networks, declarative APIs, and more.The rational and efficient use of these technologies can build loosely coupled systems with good fault tolerance, ease of management, and visibility. Combined with reliable automation methods, these technologies enable engineers to easily make frequent and predictable changes to the system, facilitating enterprises in developing and running elastic applications in new dynamic environments such as public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds.

Containers package applications and their dependencies, reducing the coupling of various components in the deployment architecture. This allows applications to run quickly and reliably across different computing environments without being constrained by the environment. The components of a container include the application itself and its dependencies, which are various binary files and libraries of dependencies. In addition, there is also the container runtime, a component of container isolation technology used to ensure that the container's operating environment meets expectations, such as the Docker container engine. Compared with virtualized deployment, the key advantages of container deployment lie in lower underlying resource consumption, higher portability, higher agility, and higher elasticity. Currently, container technology is continuously being optimized and improved, such as enhancing isolation, security, and heterogeneity, so as to fully leverage its advantages in practical application scenarios.

The implementation of containers cannot do without container images and container orchestration technologies.Container images can solve the dependency of container applications on operating systems: Container images package the application's runtime environment, including code, dependencies, tools, resource files, and metadata into an immutable software package that is independent of the operating system distribution, thus eliminating dependency on server operating systems and improving portability. At the same time, images can also improve application performance, enhance container scaling capabilities, and work together with immutable infrastructure; while container orchestration can solve the dependency of containers on operating system kernel features: Orchestration tools allow development and operations personnel or automation tools to obtain images from image repositories, deploy these images into containers, and manage running containers; it provides abstraction, allowing development and operations personnel to conveniently set the number of containers required for a certain image to run, as well as the resources allocated to each container, such as memory and computing resources, solving the problems of container deployment, running, and management in large-scale clusters.

The development of cloud-native technologies complements the development of containers.Cloud-native is actually a new phase in the development of the cloud computing industry. The goal is to break free from the limitations of traditional architectures, allowing applications to 'be born in, grow on, and thrive in the cloud', thereby fully leveraging the value of cloud computing. The development of containers is mainly driven by the growth of the cloud-native ecosystem, and the opening of the era of cloud-native cannot be separated from the momentum brought about by container development. Since its inception, container development has gone through four stages: the technical sprouting phase, the technological explosion phase, the commercial exploration phase, and the commercial expansion phase, each with its own distinct characteristics.

In an environment where technology continues to develop and container business expansion makes continuous progress, the penetration rate of cloud-native has seen a significant increase. The technical value has also been verified in production and operational activities at the demand side, with more and more enterprises beginning to shift their focus towards cloud-native. The continuous growth of cloud-native demand, along with the overall influence of China's cloud-native ecosystem, has laid a solid foundation for the development of containers:

Digital transformation drives cloud-native needs.The digital transformation of industries has progressed well. Digital-native e-commerce, cultural and creative industries have led the cloud usage scale, while traditional industries such as manufacturing, government affairs, and healthcare have shown strong growth trends, with rapid cloud adoption potential being unleashed. The digital-native internet and information service industries are inherently inseparable from digitization and naturally have a demand for cloud-native technologies. Therefore, these industries have a relatively large proportion of users using cloud-native solutions. However, in 2021, this proportion declined compared to 2020 due to the impact of the pandemic. The proportion of users in traditional industries (such as finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, etc.) increased in 2021, indicating the driving force of digital transformation on cloud-native demand. As a key technology for cloud-native, the demand for containers will benefit from this trend.

Enterprises can use containers to reduce the complexity of building multi-cloud/hybrid clouds and improve business and resource utilization efficiency.As the cloud adoption of enterprises deepens, more and more companies are adopting hybrid or multi-cloud architectures. Leveraging the strengths of elasticity and strong capability to shield infrastructure differences, container-based hybrid or multi-cloud solutions can better meet enterprise needs. At the same time, by using containers, enterprises can advance the process of cloud-edge integration and improve resource utilization efficiency through their offline complementary capabilities.

The high elasticity of containers can reduce costs for enterprise business applications.Enterprises can use container-related cloud services without having to estimate capacity and business traffic in advance. They can scale up as needed to handle sudden business traffic spikes. For example, during the 'Double Eleven' shopping festival, e-commerce platforms face a significant increase in transaction volume and express delivery volume compared to normal times. However, the actual traffic situation can only be determined during the event. If the traffic exceeds expectations, capacity can be expanded by using container cloud services; if it is lower than expected, capacity can be reduced to reduce idle costs. In addition to dealing with emergencies, the high elasticity of containers also helps enterprises reduce the cost of daily business operations and maintenance.

Cloud vendors are jointly advancing the commercialization process and unlocking market potential.The core providers of container cloud services in China include comprehensive cloud service providers and specialized cloud computing providers. The competition and cooperation between these two types of providers have laid the foundation for the rapid penetration of containers, unlocking market potential. Comprehensive cloud service providers possess rich resources in the field of cloud computing and leverage their public cloud business advantages to enhance market awareness of containers in the public cloud sector; specialized cloud computing providers focus on the private cloud domain, offering customized services to improve the penetration of containers in the private cloud space. Both parties have jointly improved industry awareness, better met the overall needs of the industry, and expanded the commercial scale of containers.

