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Serverless frees developers from heavy manual resource management and performance optimization, just as assembly language evolved to high-level languages decades ago, cloud computing productivity is once again revolutionizing. What are the core values of Serverless? What Serverless ecological products have been released by Ali Cloud, and what are their special features? Ali cloud function calculation performance? Aliyun researcher Shu Tong will share the journey and determination of Alibu Serverless through this article.

The introduction

Back in 2009, Berkley predicted that cloud computing would take off. With nearly unlimited cloud computing resources, customers do not need to build their own computer rooms, and IT is possible to pay as needed. The investment of enterprises in IT has been significantly reduced, and the technology dividend released by cloud computing has enabled more and more enterprise customers to move from the cloud to the cloud.

However, when most customers use cloud services, they still have to face complex operation and maintenance, relatively high idle resources, and they cannot truly pay on demand. The advantages of cloud computing have not been fully exploited.

AWS launched Lambda service in 2015, Ali Cloud launched FC function computing in 2017, And Berkeley predicted Serverless computing would replace Serverful computing again in 2019. As a result, Serverless has attracted wide attention in the industry.

Serverless frees developers from the onerous manual resource management and performance optimization that led to the evolution of assembly to high-level languages decades ago, transforming cloud computing productivity once again. Serverless is not so much a distillation of cloud computing as a redefinition of cloud computing, which will become a new computing paradigm in the cloud era and lead the next decade of cloud.

The core values of Serverless

Fast delivery, intelligent flexibility and lower cost are the three core values of Serverless.

First, fast delivery

Serverless does a lot of end-to-end integration and integration between cloud services, which provides maximum convenience for application development. Users do not need To pay attention To the underlying IaaS resources, but only need To focus on the development of business logic, focusing on business innovation, greatly shortening the go-to-market time of enterprise applications. Create greater business value.

Second, extreme elasticity

Before Serverless, I believe that many developers have had similar experience, once encountered sudden traffic may directly lead to system timeout, abnormal, or even crash; When we are making a big push, we need to carry out multiple capacity assessments and expand capacity well in advance. Once the assessment is not correct, it may have a disastrous impact. With Serverles, dealing with burst traffic, capacity estimation, and so on becomes much easier.

Third, lower costs

Just like hydropower and coal in our lives, Serverless pays only for the resources it actually consumes, not for the resources it doesn’t use. Based on the above three core values, Serverless is bound to receive more and more attention and favor from enterprises and developers.

Ali layout Serverless’s journey

Alibaba’s Serverless practice is in a leading position in the industry. Not only Taobao, Alipay and Dingding have applied Serverless to production business, Ali cloud Serverless products is to help tens of thousands of enterprise customers such as Weibo, graphite, learn with who, Timing and so on successfully land Serverless, covering front-end full stack, small program, new retail, game interactive entertainment, online education and other industries or scenes.

The rich Serverless offerings offer customers more choices, such as Function Compute for functions, SAE for applications, Serverless K8s for container orchestration, and ECI for container instances. Constitutes the most complete Serverless product matrix of any cloud vendor today.

Behind these Serverless products are the four core technologies of Ali Cloud infrastructure — Divine Dragon architecture, sandbox container, Pangu storage and Roshen Network, which provide a solid foundation and strong core competitiveness for Serverless.

A complete Serverless product needs to be equipped with a complete back-end cloud service, and the event bus EventBridge and Serverless Workflow that we will be releasing today demonstrate AliCloud’s commitment to Serverless strategy. In September, Ali Cloud launched four Serverless ecological products, which helped the rapid development of Ali Cloud Serverless.

  • Sandbox 2.0: the cornerstone of Ali Cloud Serverless products, more stable, more secure, more resilient.
  • EventBridge: An event hub in the cloud, with native support for CloudEvents.
  • Serverless Workflow: Provides simple, flexible, visual function choreography, more intuitive, more convenient.
  • Functional computing 2.0 Plus: Join hands with developer tools and application center to lead developers to fully upgrade their experience.

What’s so special about these four products?

Sandbox 2.0, lighter and faster cloud native operating unit, provides a solid foundation and strong core competitiveness for Ali Cloud Serverless products.

First, it provides users with a reliably isolated, agile and efficient bare-metal operating environment. Secondly, 50ms cold start and 3ms hot recovery meet The super high requirements of Serverless for rigid delivery of resources. Third, through the hardware and software co-design, the performance of zero loss. Only when the foundation is firmly established can a tall building rise from the ground. Applications running on Top of Serverless products will have better stability only if the infrastructure is solid.

