IDC published a report on May 31, 2020, stating that the connotation of hybrid architecture is constantly enriched, and cloud management software has great potential. On February 19 of the same year, IDC published a report on the top ten predictions for the cloud computing market in 2020, indicating that multi-cloud and cloud-native trends are becoming mainstream. How did Odin deal with these new technologies and trends?

Containerization, Kubernetes, microservices, and hybrid clouds will enrich the connotation of enterprise architecture and become the core components of future enterprise IT infrastructure. With the emergence of new technologies in new environments, enterprise IT architecture is also changing. IDC's latest research shows that although traditional infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud are still the main architectures of most companies, new technologies and concepts such as containers, microservices, and hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments are gradually integrated into this architecture, becoming the norm of future enterprise IT infrastructure.

IDC's predictions at the beginning of this year also stated that "by 2023, 50% of Chinese enterprise applications will be deployed in containerized hybrid cloud/multi-cloud environments to provide agile and seamless deployment and management experience," and "by 2024, 50% of large Chinese enterprises will rely on third-party service providers (SPs) for containers, open-source, and cloud-native application development help."

Cloud-native, hybrid clouds, and multi-clouds

The rapid growth of medical data has led to the gradual cloudification of data storage, and hospitals have put forward various demands, such as the security of data storage, the capacity of cloud storage, and convenient data access methods. Hybrid and multi-cloud forms have also gained more recognition. IDC's top ten predictions for the Chinese cloud market in 2020 show that more than half of the predictions are related to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native trends, highlighting that these directions will gradually become mainstream trends. The high growth rate of the cloud system and service management software market in IDC's latest half-year tracking report also reflects the demand for various cloud services by enterprises.

Container technology and microservices

The emergence of many new businesses and technologies has caused some old medical systems to encounter difficulties in maintenance and updates due to the mutual dependence of different applications. Through the concept of microservices architecture and containerization technologies such as Kubernetes (K8s), hospitals can break down a single business into multiple applications. Each application can be independently deployed and developed without being affected by other applications, improving system maintainability. At the same time, new applications can also quickly integrate into the overall architecture, accelerating deployment speed and having better scalability.

How did Odin respond to containerization, hybrid clouds, and other new technologies and trends?

As early as mid-2018, Odin began to develop Odin NeXT (New generation eXchange Technology), a data service platform based on microservices and containers, which was successfully launched in mid-2019. Odin NeXT has a forward-looking design concept and a cloud-native distributed cluster architecture based on the latest container orchestration technology Kubernetes (K8s), which has the following characteristics:

Not bound to specific cloud providers and supports hybrid clouds:

Due to the need for balancing risks, utilizing various cloud platform advantages, and other factors, more and more enterprises are storing their data in hybrid cloud environments and adopting multi-cloud strategies. However, because product functionality is often tied to specific cloud providers, switching providers can be difficult. Odin NeXT's cloud-native architecture not only supports hybrid clouds and can be deployed on private data centers or cloud providers' IaaS, but it is also not limited by specific cloud provider functionality, thereby supporting enterprise multi-cloud strategies.

Containerized deployment:

Odin NeXT is built on Kubernetes and uses containerization technology to provide a highly reliable, high-performance, and stable cloud platform. It simplifies the maintenance of cloud-native applications by providing efficient container management and orchestration and high-level resource isolation. It also has many control and scalability-related features that provide "technical middle platform" support for medical institutions' efficient and agile development.

Microservice-oriented architecture with support for hot upgrades:

Odin NeXT enhances overall application agility and maintainability through loose coupling, simplifying deployment and quickly constructing a scalable and flexible architecture. It uses microservices iteration to smoothly upgrade the engine and easily accommodate complex business scenarios and changing demands.