In the last article of this series, we explore the core products by Alibaba Cloud that can help manufacturers on their journey to digital transformati.
In this series, we explore the challenges and goals, core solutions and core products facing manufacturers on their journey to digital transformation.
In the final blog of this series, we highlight Alibaba Cloud's core products that allow manufacturers to build their own IoT and Analytics platforms. In doing so, manufacturers benefit from the pace of innovation, increased agility and reduced time to market when releasing new products to their own customers.
Download the Multinational Corporation (MNC) Manufacturing Industry whitepaper to discover how Alibaba Cloud can help manufacturing companies achieve digital transformation.
Device Runtime
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AliOS Things is a real-time operating system for embedded devices. Specifically designed for IoT scenarios that demand small memory footprint and lower power consumption.
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IoT Edge seamlessly extends Alibaba Cloud to edge devices so they can act locally on the data they generate, while using the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage.
Device Management
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IoT Platform is a device management platform on Alibaba Cloud that enables developers of IoT applications that lets devices (sensors, final control elements, embedded devices, and smart household electrical appliances) and cloud-services easily and securely interact with cloud services and other devices by supporting open standards and protocols such as MQTT and CoAP.
Data Sources
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ApsaraDB for RDS is a stable, reliable, and scalable online database service. Built with a distributed file system on Alibaba Cloud and integrated with high-performance SSDs, ApsaraDB for RDS provides a complete suite of database operation and maintenance solutions such as disaster recovery, backup, restoration, monitoring, and migration.
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ApsaraDB also exists for additional NoSQL database caching engines such as Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Redis and Memcached.
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AsparaDB PolarDB is a next-generation cloud-native relational database service which is compatible with MySQL, Postgresql and Oracle. It separates the compute and storage layer and independently and seamlessly scales them with superior performance and cost ratio.
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MQ for Kafka is a distributed, high-throughput, and scalable message queue service provided by Alibaba Cloud. Message Queue for Apache Kafka is widely used in big data fields such as log collection, monitoring data aggregation, streaming data processing, and online and offline analysis.
Data Ingestion
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Data Lake Analytics (DLA) supports a classical ETL approach which also reinforces open-source technologies such as Spark Jobs in a serverless fashion. Heterogeneous data sources are supported such as Redis, MongoDB, and RDS and lets customers easily do batch ingestion.
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Realtime Compute is a managed version of Apache Flink which enables the ingestion of continuous data streams and events which is particularly useful for automotive and manufacturing companies whose assets such as cars and production plants are constantly generating data points.
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Log Service (SLS) is a one-stop logging service developed by Alibaba Cloud that is widely used by Alibaba Group in big data scenarios. It is used to collect, query, consume and visualize log data without the need to invest in in-house data collection and processing systems.
Data Storage/Data Management
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Object Storage Service (OSS) serves as a robust and highly-available object storage for unstructured, and (semi-) structured data and is both tightly integrated with the data ingestion services as well as the data analysis services enabling a frictionless experience.
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Data Management Service (DMS) constitutes the organizational bracket around the before-mentioned services from the Data Sources and Data Ingestion layer. It provides means to create organized, labelled, and query inventories of data assets, also known as data catalogue. But it's more than that. It is an all-in-one data management service that encompasses data management, structure management, access security, BI charts, data trends, data trace, performance trends and optimization, and even server management.
Data Analysis
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Data Lake Analytics (DLA) allows for SQL-like queries across a heterogeneous set of different data sources such as relational, NoSQL and object-oriented storage systems.
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DataWorks is a Big Data platform product launched by Alibaba Cloud. It provides one-stop Big Data development, data permission management, offline job scheduling, and other features. DataWorks works straight 'out-the-box' without the need to worry about complex underlying cluster establishment and Operations & Management.
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Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning Platform for AI (PAI) provides an all-in-one machine learning service that lets you prepare data sets, train and test models, and deploy them for batch or real-time predictions.
- Cloud-native OLAP data storage engines such as AnalyticDB for MySQL and AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL (ADB) process petabytes of highly concurrent data in real time to adjust production guidelines, operation efficiency, and enterprise decisions accordingly.
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E-MapReduce (EMR) is based on open-source Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark and supports the wider ecosystem of these technologies. It flexibly manages data in a wide range of scenarios such as trend analysis, data warehousing, and online and offline data processing.
- Graph Database (GDB) is a real-time and reliable online database service that supports the Property Graph graph model and is used to process highly connected data query and storage. It supports Apache TinkerPop Gremlin query language and helps to quickly build applications based on highly connected data sets. GDB is very suitable for scenarios with highly interconnected data sets such as social networks, fraud detection, recommendation engines, real-time graphs, and network/IT operations.
- IoT Data Analytics is a device intelligent analysis service provided by Alibaba Cloud for Internet of Things developers. It covers device data collection, management, storage, cleaning, and analysis, effectively reducing the friction for data analysis tasks.
SAP
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Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable IaaS-level service. ECS eliminates the need to invest in IT hardware up front and allows you to quickly scale computing resources on demand, making ECS more convenient and efficient than physical servers. ECS provides a variety of instance types that suit different business needs and help boost business growth. Alibaba Cloud provides certified ECS instance types specifically for the operation of SAP workloads such as NetWeaver, HANA, MaxDB, MSSQL, ASE, DB2, Business One and Data Hub. In addition, Alibaba Cloud is cooperating with SAP closely to bring the most popular SAP Solutions such as S4HANA and HANA, into a pure Cloud based SaaS version, allowing enterprises to use cloud native SAP products with all the benefits of Cloud while completely eliminating infrastructure operation and maintenance efforts.
The journey to digital transformation can seem daunting. There are many challenges to consider, and manufacturers need to be willing to embrace innovative processes so they can break free from outdated models. This will allow teams to collaborate more successfully, get access to vast amounts of data, and operate more efficiently. The rate of change and technological innovation in the digital age is fast-paced. Manufacturers need to keep up in order to be successful. With Alibaba Cloud's range of products and innovations, manufacturers will have the advantage.
Alibaba Cloud is a world-class cloud provider and the No.1 public cloud service provider in China and Asia. To find out more about how your manufacturing business can succeed in the digital era, download Multinational Corporation (MNC) Manufacturing Industry whitepaper today.
See Also
- Journey in The Digital Era - MNC Manufacturing Series - Part 1
- Journey to the Cloud - MNC Manufacturing Series - Part 2
- Core Solutions for Manufacturers - MNC Manufacturing Series - Part 3
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