Alibaba Cloud’s road to the Internet of Things
The author | hong-feng liu coordinating editor | traditional operas don in this paper, starting from CSDN WeChat (ID: CSDNnews) the original link
Over the next 10 to 20 years, the consensus is that the new landscape will be shaped by AI and the Internet of Things. Looking at the domestic market, among these Internet giants, Alibaba and Huawei are the first to become competitors in the future. In these two fields, they have their own strengths and advantages.
AI vs. IoT: A head-on battle between Alibaba and Huawei
At the AI level, Huawei adopts both the hard and the soft, offering the banner of “Puhui AI”. It not only launches “EI Enterprise Intelligence” and deep learning service DLS on the cloud, but also launches ModelArts AI platform. On the hardware side, two AI chips, Centron 910 and Centron 310, were introduced.
Compared with Huawei, Ali AI technology is generally inferior to Huawei, but it is not to be outdone. In addition to the establishment of “Dharma Institute” and “Luohantang” for deep research on AI technology, Alibaba Dharma Institute announced the establishment of an independent chip enterprise “Pingtou Brother Semiconductor Co., LTD.” at the Hangzhou Cloud Conference on September 19, 2018. See this name, can also feel such as “Africa a brother” that no fear, life and death look pale, refuse to do momentum.
In the field of Internet of Things, from the name of Huawei’s technology conference – “Full Connection”, Huawei has no small ambition. However, from the author’s personal perspective, in the layout of Internet of Things field, Although Alibaba is not the first, it has been developed after the first step, and its influence in the industry is increasing.
Here we can make another assertion that Huawei will be more and more influential in the field of AI in the future of China, and Alibaba will be the leading actor in the field of basic platform of the Internet of Things.
Internet of Things global landscape: Amazon Microsoft VS Baidu Ali
Looking back, let’s first sort out the context of the development of Internet of Things cloud platform at home and abroad.
In October 2015, Amazon announced an Internet of Things platform at the Global Cloud Computing Conference that could connect hundreds of millions of devices to AWS IoT. This should be the first true IoT cloud platform.
Microsoft also announced the launch of Azure IoT Suite at AzureCon 2015 in October. Less than four months later, Microsoft officially opened its Azure IoT Hub service to the public in February 2016. Not only is it an important part of Azure IoT Suite, it is also an important foundation for Microsoft’s IoT strategy.
Looking back at China, In fact, Baidu is the earliest company to launch the Internet of Things platform in China. Baidu IoT launched the Internet of Things platform on the open cloud forum of “Baidu World 2015”, and began to sound the horn of entering the Internet of things, hoping to lead the wave of the Internet of Things in logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, medical care, smart home and other fields. Open the age of intelligence. But baidu in the following time, its focus shifted to the field of artificial intelligence, especially in the unmanned driving field invested heavily, in order to seek a greater breakthrough in this level. Therefore, baidu’s tiangong Intelligent Internet of Things (TIangong Intelligent Internet of Things) started well, but the follow-up was weak, giving people a feeling of loud thunder but little rain, and its influence is getting smaller and smaller.
It wasn’t until the second half of 2016 that Alibaba’s iot platform arrived with a more low-key name, “iot Development Suite.” And the function is relatively simple, is through MQTT protocol, data packets from the device to the cloud.
The content of data packets can be binary data, or text data in XML or JSON format. The specific content is explained by the users themselves. The development team is not too many, only about 10 or 20 people.
How did Alibaba’s Internet of Things rise
The milestone of Alibaba’s iot platform is to reach an iot platform development cooperation with wuxi municipal government in the middle of 2017. It is said that the project was initially pursued by Huawei for more than half a year, but eventually ended up with Ali.
Wuxi municipal government commissioned Alibaba Cloud to develop a local iot platform called feiyan system for 100 million yuan, with an additional condition that Alibaba set up a smart city-oriented iot company in Wuxi.
At the beginning of development, since the product of Alibaba Iot development team was only “Ali Cloud iot Suite”, and the development team only had dozens of staff, it was not very optimistic that any decent iot platform could be developed within half a year.
However, as the development requirements became clearer, and the development team increased rapidly (the iot team grew from dozens of people in the middle of the year to more than 450 people at the end of the year in just a few months. At the time of writing of this article, the Alibaba Cloud IoT team has already reached thousands of people), and the Alink protocol has gradually become more and more perfect, like a seed slowly taking root and germinating, the model of things has begun to be established bit by bit, and the data of various devices has begun to gather into the IoT platform. By the end of the year, the first version of the “flying Phoenix” was officially online.
Link Develop 1.0, a one-stop Internet of things platform based on Feifeng, was released in early 2018. In addition, the Link Develop data access part of one-stop platform (access to the model of things based on Alink protocol) is specially independent and packaged together with the original Internet of Things suite as a universal access platform for the Internet of Things. The original access mode is called “Basic Version”, while the new Access mode based on the Alink protocol is called “Advanced Version”, which was officially released in April 2018. In late June of the same year, the “iot Suite” officially changed its name to “iot Platform”. On April 9 of the following year, the product version was officially unified and the console no longer differentiated between “basic” and “advanced”.
