Naver Cloud: A look inside the South Korea’s Leading Cloud Platform

In 2019, global pop sensation BTS took the stage for their largest tour to date at Wembley Stadium in London. To promote its emerging venture, Naver broadcast the performance live to over 140,000 viewers worldwide via its Naver V Live platform, which relied on Naver Cloud infrastructure to reach audiences in the United States, Japan, Korea, and beyond. This successful event laid the foundation for what has become South Korea’s most widely used cloud service provider. In this article, we’ll explore what Naver Cloud offers and how it distinguishes itself from its Western counterparts in the competitive CSP landscape.

What’s Naver Cloud?

Naver Cloud is the cloud service provider created by Naver, the South Korean conglomerate behind the country’s most popular search engine and an ecosystem of widely used apps like Naver Mail, Naver Pay, Naver Maps, Naver Workspace, and more.

Officially founded in 2017, Naver Cloud initially offered 22 cloud products, expanding to over 200 products across 18 categories by 2022. Today, more than 60,000 South Korean companies, including 55% of the top 100 firms such as Samsung, SK Telecom, and PUBG Corp, rely on Naver Cloud for their services. Furthermore, government regulations make it the preferred choice for many government offices when it comes to cloud solutions. To put it in perspective, Naver can be seen as the “South Korean Google.”

Different Networking

Naver Cloud’s networking options diverge slightly from those offered by Western cloud providers. Depending on the region, users can choose between two types of networking environments: Classic and VPC. Initially, Naver Cloud only provided the Classic environment, where all resources were deployed on a shared network. This setup allowed for private communication between servers created under multiple accounts, making it possible for users to interconnect resources across accounts.

However, the Classic model comes with certain challenges. For instance, access control requires separate configurations through Access Control Groups or other methods to manage inter-tenant communication, which can become complex, especially when a single account supports multiple tenants. As deployments grow in complexity, maintaining access settings becomes increasingly challenging. Additionally, due to the shared network, each tenant’s network environment cannot be configured identically, and private IPs are assigned randomly, complicating the enforcement of strict access control policies by IP range.

To address these limitations, Naver Cloud introduced the VPC environment on September 17, 2020. The VPC setup provides users with a fully isolated network, making network management more straightforward and adaptable to specific organizational needs, effectively resolving the issues associated with the Classic environment.

Though Naver Cloud continues to support the Classic environment, there are now limitations on its functionality. For example, users can no longer create new Kuberneets clusters in the Classic setup, and certain newer features are exclusive to VPC. Naver Cloud has also introduced tools to facilitate the migration of workloads and servers from Classic to VPC, indicating the company’s intent to transition users towards the VPC model over time. While many organizations, especially large corporations, are often resistant to major changes, it’s likely that this shift will eventually become necessary, though Naver may need to provide additional support and resources to help clients through this transformation.

Create a new Naver Cloud Platform Account

As of this writing, Naver Cloud supports the direct creation of new business accounts (associated with a company) for users residing primarily in Singapore, South Korea, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States, and Vietnam. To complete the registration process, applicants must provide a certificate of company registration, a valid phone number from the country of residence (VoIP numbers are not accepted), and a valid credit card.

Personal accounts, however, are available only in South Korea. If you attempt to create a personal account using a temporary South Korean phone number — such as those provided to tourists — it won’t work. This is because account registration requires identity verification through the phone number used to register the credit card. Additionally, without an Alien Registration Number, which tourists do not possess, you will be unable to complete the process.

If you reside in a country not included in the supported list, don’t worry. You can create an account by directly contacting the Naver Support Center. In your support ticket, include your company’s certificate of registration, a 30-minute time window for verification, a photo of your credit card, and your phone number. The Naver Cloud team will then temporarily add your country to the list of available regions, allowing you to complete the account setup.

Training

Upskilling engineers is a critical aspect that every cloud service provider must prioritize for success. To facilitate engineers’ use of their services, incentive companies to migrate to the platform, Naver Cloud provides a huge amount of educational content, along with regular online webinars and offline training sessions. The offline training sessions, available only in Korean, range from free full-day courses to multi-day, instructor-led programs designed to deepen users’ expertise and taken at their office in Seoul.

Certifications

Certifications serve as a way to validate an engineer’s skills and attest to their knowledge. Many organizations, such as Azure, AWS, and CNCF offer certification programs that engineers can obtain by passing proctored exams. Naver Cloud follows this approach and currently offers the following certifications:

• NAVER CLOUD PLATFORM Certified Associate: This certification verifies a foundational understanding of cloud concepts and the ability to configure basic resources like Compute, Storage, Database, Network, and Media services on Naver Cloud Platform.
• NAVER CLOUD PLATFORM Certified Professional: This level takes the knowledge deeper, building on the previous resources and adding troubleshooting capabilities. It consists of three exams.
• NAVER CLOUD PLATFORM Certified Expert: The highest certification level, which requires comprehensive knowledge of Naver Cloud Platform resources, as well as skills in troubleshooting and customization. It consists of four exams.
• NAVER CLOUD PLATFORM Certified AI: This certification is designed for those working with AI, covering basic knowledge related to machine learning and a solid understanding of CLOVA Studio, based on the HyperCLOVA X engine.
• NAVER CLOUD PLATFORM Certified Expert AI: The most advanced AI certification, requiring expertise in AI, a thorough understanding of large language models, and skills in RAG configuration and chatbot development using the HyperCLOVA X engine.

References:

• VPC Announcement: https://www.ncloud.com/intro/news/554
• Naver Cloud Support Center: https://www.ncloud.com/support/question/general
• Naver Training Platform: https://g-bizschool.naver.com/
• Naver Education Platform: https://edu.ncloud.com/online