​From CDN to edge computing, computing power evolution accelerates again

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the global digitalization process and accelerated the integration of the digital economy and the real economy.

Recently, IDC, Tsinghua University Global Industry Research Institute and other institutions released the "2021-2022 Global Computing Power Index Assessment Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"). Judging from the overall trends and forecasts from 2016 to 2025, the proportion of digital economy in GDP of various countries continues to increase, and it is expected to reach 41.5% in 2025.

The report shows that cloud, edge computing, software-defined infrastructure, and heterogeneous computing for parallel computing workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to drive market growth. As a key growth factor for enterprises, edge computing has innovated and expanded the functions and scope of core data centers, and has become an important force driving the growth of the global enterprise-level infrastructure market.

Computing power empowers the digital economy

In recent years, the digital economy and the real economy have jointly promoted the development of my country's economy.

According to the State Council's "14th Five-Year Plan for Digital Economy Development", the added value of China's core digital economy industries will account for 7.8% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020. By 2025, the digital economy will enter a period of full expansion, and the added value of the core digital economy industries will account for 10% of GDP. Calculated proportionally, the scale of the digital economy will exceed one trillion yuan by then.

With the rapid development of the digital economy, computing power, as its key production factor, has become the core support and driving force for tapping the value of data elements and promoting the development of the digital economy.

In the report, based on IDC's regression analysis of computing power index and economic indicators, for every 1 point increase in the computing power index of fifteen key countries (including China, the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.), the country's digital economy and GDP will increase by 3.5‰ and 1.8‰ respectively. This trend is expected to continue from 2021 to 2025.

When a country's computing power index reaches above 40 points, every 1 point increase in the country's computing power index will increase its driving force for GDP growth by 1.5 times. When the computing power index reaches above 60 points, every 1 point increase in the country's computing power index will increase its driving force for GDP growth by 3.0 times, and its role in driving the economy becomes more significant.

From the perspective of computing power, artificial intelligence computing and edge computing have become important forces for market growth. In particular, edge computing, as a platform technology, provides important carrying capacity for emerging technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, robots, and artificial intelligence. In the next five years, the growth rate of global computing power investment in edge locations will be much faster than that in core locations. By 2025, the proportion of global edge computing server expenditures in total servers will increase from 14.4% to 24.9%.

The rise of edge computing is an inevitable result of technological iteration.

Edge computing is one of the foundations of the digital economy

In recent years, with the rapid development of chip technology, cloud computing resources have also grown exponentially. However, the delay of network transmission is a physical law that humans cannot change. If emerging applications in the future want to provide the ultimate interactive experience, the only way is to sink computing power to the edge as much as possible. The high-speed computing network supported by 5G combines the multiple advantages of cloud, network, and edge, allowing enterprises to independently decide where and how to process their data and applications, thereby meeting users' higher requirements for latency, intelligent allocation capabilities, and the ability to process and calculate massive data.

At the same time, with the vigorous development of information technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, the importance of intelligent transformation in smart security, smart parks, smart cities, etc. has become more prominent. In recent years, the scale of the global edge computing market has also increased rapidly. According to IDC data, the scale of the global edge computing market in 2020 was approximately US$3.6 billion, and it is expected that the market scale of the industry will reach US$16.7 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 37%, and there is broad room for development.

With its unique technical advantages, edge computing has quickly become one of the foundations of the digital economy. On the edge side, with the help of distributed computing power, enterprises are provided with the flexibility and possibility to process data at the source of data or key value delivery points, thereby ensuring efficient, low-latency, and low-traffic services. In particular, edge computing provides the most direct distributed computing power support for building distributed clouds, and the ubiquitous computing power it forms ultimately forms "cloud-edge collaboration."

Among them, CDN, as the core basic application of edge computing, is indispensable in various application scenarios of the industrial Internet. Take Fastly, a well-known international CDN company, as an example. It gradually transfers data processing work from centralized data centers to distributed computing platforms, realizes automated network mapping and intelligent data routing, thereby reducing latency.

In addition, driven by new technologies, connection technologies such as 5G have reduced the speed of data transmission and processing. In order to share the computing pressure of data centers and also improve real-time response speed, artificial intelligence processing on the edge will become a key growth area for enterprises.

New CDN Accelerates Edge Computing Practice

In the industry's view, in the future, as edge computing gradually matures and standards tend to be unified, CDN, as the most mature and widely used application of edge computing, will also increasingly penetrate into various application scenarios of the industrial Internet. In terms of service capabilities, CDN is based on the edge concept and is constantly upgraded, from the initial image acceleration, website acceleration, and video acceleration to carrying ultra-high-definition video, VR/AR and other heavy applications, driving the growth of the digital economy.

It cannot be ignored that the innovative application scenarios of edge computing still put forward new requirements for CDN technology. For example, CDN services previously mainly cached a large number of static files and distributed them to users at the edge. When the industry faces new applications such as big data technology, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, CDN needs to support more and more complex business logic to reduce the computing load of the source station and improve the experience of end users. It is these rigid demands that are driving the evolution of CDN from standardized services to programmable capabilities, that is, programmable CDN.

From the application point of view, programmable CDN can personalize content according to customer needs, and has business advantages such as simple syntax, flexible development, and agile iteration. For example, after the programmable CDN is configured, it can publish unique content, generate customized responses, or perform A/B testing to run custom code on edge infrastructure based on visitor attributes, thereby building a developer-friendly environment. At the same time, programmable CDN should also have flexible interfaces for connecting to third-party edge applications to infinitely expand its processing capabilities.

At present, programmable CDN is widely supported by overseas giants such as Akamai, Fastly, AWS, as well as domestic veteran CDN manufacturer Wangsu Technology, and is used for intelligent and fast content delivery.

Public information shows that Wangsu Technology, founded in 2000, has deployed more than 2,800 resource nodes around the world. With extensive resource reserves and technical strength, the company has worked together from the dimensions of nodes, scheduling, big data, etc., and its CDN performance has led the industry for many years. Recently, CDN Pro, a product launched by Wangsu Technology in China, has realized multiple scenarios such as programmable delivery, edge computing capabilities, debugging and deployment. In the edge computing capability scenario, CDN Pro can transfer part of the business logic originally handled by the source station to CDN, further reducing the load on the source station.