Based on Link Develop, or a branch of Link Develop, Alibaba’s Link lifestyle platform “Feiyan” was also launched in May 2018. Specializing in smart appliances and white goods equipment, we not only provide certified embedded modules, but also provide one-stop mobile App, which can quickly create intelligent products of Internet of things for life.
The Link Develop platform itself is also growing at a rapid pace, after addressing the connectivity and iot model. For the presentation of various applications, it not only supports 2d planar graph display, but also supports 3D modeling, and the WEB and mobile terminals also support various application presentation synchronously. Link Develop 2.0 was launched on September 16, 2018, and Link Develop was upgraded to IoT Studio in early 2019.
When it comes to cloud and terminal connectivity, we have to mention the hardware link layer of IoT besides MQTT software protocol: NB-iot and LoRa. They are the core communication technologies that are difficult to bypass when building various Internet of Things networks. Huawei has outstanding hardware capabilities. With its OWN NB-iot chip as the core, Huawei is pushing nB-iot and signing in-depth cooperation agreements with telecom operators. For Ali, it’s all about LoRa.
On March 7, 2019, Ali Cloud Internet of Things Management platform (LinkWAN) and Ali Cloud Internet of Things platform were connected. When creating products, LoRaWAN can be selected as the networking protocol and the access certificate can be selected. Devices created under this product will be associated with Ali Cloud Internet of Things Management platform and support LoRa protocol access.
Products with “Internet of Things Platform” and “IoT Studio” as the core can be regarded as the middle layer of Alibaba Cloud Internet of Things strategy. Based on this, Alibaba has its own layout both downward and upward.
On the device side, Alibaba officially launched AliOS Things, its own embedded system for the Internet of Things, at the Hangzhou Cloud Conference in October 2017. In September 2018, the first Tmall “Chip Festival” was also held at hangzhou Computing Conference, where 10 Tmall flagship stores simultaneously launched AliOS Things’ iot products and solutions.
In December 2018, Alibaba announced a high-profile cooperation with qualcomm, Mediatek and other 23 chip module manufacturers to launch a module preinstalled with AliOS Things operating system. Three months later, at the Beijing Cloud Conference in March 2019, it announced that 100 million AliOS Things-based chips had been shipped.
On the platform of Internet of things data access, big data storage, mining and analysis are the leading roles, which is also where Ali’s strength lies, so it will not let go.
On March 29, 2017, Alibaba launched ET industrial Brain at the Shenzhen Computing Conference. On November 16 of the same year, ET City Brain became the national AI development and innovation platform.
In April 2018, Alibaba launched the construction of supET industrial Internet platform. June 7, Shanghai Cloud Conference, announced that Ali cloud ET city brain comprehensive upgrade, and launched ali Cloud agricultural brain. Zhejiang province also launched a suPEt-based “1+N” industrial Internet platform on June 14. At the Chongqing Cloud Computing Conference on August 24, Alibaba and the Chongqing municipal government jointly released the “Industrial Internet platform of Flying Elephant”.
With the continuous improvement of these platform-level products, Ali began to make efforts in the application layer.
SaaS Accelerator: Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and other technical capabilities are integrated into modules, isVs and developers can quickly build SaaS applications with a simple drag and drop.
At the same time in order to let a hundred flowers bloom, faster so that their applications quickly released, Ali cloud also in Beijing summit, formally released the small program cloud, and at the same time jointly alipay, Taobao, Nails and Autonavi jointly released the “Alibaba small program stars plan”.
From chip, to embedded system, to Internet of Things platform, and then to various ET brain and industrial Internet platform, finally to SaaS accelerator and small program. In just two to three years, The strategic layout of Alibaba’s future AI+IoT has taken initial shape.
In March 2018, Hu Xiaoming, then president of Alibaba Cloud, announced at the Cloud Conference in Shenzhen that “Alibaba is fully entering IoT. IoT is a new main track after alibaba Cloud Baba Group’s relay business, finance, logistics and cloud computing”. A year later, at the Beijing Summit in March, zhang Jianfeng, the chief technology officer of Ali Group, who was also the president of Ali Cloud, shouted that Ali Cloud would “start again in 10 years”.
A new journey, a new beginning, the road ahead is becoming clear, but there is still a long way to go. Just as Mr. Ku Wei, general manager of The Internet of Things Business Unit of Ali Cloud and a former communication operator, said at the Beijing Summit, the Internet of Things platform will become more and more infrastructure like the communication platform in the future. We will shoulder this responsibility and carry forward the load.
About the author: Liu Hongfeng, founder and CEO of Yifan Technology, CSDN blog expert, Huawei Cloud MVP, Ali Cloud MVP, Ali Cloud IoT partner, eight-time Microsoft MVP, former member of Microsoft (China).net Micro Framework development team.