The author with source | | uncle alibaba cloud native public number
Today, digitalization has become the core competitiveness of enterprises. Thousands of industries are embracing cloud computing and cloud native. We believe that the year 2020 is the first year of cloud native landing, so 2021 will be the key node of cloud native accelerating enterprise digital innovation. Ali cloud computing summit on March 29, alibaba researcher, ali cloud cloud native application platform is responsible for Edmund yu (uncle) published the cloud native, shortest paths of enterprise digital innovation “keynote, reviewed all the alibaba 15 years cloud native practice course, and emphasis on the under the background of the digital economy, How can enterprises realize cloud application through cloud native, give full play to the value of cloud, and quickly activate digital innovation capability?
The following is a summary.
Ali Cloud to cloud native assertion
Gartner reports that 75 percent of global companies will use cloud-native containerized applications in their production by 2022. With the cloud on the enterprise trend, we are seeing more and more enterprises and developers move their businesses and technologies to the cloud native.
Aliyun makes three assertions about cloud native:
First, container +K8s will be the new interface for cloud computing. The container has revolutionized the way the cloud is used, and its importance cannot be overstated, as it solves many problems while creating new architectural possibilities. Containerization is the key to build cloud native, if cloud native is a high-rise building, then containerization is the base of the building. Containers support multiple workloads and distributed architectures upward, encapsulate infrastructure downward, shield the differences between underlying architectures and heterogeneous environments, and form the distribution and delivery standard of packaged images for applications. Alibaba Cloud container service ACK downward encapsulates 30 cloud products, forming a new interface for the interaction of the entire automated operation and cloud platform, thus improving the flexibility and automated operation and maintenance capabilities of the system. At the same time, containers are also driving the integration of soft and hard upgrades, such as the Divine Dragon bare Metal server.
Second, cloud native is reshaping the entire software life cycle for developers. We see cloud native extending downward to promote the integration of software and hardware, extending upward to promote the modernization of architecture, and horizontally extending to solve the challenges of the full life cycle of R&D and operation, including code development, DevOps, CICD process, operation and maintenance monitoring, observability, etc. Cloud native is closely related to the entire development process of developers and is an important help that developers cannot ignore.
Finally, for enterprises, cloud native is the shortest path to enterprise digital innovation. The value of cloud native for the evolution of enterprise technology lies in that it can realize the cloud of infrastructure, the Internet of core technologies, the modernization of application architecture, and the intelligent service. These features bring the most intuitive business value to enterprises, including resource elasticity, system stability, application agility, service intelligence, and trust and security.
Alibaba fifteen years of cloud native practice
Alibaba has 15 years of cloud native practice experience, in the process of 15 years, we often face some key decision points, in these decision points every step of choice, alibaba’s cloud native process has a significant impact. Why are we fully embracing cloud native, and how are we thinking behind every decision we make?
We began to explore the Distributed architecture of the Internet in 2006, and now think of it as a starting point for Alibaba Cloud. The reason for the Internet distributed architecture was that Taobao encountered some difficulties in the rapid development process at that time. Three systems were developed by 300 people, which would bring some conflicts of release and code merger, thus resulting in the decrease of r&d efficiency and the lack of agile business promotion. Because of these pain points, we propose to do servitization, which is distributed systems. In 2008, taobao’s entire servitization split has been completed, forming three core middleware, and open source to the industry.
In 2011, we started to push for container landing. Why do containerization? You know, in 2011, there were only a handful of containerization companies in the world. At that time, we began to focus on resource utilization. From the perspective of resource supply, there were several forms in the past, such as purely physical machines, which meant that the deployment density was relatively coarse, so the utilization rate was not high. If virtualization is used for isolation, there is some resource consumption. In 2011, Alibaba began to do container technology transformation — T4 project. Containers address three core issues: deployment density, efficient operation and maintenance, and resource isolation. With the emergence of Docker, its container image standardization ability has greatly promoted automatic operation and maintenance, ensuring that containers can achieve standardized delivery. Based on this, Alibaba will integrate Docker and promote more standardized cloud native technology.
