As industries worldwide rush to embrace digital and intelligent transformation, Huawei Cloud consistently pursues technological innovation as its core driving force. This was the case at Huawei Connect 2025, Zhang Ping’an, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and CEO of Huawei Cloud, shared Huawei Cloud’s innovation and practices in AI compute services, foundation models, embodied AI, AI agents, and much more.
Huawei Cloud made several key announcements at the event, such as:
-Huawei Cloud launched the CloudRobo Embodied AI Platform, which deploys complex algorithms and intelligent logic on the cloud to realize more lightweight robots. By taking advantage of the massive computing power and advanced AI models on the cloud, the platform makes robot execution more intelligent. Cloud intelligence overcomes the limitations that have been holding robots back, making them applicable to more scenarios.
-Huawei Cloud launched Versatile, an enterprise-grade agent platform. It aims to serve as an easy-to-use, effective, and open platform for developing and running AI agents. With this platform, customers will be better equipped to quickly develop AI agents that suit their application scenarios.
Charles Yang, Senior Vice President of Huawei and President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, also highlighted that Huawei Cloud’s innovations are empowering enterprises to succeed in global markets in the digital and intelligent era.
Underlying that success is robust cloud-native innovation and corresponding architectures. Huawei’s cloud native container technology is what propelled the company into the Gartner Container Management Leader’s Quadrant, as announced in early August.
Understanding container technology and Huawei’s role in cloud-native innovation
Container technology has become one of the cornerstones of modern computing. By packaging applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable units, containers ensure that software can run reliably across diverse environments. This makes them vital to the shift toward cloud-native infrastructure, microservices, and scalable digital services.
What is container technology?
The core metaphor often used is the shipping container. Just as physical containers allow goods to move seamlessly between ships, trucks, and trains without repackaging, software containers encapsulate applications with all the code, libraries, and configuration they need. This ensures that the application behaves consistently whether deployed on a laptop, in a corporate data center, or on a public cloud.
Unlike traditional virtual machines, which simulate entire operating systems for each application, containers share the host system’s kernel. This makes them lighter, faster to start, and far more resource-efficient. Whereas a virtual machine can take minutes to boot, a container launches in seconds. The difference can be compared to providing each tenant a separate building (VMs) versus giving each a room within a shared complex (containers).
Why containers matter
The value of containers is tied to some of the most pressing challenges in enterprise IT:
-Consistency across environments – Developers often complain that software “works on my machine but fails on yours.” Containers eliminate this problem by ensuring identical behaviour from development to testing and production.
-Cost savings – Running 10 applications used to require 10 separate virtual machines, each with its own operating system. With containers, those same 10 apps can run on one host, reducing CPU, memory, and storage requirements dramatically.
-Elastic scalability – During peak events such as major online shopping sales, thousands of containers can be spun up within seconds and scaled back down when demand eases.
-Support for microservices – Modern applications are often split into many smaller components. For example, an e-commerce platform may separate authentication, payment, and shopping cart services. Each can run in its own container, making upgrades, fault isolation, and scaling far more efficient.
These advantages have made containers the foundation of cloud-native computing, enabling enterprises to modernize legacy applications, embrace automation, and meet the demands of digital transformation.
Typical use cases
- Cloud-native and microservices: Containers are widely used to host microservices architectures, allowing organizations to scale individual components independently.
- CI/CD pipelines: Containers are central to continuous integration and delivery, enabling automated build, test, and deployment processes that accelerate development cycles.
- Edge computing: Containers allow data to be processed close to its source, such as wind turbines or sensors, reducing reliance on central cloud resources.
- Modernization of legacy systems: Even older enterprise applications can be “containerized” without rewriting, gaining portability and security benefits.
Inside Huawei’s container ecosystem
Huawei Cloud has invested heavily in container technology, building a portfolio of products that address the full lifecycle of containerized applications. At the center of this ecosystem is the Cloud Container Engine (CCE), complemented by Cloud Container Instance (CCI) and Unified Cloud-Native Service (UCS).
CCE: Enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters
CCE provides a managed Kubernetes service tailored for enterprises. It comes in several variants:
CCE Standard – a stable entry point for organizations beginning their cloud-native journey.
CCE Turbo – optimized for high-performance workloads such as AI training, video processing, and e-commerce flash sales. Turbo achieves low latency and high throughput by offloading tasks from CPUs to smart network cards and using advanced scheduling engines.
CCE Autopilot – a serverless Kubernetes model where enterprises focus solely on their applications, while the platform manages scaling, upgrades, and maintenance. Billing is per-second and based on actual usage, making it attractive for cost-sensitive workloads.
Together, these options cover a spectrum of needs, from stable enterprise services to real-time scaling under heavy traffic.
CCI: Serverless container instance
Huawei Cloud’s CCI was the first serverless container service based on Kubernetes when launched in 2018. It eliminates the need to manage clusters entirely, allowing developers to run workloads directly by submitting container images. This makes it particularly suited for short-lived or bursty tasks such as batch processing, CI/CD, or e-commerce traffic spikes.
UCS: Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and edge governance
UCS (Unified Cloud-Native Service) addresses the growing need to manage containers across multiple clouds, regions, and edge environments. Built on the open-source orchestration project Karmada, UCS provides multi-cluster scheduling, elasticity, governance, and observability. This ensures that enterprises can run applications seamlessly across different infrastructures—whether on Huawei Cloud, AWS, GCP, or on-premises.
In doing so, UCS reduces the risks of “single cluster” failures, boosts efficiency, and delivers consistent performance across distributed environments.
Containers have transformed the way applications are built, deployed, and scaled. By offering lightweight, consistent, and portable software environments, they provide enterprises with the flexibility needed in an era of rapid digital transformation. Huawei’s suite of container products—CCE, CCI, and UCS—reflects the range of enterprise needs, from high-performance computing to cost-sensitive workloads and multi-cloud governance. Combined with its open-source contributions, Huawei has positioned itself as a significant player in shaping the future of cloud-native infrastructure.
