Introduction: The original intention of Ali Cloud Serverless Application engine (SAE) is to allow customers to enjoy the complete experience of micro-service +K8s+Serverless without changing any code or application deployment mode, and free operation and maintenance out of the box.

preface

As a more flexible, reliable and open architecture, microservices have been developing rapidly in recent years. The combination of microservices and container technology can easily realize DevOps after microservices. More and more enterprises are looking for ways to implement microservices containerization to make their applications better on the cloud. However, due to the learning curve of K8s itself, operation and maintenance complexity, service registration discovery, version management, gray strategy, existing session processing, etc., these customers are discouraged and cannot love it.

Ali Cloud Serverless application Engine (SAE) was born under this background. The original intention is to let customers enjoy the complete experience of micro-service +K8s+Serverless without changing any code or application deployment mode, and free operation and maintenance out of the box. The unified K8s base helps users shield IaaS and K8s cluster operation and maintenance. WAR/JAR/PHP ZIP packages are directly deployed without container transformation. In the application layer, users are provided with full stack capabilities, focusing on application management and microservice governance. With good integration of developer tools /SaaS, SAE covers the full cloud scenario for applications.

SAE deeply integrates MSE and has industry-leading micro-service governance capabilities

SAE deeply integrates the microservice engine (MSE) and productifies the microservice best practices that Alibaba has been developing for more than ten years and has passed the double 11 test. More advanced governance capabilities are available free of charge on top of the open source Spring Cloud/Dubbo. For example, the micro service Canary/grayscale flow capability enables the application to carry out accurate grayscale based on various latitudes such as header/cookie and control the minimum explosion radius when issuing new versions. The lossless offline and online capabilities of micro-services can refresh the service list and notify actively through the agent mounted in THE SAE application during the Provider upgrade process, so that there will be no invocation error for Consumer. During service startup, traffic is smooth and stable regardless of whether the service is published or expanded. There is also the all-link gray scale capability of Assassin’s mace, which can realize the cascade flow gray scale from the seven-layer entrance flow to the back-end of a series of micro services, which greatly reduces the cost of building multiple sets of environments for customers and improves the gray effect.

SAE breaks through Java cold start bottleneck, increasing speed by 40%

The slow efficiency of Java cold start has been a problem for developers for many years. There are too many classes loaded and too many dependent packages, which will seriously slow down the efficiency. In addition to the optimization methods of image acceleration and image warm-up efficiency, SAE is also trying to create the ultimate Java application startup efficiency: Based on the AppCDS startup acceleration technology enhanced by Alibaba Dragonwell 11, it saves the cache generated during the first application startup process and directly starts the application through the cache. Compared with the standard OpenJDK, it can improve application startup and elastic efficiency by 40% in cold startup scenarios. This technology has been widely applied to the group’s production business and has received frequent praise from most enterprise users.

SAE industry’s first hybrid resiliency strategy

SAE provides the industry’s richest set of resiliency metrics and most flexible resiliency strategies. Different scenarios use different elasticity policies. In addition to THE CPU/MEM provided by K8s standard, SAE added support for application monitoring indicators such as QPS, RT, TCP connection number, etc., which is more accurate based on business. In addition to timing flexibility and monitoring index automatic flexibility, SAE added support for hybrid elasticity strategy, which solves the pain point that timing flexibility and monitoring flexibility are mutually exclusive and cannot be enabled at the same time in online education, mutual entertainment, cultural media and other industries. In addition, automatic flexibility can be restored after manual intervention.

SAE provides highly available solutions for scaling

Serverless application Engine (SAE) is especially suitable for e-commerce, new retail, interactive entertainment, online education, catering, travel, cultural media and other industries with sudden traffic, which can achieve accurate capacity + extreme flexibility + limiting traffic downgrade.

With the development of the Serverless Application Engine (SAE), the argument that microservices are a fantasy on Serverless and that Serverless and microservices are a match made in heaven will disappear. SAE will also be the shortest path for microservices containerization and best practices for microservices on Serverless.

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