In 2015, when our technology and products matured, we began to promote the full commercialization of product technology and fully embrace the cloud native standards. In this process, Alibaba’s own business development also began to fully enjoy the dividend of cloud computing. For example, how to use cloud platform to solve the extreme flexibility brought by resource pooling for peak services such as Double 11 and Double 12? Therefore, from 2015, Ali Cloud began to fully support Alibaba Singles’ Day. At the same time, we began to unify the scheduling of ground containers and the underlying resource pool. In addition, we have also carried out a variety of work, such as hybrid deployment, realizing the unification of technology stack and data, which has greatly reduced resource costs, improved operation and maintenance efficiency, and better promoted the intelligence of business.
If you can imagine a company with 10,000 engineers, if you can improve the r&d efficiency by 10%, you can save 1,000 engineers, which is a huge release of our productivity. Further, if we can have some more efficient platforms, more advanced methods and processes, and integrated into the technology system, it will bring a huge leap in the productivity of technical personnel.
2019 is a big year for Aliyun. In 2019, Ali Cloud provided 100% cloud support for Alibaba’s Singles’ Day core system, with nearly 2 million online business containers, 100% dpCA flexible bare metal servers, and a 20% increase in computing cost performance. Then in 2020, we completed the comprehensive cloud biogenesis of the core system, and cloud native products began to comprehensively support the group’s promotion, becoming a new base for the world’s largest cloud native practice. The driving force behind this is to make use of cloud native platforms, products and tools to achieve applications on the cloud and grow on the cloud.
In the cloud native era, what is the core competitiveness of cloud products? In my opinion, the essence of cloud products is to continue to represent advanced productivity, which requires cloud products to have core technical capabilities and rapid iteration. For any enterprise, its own system is difficult to have such tenacious vitality and competitiveness, alibaba is the same. Therefore, In 2020, Alibaba will fully switch to the support of cloud native products. Firstly, it recognizes the trend of cloud native technology, and secondly, it improves alibaba’s internal research and development efficiency and resource utilization rate based on cloud products.
Ali Cloud is the leader and best practitioner of cloud native. Ali Cloud has the richest family of cloud native products in China, with more than 300 products and nearly a thousand technical solutions, including cloud native DevOps, aPaaS & micro services, message and event drivers, application tools, Serverless architecture, etc. As well as cloud native databases, big data/AI, application delivery and security capabilities. IT can be said that an enterprise was born in the cloud native era and can build its IT system comprehensively based on cloud. Ali Cloud can provide the most complete technical solution and product system.
Ali Cloud has the most comprehensive cloud native open source contribution in China. Today, the total number of ali open source projects has exceeded 1000, covering big data, cloud computing, AI, middleware, containers, Serverless and other fields. Some of these open source projects have become de facto standards in the field. For example, Dubbo has become the most influential and widely used open source micro-service framework in China. RocketMQ is the first Apache top-level Internet middleware project in China, and the number one open source middleware project in China for many years. In addition, we also have the application management engine KubeVela, Alibaba’s first edge computing project OpenYurt, which opened last year, and the first Serverless developer platform Serverless Devs, It is also the industry’s first cloud-native full lifecycle management platform to support mainstream Serverless services/frameworks.
Through a large amount of investment in open source and the establishment of more technical standards, more developers can use more advanced cloud native technologies, so that a very good connection will be established between the community ecosystem and the cloud, and promote the rapid development of enterprises and the cloud together.
On March 25, authoritative consultancy Forrester release in the first quarter of 2021 FaaS platform (Function – As – A – Service Platforms) assessment, ali Function of cloud computing with the advantages of product capacity, the world stand out, Get the highest score in all eight dimensions. Alibaba Cloud has become the global FaaS leader alongside Amazon, which is the first time that a domestic tech company has entered the FaaS leader quadrant.
Data from the 2020 Cloud Native User Survey report by the Ict also confirms this. It is mentioned in the report that Ali Cloud Serverless products, by virtue of the technical training and rich application practice in double 11, accounts for 66% of the domestic Serverless user scale, far exceeding the sum of other cloud manufacturers, and is considered as the first choice of domestic Serverless users.
