PaaS , as a primary form of cloud, provides basic service that supports the continuous interleaving and evolution of applications and processes. Its core value is to build connection between the large-scale shared resources of infrastructure and applications, establish standards and mechanisms for resource scheduling and allocation, so that infrastructure resources are transparent to users. PaaS can reduce the complexity of business and application deployment, and simplify business management processes and mechanisms, which is an indispensable step for enterprise moving to cloud, besides all the technological advantages, PaaS also optimizes the cost structure of enterprises, that’s why economic benefits are also the focus of many market participants and users.
However, in the past 10 years, PaaS still hasn’t formed a unified standard yet. Lacking in standardization, and no continuous leadership, the current focus of the PaaS market is not on direct economic benefits, but on building and forming a close industrial ecosystem.
According to the Gartner report, up to 2019, there were more than 360 vendors in the entire PaaS market, offering more than 550 cloud platform services under 21 categories. In such a huge market, there is no leading company. PaaS still plays the role of game rule changer.
Recently，New diversified needs and characteristics are also manifested as the enterprise moves forward. Cloud architecture in pioneer company is changing from single cloud in the private environment to the hybrid cloud architecture of a public cloud integrate with private cloud, gradually shifting to more complex systems such as mixed cloudy, multi-heterogeneous clouds, as for their procurement, for sure from multiple cloud vendors.
IBM predicts that "Hybrid multi-cloud architectures will replace the 'one-cloud-fits-all' approach", and in the future, a mixed cloud architecture will gradually replace a single cloud form. And new morphological cloud models under various classification standards, such as container clouds, industry clouds, etc.
This phenomenon comes from the diversified development of technology on one hand, mainly because many enterprises do not establish a perfect cloud mechanism in the early stage of Clouding, but choose different Cloud suppliers with different clouds according to business shape and growth demand. In the process of business innovation and clouding in the past few years, a mixed multi-clouds environment has gradually formed, and data systems have become more and more complex. This affects the unified design and planning of the follow-up business to a certain extent, and brings great challenges to operation and maintenance.
Specifically put, for example, the lack of a unified resource management and distribution and recycling mechanism, sparse personnel and authority systems. scattered business and system architecture, the environment is not standard in operation and maintenance, make it more difficult for IT staff. Sometimes there is even no suitable technical staff, how should they handle the new challenges created by various open source technologies and software.
Therefore, from the perspectives of business development, cost optimization, and enterprise management, building or adopting a standard IT PaaS platform has become a key indicator for enterprise development.
So how should we build a standard PaaS platform that supports multiple heterogeneous IT architecture?
This requires deep understanding of the characteristics of the enterprise application. Usually in SMEs, the business form is simple enough, there is no need for a complicated system. On the other hand, the business field is not mature enough to establish the standard. The most common scene is that the business exists in the form of hosting or SaaS, without the excessive cost of resources.
In large enterprises, business and IT technology are inextricably inseparable. All business transformation and innovation are inseparable from IT support, and the pain points facing the business often reflect the challenges of IT system construction. The general overall data system has the following characteristics:
1. The application system is complex with low standardization: in the growth period of business, long-term planning for data system architecture is often neglected to quickly respond to business needs, so it’s difficult to form a unified standard in terms of hardware environment, technical architecture and R&D specifications for most enterprises.
2. The system is large in volume and complex in correlation: large enterprise information systems often have many systems, large amounts of data, and often intersect between systems.
3. High security management requirements: Large enterprises often have higher requirements for business continuity, management process specification, data operation legitimacy, data security protection and service assurance.
4. Open embrace of open-source technology: to gradually realize self-control of technical architecture and component, more and more open-source technology are brought to R&D stage, also independent research and development become a main trends for head companies in the industry. But lacking the professional processes and mechanisms for application quality. The management quality is needed to be improved.