The growing influence of the Chinese cloud-native ecosystem is driving container development.A more open ecosystem enables developers to develop applications with greater convenience, and cloud service providers can also improve container products better. This is key to fully leveraging the value of cloud-native and promoting the development of containers. The establishment of a cloud-native open-source ecosystem broadens the space for technological expansion and drives the rapid development of container products. At present, vendors are actively embracing the open-source ecosystem, and the Chinese cloud-native open-source ecosystem is showing a trend of gradual growth. Open source is crucial for the development of cloud-native and containers, and under a good open-source environment, vendors have a solid foundation for development. By building a multi-dimensional open ecosystem, cloud service providers can not only consolidate their competitiveness but also further develop the cloud computing industry.

As policies continue to deepen, cloud-native will continue to strengthen.As a key development plan for China during the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans, 'industrial digitization' and 'digital industrialization' are two important connotations. Various government departments in China have also continuously introduced multiple policies to promote its development. Entering the development stage of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the construction of China's digital economy system is also being continuously deepened, and the processes of industrial digitization and digital industrialization are accelerating. Cloud computing, as an infrastructure that provides computing power and other resources in the development of China's digital economy, is the foundation for advancing industrial digitization and an important part of realizing digital industrialization. The 14th Five-Year Plan also lists cloud computing as a 'frontier industry of national strategic scientific and technological strength.' As cloud-native technology enters a new development stage, it will burst forth with new vitality during the 14th Five-Year period.

Hybrid cloud/multi-cloud has become the norm, and containers are playing a prominent role.At present, enterprises are making good progress in cloud adoption. Against the backdrop of further deepening the development of the digital economy in the 14th Five-Year Plan, to meet the needs of application business development, hybrid cloud/multi-cloud, cloud-edge collaboration, and mixed deployment of offline services will continue to strengthen, and the scale will also continue to increase. The three types of scenarios will become the norm for using cloud services. For cloud service providers, the performance of their products in these scenarios will directly affect their market influence in container products, which is also a key factor determining the development capabilities of providers.

Frost & Sullivan selects five major cloud service providers—Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and JD Cloud—from the industrial ecosystem. Based on three key dimensions: application, product, and ecosystem, they construct a competitiveness system to evaluate the core competitive advantages and comprehensive barriers of mainstream providers, as well as form an objective assessment of the development of containerization in the Chinese market.

Huawei Cloud - the fastest-growing cloud under the concept of "open hardware and open-source software".Huawei Cloud has for the first time in the industry proposed the concept of cloud-native 2.0, which includes cloud-native applications, cloud-native infrastructure, and cloud-native services, further deepening the connotation of cloud-native. Huawei Cloud's Container Engine (CCE) provides enterprise-level container application management services with high reliability and performance, and builds CCE Turbo container clusters for the cloud-native 2.0 era; Huawei Cloud's Container Instances (CCI) provide Kubernetes-based Serverless container services and offer a variety of computing resources for customer businesses. Huawei Cloud containers accelerate computing, networking, and scheduling comprehensively, promoting enterprise application innovation.

Alibaba Cloud - A key vendor with years of cloud-native practice and a strong commitment to container development.The Alibaba Cloud container product family is centered around ACK and ASK built on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, providing customers with standardized interfaces, optimized capabilities, and simplified user experiences. It also offers essential capabilities required by various businesses, such as multi-cloud/hybrid cloud, heterogeneous computing resource scheduling, etc.

Tencent Cloud - A booster for enterprise digitalization, and a cloud where container-based development of cloud-native products thrives.TKE, Tencent's Kubernetes-based container service, is built on Tencent Cloud's infrastructure, covering multiple complete capabilities such as release management and container orchestration. Currently, customers cover various fields including e-commerce and finance, with a total deployment of over 3.2 million containers; Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a Serverless container platform with simple operations and compatibility with native Kubernetes.

Baidu Cloud - A dual-prize winner in both deep learning platforms and AI custom servers.Baidu Cloud Container Engine Service (CCE) provides features such as Docker container lifecycle management, large-scale container cluster operation and maintenance management, and one-click release and running of business applications. It seamlessly integrates with other Baidu Smart Cloud products and serves as an elastic and highly available cloud Kubernetes container runtime platform, supporting scenarios such as microservice-based system architecture, DevOps operation and maintenance, and AI application deep learning containerization.

JD Cloud - A cloud-native dark horse that is catching up with container acceleration.In 2020, JD.com launched the independently developed distributed file system and object storage system ChubaoFS (CFS), with the original intention of providing a persistent storage solution for JD.com's Kubernetes clusters. It can also be used as a general cloud storage service by businesses, mainly for Kubernetes container environments.

In terms of applications, Huawei Cloud and Alibaba Cloud are neck and neck. Huawei Cloud is a leader in the industry in areas such as government and enterprise digitization and industrial digitization, and has begun to layout application scenarios such as satellites. In terms of products, there is a small overall gap in product capabilities among the companies. However, in terms of ecosystem, Huawei Cloud focuses on building an ecosystem, actively expands its ecosystem partners, and has a significant advantage over other players in terms of ecosystem prosperity.