Moreover, ali Yunyun’s original product capabilities have been certified by the world’s top evaluation institutions. In March last year, Gartner released the 2020 Public Cloud Container Report, and Ali Cloud was the only Chinese enterprise selected for two consecutive years. In terms of product richness, Ali Cloud ranked with AWS as the cloud service provider with the most complete container products in the world, covering 9 product capabilities, leading Google, Microsoft and IBM.
Below, we will explain how aliyunyun’s native products and solutions empower enterprises with digital innovation from three directions.
Container services help enterprises improve resource resiliency and significantly reduce computing costs
Today, cloud native has evolved into a standardized technology. What is the difference between the products offered by the cloud platform and the open source version? This is a concern for many businesses and developers. Ali Cloud container service provides a large number of enterprise-level features, including security governance capabilities, observability, multi-cloud hybrid cloud management capabilities, heterogeneous computing capabilities, scheduling capabilities, intelligent operation and maintenance capabilities, etc. On top of the container, a variety of workloads are supported, including microservices, stateful applications, big data, intelligent applications, and innovative applications such as blockchain and IoT.
Based on the container product family, we provide perfect container solutions. Last year, cloud native AI solutions received a lot of attention from enterprises. Baiyun team’s exploration of agile architecture allows them to operate in high-concurrency scenarios. Before this battle, Baiyun has optimized its container cluster architecture and planning with the help of Ali Cloud team, and achieved dynamic expansion and efficient control calmly with the core solutions of Ali Cloud container service ACK and flexible bare metal (Shenlong) example.
In the face of massive business data, the problem facing Zhongan is the significant increase in IT costs, and the pressure of operation and maintenance and data security have become the core pain points. Based on ACK of container service, zhongan’s hardware investment is reduced by 10%, operation and maintenance pressure is greatly reduced, and manpower is reduced by more than 50%. In 2020, SHENTong will quickly realize comprehensive containerization, which not only improves the stability of shentong system, but also shortens the troubleshooting time. The flexibility of the cloud is particularly suitable for large-scale promotion scenarios. Resources on the cloud can be paid by volume, and STO releases resources after the large-scale promotion, saving STO millions of computing costs every year. Compared with offline equipment rooms and standby machines, resources on the cloud are easier to operate and cheaper to manage. Native transformation at the same time, based on the cloud, also boosted shentong internal technical system innovation, such as shentong express operations teams in the past in IDC, basic is by manual or packaged deployment scripted way, through a comprehensive cloud after the container to make use of the successful transition and cloud native technology enterprise, promote the research and development and operational efficiency.
Cloud native middleware escorts system stability
Cloud-native technologies and products can help users easily evolve from the original IT architecture to the modern application architecture. From the perspective of the underlying application hosting platform, Ali Cloud provides ACK/ASK container services. In the application PaaS layer, Ali Cloud provides three products, SAE, EDAS and Web+. At the upper level, Ali Cloud provides function FaaS service, which can meet different business needs. Moreover, Ali Cloud also provides a variety of middleware services, including the most complete and rich message queue service in the industry, covering all common message protocols. For example, RocketMQ, the well-known open source messaging middleware in China, Kafka, RabbitMQ and MQTT message queues popular in the industry can all find corresponding commercial services on Ali Cloud. Other middleware domains, such as MSE, ASM, CSB, and GTS for transaction services, can help enterprise users quickly build modern application architectures.
Cloud native middleware is fully compatible with open source standards, supports large-scale complex scenarios, has enterprise-level features, and can achieve high and reliable SLA. On top of cloud native middleware products, we also provide comprehensive solutions for enterprises, such as remote live, full link pressure measurement, enterprise high availability, resource mixing, etc. For enterprises that want to do cloud native upgrade, Ali Cloud provides perfect solutions, from micro-service governance to cloud migration, architecture upgrade, business center, etc., to help enterprises evolve to modern architecture.
The only one in China to enter the Forrester FaaS leadership quadrant, Ali Cloud Serverless global leader
Because it shields the various operation and maintenance complexity of the server, Serverless enables developers to spend more energy on business logic design and implementation, and gradually becomes one of the mainstream cloud native technologies. The advantage of Serverless is that it removes the homogenized and burdensome development and operation of server-based infrastructure from application development and allows users to focus on business innovation. Compared with the traditional development mode, Serverless mode builds applications based on a large number of mature cloud service capabilities, with fewer decision points for users and lower implementation complexity.
