Baidu's Cloud-Native Database GaiaDB 4.0 Released: Analysis of Hybrid Cloud Industry Development and Market Size
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Baidu's self-developed cloud-native database GaiaDB 4.0 has been officially released, helping enterprises solve complex query challenges. GaiaDB 4.0 enhances parallel query capabilities, overcoming single-machine computational bottlenecks and enabling cross-machine multi-core parallel queries. It achieves a performance improvement of over 10 times in hybrid workload and real-time analysis business scenarios.
Hybrid cloud, which combines public and private clouds, has become the primary model and development direction of cloud computing in recent years. As we know, private clouds primarily serve enterprise users. Due to security concerns, enterprises prefer to store data in private clouds while also desiring the computational resources of public clouds. In this context, hybrid cloud is increasingly adopted, blending and matching public and private clouds to achieve optimal results. This personalized solution balances cost-efficiency and security.
The security of private clouds surpasses that of public clouds, while the computational resources of public clouds are unmatched by private clouds. In this dilemma, hybrid cloud provides a solution. It leverages the security of private clouds to store critical internal data in local data centers while utilizing the computational resources of public clouds to complete tasks more efficiently and swiftly. Compared to purely private or public clouds, hybrid cloud offers a more comprehensive approach. It overcomes the hardware limitations of private clouds by harnessing the scalability of public clouds, enabling enterprises to access higher computational power as needed.
By moving non-confidential functions to public cloud zones, enterprises can reduce the pressure and demand on their internal private clouds. Hybrid cloud effectively lowers costs. It allows enterprises to utilize both public and private clouds, placing applications and data on the most suitable platforms to achieve the best combination of benefits.
Cloud computing includes three service models: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). IaaS primarily utilizes virtualization technology to provide customers with infrastructure resources, including computing, storage, and networking.
PaaS often provides developers with development platforms and corresponding runtime environments for SaaS-layer applications, specifically including data analysis, speech recognition, image recognition, advertising, etc. SaaS mainly targets end-user groups of enterprises or individuals, providing specific software application services.
As the impact of the pandemic weakens, the global cloud computing market had largely returned to pre-pandemic growth levels by 2021. Data shows that the global cloud computing market reached $330.7 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 32.44%. Preliminary statistics indicate that the global cloud computing market size was $405.3 billion in 2022, with a growth rate of 22.6%.
Compared to public and private clouds, hybrid cloud has its own advantages and plays a significant role in application scenarios such as market segmentation, information confidentiality, and industry compliance. In the field of market segmentation, public clouds provide homogeneous services that cannot meet the specialized needs of specific businesses. For example, banking systems' mainframes are typically placed in their own data centers or third-party physical hosting facilities.
Secondly, regarding information confidentiality. As corporate information has tiered confidentiality requirements, the need to place high-level confidential information in private clouds will persist long-term, while non-confidential information is suitable for public clouds to form hybrid cloud solutions.
<span style="text-decoration:underline;">Current Development and Market Size Analysis of the Hybrid Cloud Industry</span>
In recent years, with the advancement of cloud computing technology and the diversification of user needs, the application scope of hybrid cloud has become increasingly widespread, gradually emerging as the primary form of cloud adoption for enterprises globally. From a market trend perspective, the upward trajectory of hybrid cloud demand has become unstoppable.
As the hybrid cloud market expands, discussions around the transition to hybrid cloud are growing louder amid increasingly complex enterprise IT environments. For most enterprises, hybrid cloud has become the optimal cloud strategy, particularly in scenarios such as development and testing, production deployment, data backup, application load expansion, and disaster recovery. Hybrid cloud provides robust technical support for enterprises to achieve efficient and automated management, enabling them to adjust development strategies and optimize business models promptly during cloud strategy implementation.
Supported by the internet and cloud computing, industries such as gaming, e-commerce, and video streaming have achieved extensive user reach and scalable business growth. Meanwhile, traditional industries like finance, healthcare, education, manufacturing, logistics, and retail face significant pressure to undergo digital transformation. In recent years, an increasing number of traditional enterprises have begun adopting cloud computing as their core IT resource.
Cloud computing services are typically divided into three categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS provides users with virtualized computing resources; PaaS offers developers a platform to build applications and services via the global internet; SaaS delivers complete, ready-to-use software applications that run on cloud infrastructure and are accessible through various client devices.
From a market segmentation perspective, the global SaaS market reached $181.6 billion in 2022, accounting for 44.8% of the total market share. The PaaS market stood at $109.4 billion (27.0%), while the IaaS market reached $114.3 billion (28.2%).
According to the 2022 China Cloud Computing Leading Enterprises Ranking published by Internet Weekly, Alibaba Cloud emerged as the top player, followed by China Telecom, Huawei, Tencent, and China Mobile in second to fifth positions respectively. All top five cloud computing companies engage in both public and private cloud services.
Beyond IBM, major cloud providers from Amazon AWS and Microsoft to Alibaba view the hybrid cloud market as a strategic battleground, racing to establish early presence, acquire more users, and secure advantageous market positions. Hybrid cloud has undeniably become the next major focus for global cloud service providers.
Gartner's 2021 global cloud computing IaaS market share data shows the top five providers were Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, and Huawei Cloud. Chinese company Alibaba Cloud ranked third globally with 9.55% market share, while Huawei Cloud secured fifth place with 4.61%.
While cloud computing cannot guarantee uninterrupted service, public clouds generally offer higher availability than most on-premises infrastructures. Clouds are built with redundancy and provide geo-replication for critical data.
Additionally, technologies like Hyper-V replication and SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups allow us to leverage cloud computing to improve high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). The cloud also provides nearly ubiquitous connectivity, enabling global organizations to access cloud services from almost anywhere.
One of the biggest benefits of hybrid cloud is flexibility. Hybrid cloud allows you to migrate resources and workloads from on-premises to the cloud and vice versa. For development and testing, hybrid cloud enables developers to easily set up new virtual machines and applications without the need for IT operations support.
You can also leverage the elastic scaling of hybrid cloud to extend parts of applications to the cloud to handle peak processing demands. The cloud also offers a wide variety of services, such as BI, analytics, and IoT, which you can use on-demand instead of building them yourself.
China's cloud computing industry is in a phase of rapid development. In 2021, the market size reached 340.92 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 53.1%. Preliminary statistics show that in 2022, China's cloud computing market size reached 455.24 billion yuan, growing by 33.5%.
Among them, public cloud has transitioned from the expansion phase to stable growth, with its growth rate slowing from 70.8% in the previous year to 27.9%, reaching a market size of 278.93 billion yuan. Private cloud demand grew relatively fast at 40.9%, achieving a market size of 147.69 billion yuan. Hybrid cloud grew by 58.8%, reaching a market size of 28.62 billion yuan. It is expected that under the influence of policies such as new infrastructure and 'East Data West Computing', China's cloud computing market will maintain rapid growth.