Alibaba Cloud Launches HaaS — Accelerating the Innovation and Iteration of AIoT
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By GXIC
At the Apsara Conference on September 18, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence officially launched Hardware as a Service (HaaS), a building block platform to help small and medium-sized developers upgrade their AIoT in a quicker way. This product was designed to help small and medium-sized developers of AIoT focus on their business and quickly assemble the building blocks of software and hardware. By doing so, they can migrate devices to the cloud securely.
HaaS refers to a development platform where developers use various hardware and software building blocks to create products by plugging them into each other without the need to customize circuit boards for each product. HaaS includes hardware and software building blocks. By utilizing the /hardware building blocks of HaaS provided by Alibaba Cloud, such as control panels, expansion panels, and sensor panels, developers can obtain the functions they need. These functions will be migrated to the cloud automatically, which solves the problem in the small-batch delivery of supply chains and greatly shortens the development time from half a year to one week. In terms of the software building blocks of HaaS, developers can create complete business logic by dragging and combining software building blocks, such as network modules, codec modules, timers, and PWM. With one click, developers can update the deployment to quickly develop driver software, which saves developers’ time in research and development.
It is reported that HaaS can be applied to a wide range of scenarios, including the modern industry, modern agriculture, and new businesses, such as power bank sharing, bicycle sharing, and charging pile sharing. All of them can be intelligently and quickly realized through HaaS.
It is said that Alibaba Cloud Intelligence will launch three types of HaaS control panels: Control Panel (HaaS100), Control Panel Pro (HaaS200), and Control Panel Pro Max (HaaS300). The control board is mainly for low-end scenarios, such as DTU, sensors, controllers, and smart appliances. The Control Board Pro is mainly for mid-end scenarios where screens exist, such as POS machines, advertising machines, and HMI industrial control panels. The Control Panel Pro Max is mainly for complex scenarios, such as industrial control computers, edge gateway, and industrial vision. In the future, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence will work with eco-partners to continuously enrich these HaaS control panels.
According to Hu Junfeng, Director of the Smart Device Platform of the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence IoT Business Unit, HaaS has many advantages. It can shorten the period for the pattern-making of hardware design, satisfy the various customer demands in customization, lower the threshold in developing system protocols, and accelerate the non-standard publicity of product schemes. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence has revolutionarily defined HaaS, through which traditional devices can be quickly transformed into intelligent devices, allowing developers to focus more on business innovation.
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