CDN+MEC will become the main battlefield in the future

With the rapid development of cloud computing, cloud service providers have been unstoppable and have enjoyed great success. After reaping the benefits of cloud computing, they have turned to the CDN industry and launched a series of price wars, even providing services at prices below cost to seize the market.

Take Alibaba Cloud as an example. It lowered CDN prices eight times within a year, which was a disaster for the industry. Many companies were put on the shelf because of this. The public opinion gradually tilted towards cloud vendors. Many people in the industry, including the media, generally believed that cloud computing + CDN is the future of the road, and traditional CDN companies will be gradually eroded. However, they did not know that the scale of the company, the reserved bandwidth, and the national layout of nodes are the real yardsticks for measuring a CDN company.

It is true that cloud vendors do have unique advantages in operating CDN business. However, will the transition to the cloud be the only right way for CDN companies in the future? The answer is not so. In the IoT era where everything is connected, CDN+MEC may be the main battlefield in the future and a battleground for strategists.

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What is CDN? What is MEC?

What is CDN? Baidu Encyclopedia explains that CDN is a content distribution network built on the Internet. It relies on edge servers deployed in various places and uses the load balancing, content distribution, scheduling and other functional modules of the central platform to enable users to obtain the required content nearby, reduce network congestion, and improve user access response speed and hit rate. The key technologies of CDN mainly include content storage and distribution technology.

The basic principle of CDN is to widely use various cache servers and distribute them to areas or networks where user access is relatively concentrated. When a user visits a website, global load technology is used to direct the user's access to the nearest working cache server, and the cache server directly responds to the user's request.

What is MEC? Baidu Encyclopedia explains that Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) can use wireless access networks to provide telecom users with IT services and cloud computing functions nearby, creating a telecom-grade service environment with high performance, low latency and high bandwidth, accelerating the rapid download of various content, services and applications in the network, allowing consumers to enjoy an uninterrupted high-quality network experience.

Mobile edge computing MEC effectively integrates wireless network and Internet technologies, adds computing, storage, processing and other functions on the wireless network side, builds an open platform for implanting applications, and opens information interaction between wireless networks and business servers through wireless APIs, integrates wireless networks with businesses, and upgrades traditional wireless base stations to intelligent base stations.

At the business level (IoT, video, medical, retail, etc.), mobile edge computing can provide customized and differentiated services to the industry, thereby improving network utilization efficiency and added value. At the same time, the deployment strategy of mobile edge computing (especially geographic location) can achieve the advantages of low latency and high bandwidth. MEC can also obtain wireless network information and more accurate location information in real time to provide more accurate services.

What kind of "chemical reaction" will CDN+MEC produce?

Recently, Thomas Bittman, vice president and well-known analyst at Gartner Research, wrote that edge computing is eating up cloud computing. Cloud computing is agile, which is good, but it is not enough. Large-scale centralization, economies of scale, self-service and comprehensive automation meet most of our requirements, but it cannot overcome physical problems: the weight of data and the speed of light. Since people need to interact with the digital assisted reality around them in real time, waiting for a data center several or thousands of miles away to respond is not feasible. Latency is important.

Thomas Bittman believes that the edge is more likely to have its own weight and be more dependent on consumers and consumer experiences than on enterprises, which is a completely different workload. The edge will create some big winners and losers, both on the supplier side and on the enterprise customer side. The edge cannot be ignored because it can be a major competitive advantage. Enterprises will then stage a good game of turf grab and fight for the edge.

In my opinion, if cloud computing is compared to the human brain, and MEC is the nerve endings, the brain is responsible for overall scheduling and efficient computing, while the nerve endings are responsible for collecting various information carriers. CDN is responsible for edge storage of content and distributes it to the user side at the fastest speed, providing users with the best service experience.

Taking intelligent driving as an example, the cloud is responsible for route planning and direction determination, while MEC is responsible for collecting various sensor data (vehicle distance, real-time road conditions, etc.). It is impossible for us to transmit all information to the cloud for feedback, but we hope to solve it locally as soon as possible to reduce congestion in the backbone network.

In this way, the combination of MEC edge computing and CDN edge storage and distribution can be said to complement each other and is a perfect match. This seems to coincide with the community cloud launched by Wangsu to some extent. Marginalizing network functions may be a major battlefield in the future 5G and IoT era.

What will the future market of MEC look like?

With the advent of the Internet of Everything era, the massive amount of data generated by tens of thousands of IoT devices will bring great pressure to communication technology. This requires the network edge side or devices close to the data source to provide edge intelligence services nearby and process the valuable data collected by the devices in real time.

It is understood that a Boeing 787 will generate 5GB of data per second; an autonomous car will generate 1GB of data per second, and it also requires real-time processing of this data; Gartner predicts that by 2020, there will be about 26 billion IoT devices in the world, with a market size of 1.9 trillion US dollars. IDC has released a related forecast that by 2019, 40% of data will need to be analyzed, processed and stored at the edge of the network, and by 2025, the IoT will generate 95% of real-time data.

In short, the MEC market will be limitless in the future.

The government and the three major operators are actively developing the IoT market

In addition, the development of the Internet of Things in my country has been strongly supported by the state. Take NB-IoT, a subdivision of the Internet of Things, for example. Not long ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Notice on Comprehensively Promoting the Construction and Development of Mobile Internet of Things (NB-IoT)", which clearly required the three major operators to build 1.5 million NB-IoT base stations by 2020.

It is understood that the three major operators are actively working on the IoT market. On June 27, at the MWCS2017 Shanghai Exhibition, China Unicom invited global operators including Deutsche Telekom, Hong Kong PCCW, Canada Bell, KPN, Taiwan Mobile, Hong Kong/Macau SmarTone, India Reliance, and Spain Telecom (Telefonica) to the "2017 International Partner Conference" held on the same day, and released the "IoT Global Connectivity Collaboration Initiative", which directly targets the global IoT business market. China Unicom said that it will strive to achieve more than 600 million IoT M2M connections by 2020.

Soon after, China Telecom launched the IoT open platform and IoT open laboratory, and signed strategic cooperation agreements with many international operators and partners. China Telecom said that IoT, as a strategic business of China Telecom, is an important foundation for future development and an engine for business transformation.

At the same time, China Mobile announced during the conference that it will start the construction of mobile Internet of Things in 346 cities across the country this year, and realize commercial use in some key cities before the end of the year. Shang Bin, chairman of China Mobile, revealed that in 2017, the number of smart connections of China Mobile's Internet of Things increased by 100 million households, reaching a total scale of 200 million households. By 2020, China Mobile strives to have a total number of connections exceeding 1.75 billion.

CDN+MEC will become a battleground in the future

5G will be a platform that integrates computing and communication technologies, and mobile edge computing will be an indispensable part of it. In the 5G era, the application of MEC will extend to transportation systems, intelligent driving, real-time tactile control, augmented reality and other fields.

The future is an era of the Internet of Everything. It goes without saying that the market for 4K, 8K ultra-high definition, VR, AR, and AI is vast. For CDN companies, they must not only remember to look up (cloud), but also remember to look down (MEC), because CDN+MEC is the closest service end to the user side. This also means that CDN+MEC will become a major battlefield in the future and a battleground for strategists.