A good PaaS solution must be able to respond to the above business needs amicably, and in order to meet the challenges of operation and maintenance and management, it is also necessary to design the system and architecture throughout the IT system. In the process of clouding in many enterprises, the IT department began to provide services such as platform, training, consulting and support for the business department, and also responsible for overall governance. The IT department developed from "factory delivery" to "service provider". The operational management capabilities of data have become a key capability in the construction of the PaaS platform.
zCloud Data Cloud Management platform
In the past 10 years of industry customer service, Enmotech has deep and unique insights into IT architecture and data architecture. It has also been expanding its business areas according to the business needs of the company, aiming to provide the most timely, professional and valuable services and solutions for the majority of industry and enterprise customers. In response to the above business needs and challenges, we independently developed the zCloud multi-database cloud management platform.
The platform has the following two main attributes:
1. Cloud management platform: unified management of resources, allocation, measurement, and recycling. Integrated management of personnel (role, authority, functions, positions), infrastructure resources (devices, architecture, components, versions) and management (approval, collaboration, supervision)
2, Automatic intelligent operation and maintenance platform: for enterprise IT systems provide lifecycle security, capacity, performance, high availability management,
Data backup and recovery, cost, ensure application quality, with all those, to achieve a Standard, automatic and intelligent operation and maintenance.
Its basic functions and architecture are as follows:
With data as the core, building top-down data management capabilities, including data interaction, data functions and module encapsulation, data processing, and data hosting. This constitutes the core logic of zCloud. From hardware environments, virtualization, database, middleware support, to upper-level business interfaces and modalities, zCloud fully supports multi-source heterogeneous and can respond well to the various needs of enterprises.
a data management platform, also the middle-end of business
One of the biggest challenges facing the PaaS has been that as a founder of standards and specifications, many PaaS service providers only allow enterprises to build new systems and restructure the architecture according to platform standards. However, the core business of the enterprise is often based on considerations of continuity, performance, etc., and cannot withstand too much underlying transformation. Therefore, it has been daunting for moving to cloud, especially to PaaS platform.
In the design and implementation of products, we try to build and follow the standards in the first place, establish specifications for the design of enterprise IT construction, technology selection, hardware, tools and various plug-ins, also trying to support mainstream technology and component categories.
For the existing IaaS layer resources of the enterprise, both the traditional local running environment and the cloud, can be managed by zCloud with good compatibility, which makes the enterprise do not need too much underlying transformation in the process of moving to the cloud. The existing IaaS environment can be directly embedded as the underlying resource pool of the platform.
As a platform-level product, zCloud supports ultra-large-scale customer IT environments and heterogeneous technologies, it can be seamlessly connected with peripheral systems. In resource management, it can achieve complete pooling and cloudization, and resources can be managed through tenants which can be customized by users and support cross-segment resource allocation. At present, the products are gradually being componentized, and can be well customized and integrated with the enterprise application management platform and IaaS underlying resources ,be delivered by platform with separate functional modules,which provides great convenience for enterprises moving to cloud.
as an automated operation and maintenance platform, zCloud considers all the main tasks of the data system from design planning, construction and implementation, and management and operation. provide quality protection and management. Including: automatic installation and deployment, monitoring alarms, health check, high availability, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, security management, SQL quality management, performance management and other dimensions. Continuously optimize processes and mechanisms in each dimension, committed to standardization, automation, and intelligent data asset operations.
With the development of the business and the enhancement of the company's own IT capabilities, the industry's head companies are trying to export IT products and services with high industry business compatibility to other following companies. these head enterprises are very advantageous in the process of building and exporting IT capabilities as in guiding position in the business direction. Through the cloud management platform, the underlying data and architecture are truly open and shared so that the data can better support the business needs under optimal operating conditions. The combination of business advantages and professional data management capabilities from industry leaders is becoming the best growing environment for the industry cloud.
IT systems and technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the enterprise. As a data solution provider, our mission is to help users sort out existing resources and build data resource management standard so that enterprises are not bound by a single database or separated by data silos, so that data is robust under centralized and unified planning management, and support business needs agilely. And through the application of big data and artificial intelligence to improve decision-making in business.
Based on cloud management, build a hybrid capability of private cloud public cloud, and build heterogeneous support capabilities of multiple databases with data as the core. zCloud gradually realize the true platformized data management, and the service sharing support ability of Middle-End.