Ali Cloud launched Serverless Event bus EventBridge, which is just like the nerve center of people. Through EventBridge, we will build event hub on cloud. CloudEvents native support makes Serverless events more standardized, standardized and unified. With events everywhere, EventBridge can easily connect cloud services, cloud applications and SaaS applications to further accelerate the end-to-end integration of AliYun Serverless products.

In 2020, Ali Cloud released Serverless workflow, which is a fully managed Serverless cloud service used to coordinate the execution of multiple distributed tasks. Through simple and flexible workflow description, visual function scheduling model, It can easily build complex work such as media processing flow, machine learning pipeline, automatic operation and maintenance flow. Serverless Workflow makes function choreography simpler, more intuitive, and more convenient.

In 2019, Ali Cloud released function computing 2.0 for the first time, providing richer runtime, more extreme flexibility, and more robust computing layer scheduling. Today, functional computing 2.0 Plus has been upgraded again. In collaboration with Alibaba to enrich the developer framework, serverless-Tools and Serverless Application Center have been launched from the perspective of developer experience to create a more open, standard and non-vendor bound Serverless community.

At the same time, container images and performance instances are integrated into the container ecology, breaking the minimum operating unit of functions, making it easier for developers to use. One-step access to the cloud and one-click Severless could become a reality for developers.

The Serverless practice gradually deepens

Good products are inseparable from customer practice. At present, a large number of customers from different fields have chosen Serverless of Ali Cloud to build new business or optimize the original business through Serverless.

Sina Weibo applies Serverless technology to personalized image processing, achieving extreme flexibility of 100 milliseconds and reducing the overall cost by 35%. Online education customers with whom to learn, with the help of Serverless technology, peak real-time audio and video transcoding efficiency increased 93%, comprehensive cost decreased 35%; Tucson Future, a driverless truck brand selected in the “2019 Forbes List of China’s Most Innovative Companies”, realized the second-level startup of 1000 node GPU container cluster through Serverless technology, shortening the model test time by 60%; Timing, an online education platform, is Serverless based on SAE zero-transformation microservice architecture, reducing computing cost by 30%.

Next, we will use a Demo to demonstrate the scene of audio and video transcoding and see the excellent performance of Ali Cloud function calculation.

To convert 10000 audio and video scene, for example, on the left than the efficiency of transcoding, function calculation integrated audio and video processing capabilities, more played a cloud computing ability of flexible to the extreme, in combination with the Serverless workflow arrangement ability, fragmentation process automation, and self-built transcoding cluster, need to build independent fragmentation process, efficiency is not high, According to the transcoding efficiency comparison chart on the left of the video, 59% transcoding time is saved by function calculation. On the right side of transcoding cost comparison, from the vCPU elastic/video processing throughput/queuing delay, the self-built transcoding cluster red curve, facing serious idle resources waste, on behalf of the blue curve represents the function function to calculate the, when will the transcoding computing resources compressed to the minimum, eliminates the cost of idle resources, At the same time, combined with the orchestration ability of Serverless workflow, the original complex transcoding process is simpler and more automatic, and the cost of function calculation is saved by 48%. It can be seen that function calculation can help improve r&d efficiency and resource efficiency to varying degrees.

The future is here, Serverless!

From leading to Pratt & Whitney, Ali Cloud Serverless is going further and further on the road of more efficient, more economical and more open in a more extreme way, bringing greater value to the enterprise customers on Ali Cloud. The next decade is worth looking forward to Serverless! 2020 the cloud during the assembly, alibaba was formally established cloud native technical committee, alibaba, a senior researcher at Jiang Jiangwei committee director, chief scientist Li Fei dharma hospital database fly, ali cloud computing platform, a senior researcher at Gu Yangqing, ali cloud native application platform researcher Ding Yu such as ali, head of the technology involved. Jiang Jiangwei said that the committee will vigorously promote the comprehensive cloud biotransformation of Alibaba’s economy, and precipitation of Alibaba’s more than 10 years of cloud native practice, enabling hundreds of millions of enterprises to carry out cloud native transformation, improve r&d efficiency by 30% while reducing IT costs by 30%, to help customers into the digital native era. The establishment of the committee, also means that Ali has upgraded cloud native technology strategic direction for the new.

Ali Cloud currently has the largest family of cloud native products and open source ecosystem in China, providing more than 100 innovative products such as cloud native bare metal server, cloud native database, data warehouse, data lake, container, microservices, DevOps, Serverless and so on. During the Cloud Computing Conference, Alibaba also released the cloud native panorama, comprehensively showing its layout and determination in the cloud native field.

Course recommended

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