Tencent is Working to Expand Arm’s Presence in its Cloud

Tencent is laying the foundation to grow the presence of Arm in the cloud.

Pursuant to a memorandum of understanding signed last year, Tencent and Arm Group (Arm UK and Arm China) have entered a collaboration initiative. Our goal is to provide developers, e-commerce companies, and other cloud-centric organizations with tools and frameworks to evaluate the performance of Arm Neoverse technology and to ultimately migrate their Tencent workloads to Arm.

The initiative is aimed at both Tencent’s business units and Tencent Cloud customers.

Some of the elements of the initiative include:

• TencentBench, an Arm server testing framework: Tencent manages a large variety of workloads, including social, gaming, content, cloud computing, video, big data and (Gartner last year reported that Tencent Cloud ranked fifth worldwide in infrastructure as a Service and fourth in Asia/Pacific, growing at over 100%.) A first problem to solve is how to measure the characteristics as well as the similarities and differences of Arm servers from different market vendors. Collecting accurate measurements requires developing a unified standard testing framework. TencentBench is an Arm server test suite created with the help of Arm. It includes commonly used server test suites along with a large number of test suites for Tencent’s self-developed workloads. This allows Tencent to accurately measure the performance of Arm technology on a wide spectrum of applications.

Tencent evaluated different mainstream Arm server vendors on the market. Tencent has found that Arm delivers 28% better performance than traditional architectures and 100% better power performance.  

• Arm-based VM virtualization in Tencent Cloud:  With the strong performance of Arm servers, most of Tencent's workloads can directly benefit. As an important part of cloud services, Tencent Cloud’s CVM product line quickly completed the development and testing of the virtualization function on Arm servers. They then began to gray test in scale within Tencent's cloud. Based on the comparative experimental observation between the open-source virtualization solution and Tencent’s internal virtualization technology, Tencent Cloud in-house virtualization solution is superior to the open-source solution. For the CPU scenario, across the various SPEC CPU® 2017 integer and floating-point subtests, performance increased by more than 12% in Tencent virtualization solution while other system key indicators increased by 35%. The successful launch of the Arm CVM virtualization project has successfully provided great support for Tencent's internal and external businesses to use Arm technology through the cloud. 

• Tencent KonaJDK Arm architecture support: In Tencent's internal and public cloud business, a considerable number of workloads run on Java virtual machines. Java is an important part of the cloud ecosystem, including microservices, serverless, big data and machine learning. Tencent's internal self-developed KonaJDK which is based on OpenJDK started to adopt Arm servers and continued tuning the performance to meet the demands of the Java workloads.  

“The growing demands from the business and users for the Arm platform as well as its solid low energy consumption and high performance computing, making it one of the architectures firmly supported by the Tencent JDK team," said Tencent JVM development team leader Felix Yang. 

• Arm enablement on typical C/C++ workload (MySQL):  KonaJDK's support for the Arm architecture makes it feasible for a large number of Java workloads to run on the Arm servers. In addition, Tencent also has a large number of C/C++ applications. Cloud database products are one of the C/C++ businesses. Tencent Cloud TDSQL is widely deployed in public clouds and also has a strong share in private clouds. The Arm server's high performance, low power consumption, and high-density computing capabilities are very suitable for TDSQL's enterprise user scenarios. In the private cloud scenario, a large number of enterprise users have a strong demand for Arm servers. These users have also obtained considerable performance gains and cost reductions by choosing Tencent Cloud TDSQL+ Arm server. 

“Tencent Cloud has always strived to provide our customers with stable, reliable, and cost-effective services. But we also want to give them options to improve their ecological footprint and return on investment,” said Mr. Xiao Heng, Vice President of Tencent Cloud. “Through detailed evaluation and in-depth technological adaptation, we have reason to believe that Arm technology can meet the demands of our customers.”

Arm has also been actively engaged with TARS, a microservice framework created by Tencent and now managed by the Linux Foundation. One ongoing project involves developing applications to give drivers real-time insight into traffic and road conditions. The goals of the project include improving location accuracy by 10x over today’s GPS system and reducing the latency for traffic information from minutes to seconds.

TARS and Arm are also exploring ways to utilize AR/VR technology to create virtual classrooms.

“Bringing the TARS microsystem framework to the Arm platform will accelerate innovation and allow developers to build applications that harness the computing power in the cloud, edge, and endpoints,” said Mark Shan, board chair of the TARS Foundation and senior technical manager at Tencent.

TARS, Arm, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation also collaborated on a virtual summit in China last summer. The virtual summit drew more than 10,000 attendees with media coverage that exceeded 120,000 mentions.

Speaking on behalf of Arm, we are incredibly proud to expand our ongoing relationship with one of the giants of the Internet. Expect to see white papers, frameworks, and further announcements emerge from the collaboration in 2021. And for more information on Arm solution in the cloud please visit our cloud infrastructure solutions page.

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