Tencent migrates its own apps into its own cloud • The Register | #datingscams | #lovescams

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.

The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.

Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.

At the same time as Tencent spotted that potential waste, it was building out its own public cloud. The Register understands a decision was taken to explore how to move Tencent’s services to Tencent’s cloud.

The company has now declared that project complete, using a series of super-cute cartoons posted – naturally – to WeChat, and depicting a cartoon bird explaining the cloud migration project. Here’s a sample of the graphics, offered in case it’s hard for readers to reach WeChat.

In Tencent’s telling of the migration, it’s moved workloads that consume 50 million cores to its cloud, saving $446 million to date, and thanks to the cunning design of its own servers achieved overall efficiency that’s 30 per cent better than the industry standard.

The post mentions a 50 percent utilization rate for the new infrastructure, claims bandwidth has increased 7.6 times, and suggests DDOS protection has been greatly enhanced.

Tencent is pleased with those improvements and savings and sees the project as proving its prowess as a public cloud operator, as an innovator, and as a contributor to the evolution of China’s economy.

Perhaps it’s also something Beijing will also see as informing China’s plan to migrate five million data center racks out of the nation’s cities and into remote areas where renewable energy is easier to access.

Tencent’s post doesn’t mention the platform used to underpin its own apps on its own cloud, a matter of interest because the Chinese giant is one of the world’s biggest operators of OpenStack. The existence of the open-source cloud stack is widely held to have enabled China’s cloud giants to scale quickly and successfully. If Tencent has turned to other platforms for this migration, the project is even more significant. The Register has made inquiries on the matter and will update this story if we receive substantive information. ®