Ali Cloud is the earliest provider of Serverless computing services in China. In 2017, Ali Cloud launched the first FaaS product with millisecond elastic scalability — Functional computing FC; In 2018, function calculation was the first FC industry to support NAS file system; FC upgraded to function in 2019, the function to calculate the FC 2.0, provides reserved instances, a single instance of concurrency, custom runtime, monthly and other products of domestic initiation capacity, avoid the time delay caused by cold start burr, good support for delay sensitive business, its remarkable single function instance concurrent ability, still is domestic only. In addition, functional computing FC is also the industry’s first Serverless service to support pre-payment. Compared with post-payment, the unit price is 70% lower, the budget is easier to manage, and the cost is lower when the load is stable.
In addition to functional computing FC, Ali Cloud also provides the first application-oriented Serverless application engine SAE, ASK for container orchestration, and ECI for container instances, which constitute the most complete Serverless product matrix among all cloud vendors.
For microservice applications, The Serverless application engine SAE can achieve zero code modification.
- O&m free: help users to shield low-level IaaS and K8s details and focus on business development;
- Zero transformation: Seamless migration of microservice applications, war/ JAR applications without container transformation;
- Ultimate Efficiency: Provides second-level flexibility and ultimate Java application startup efficiency;
- One-stop experience: seamless integration of basic services and micro-service ecology, richer functions, and high integration with other cloud products.
For containers, Serverless Container ASK can greatly improve the agility and flexibility of container application deployment and reduce computing costs. Enabling users to focus on business applications rather than underlying infrastructure management greatly improves application development efficiency. The carrier of ASK application is container image, which has good flexibility and can support various types of applications with scheduling system, such as stateless applications, stateful applications, and computing task applications. Since the ASK/ECI open beta in May 2018, the value of the Serverless container has been widely recognized by users. During the epidemic, several online education platforms used ASK/ECI’s super elastic capacity to support online business expansion, and could rapidly expand 500 application instances within 30 seconds, easily responding to expected and unexpected sudden traffic.
Product upgrades, to create a comprehensive capacity system
Today, we’re announcing major upgrades to our cloud native offerings in three areas.
- Container services blockbuster upgrade: release cloud native AI suite
Gartner predicts that 70% of AI applications will be in the cloud. In practice, enterprises will also find more and more demand scenarios for AI containerization. In the past few years, we have provided a variety of tools and solutions in heterogeneous computing resource management, AI task lifecycle management, AI task scheduling and acceleration, AI training data acceleration and other directions through container service ACK, helping enterprises improve the engineering efficiency of AI production, computing resource utilization, AI platform construction speed and so on.
Based on the container service ACK, we integrate the full stack optimization capabilities of low-level computing resource optimization, AI task management, and upper-level AI engine acceleration and domain algorithm applications. Each layer of capabilities can be used independently or in combination to achieve the overall optimization effect. Cloud native AI is for AI service producers, including data scientists, AI algorithm engineers, AI platform builders and operators, who can choose to build their own AI platforms on K8s as needed. Based on cloud native technology, it helps users to quickly build AN AI platform, improving GPU utilization by 100%, AI engineering efficiency by 50%, and AI training speed by 20%.
- Application real-time monitoring service ARMS major upgrade: release of cloud dial-up capabilities
With the rapid development of digital economy, more and more enterprises are vigorously developing online business. For enterprises, how to assess in advance whether their business applications have reached the target service quality and user experience? How can I accurately locate the faults and root causes that occur when terminal users access applications? How to effectively measure the performance and experience gap between themselves and their competitors is the pain point of enterprise operation and maintenance in the era of digital economy.
Released the blockbuster ali cloud is a dial test and Po data cooperation of SaaS products, for Internet applications (Web page, network link, etc.) for monitoring service, application performance and the user experience without embedded code for cloud users provide out-of-the-box enterprise active type dial test application monitoring solution, is the enterprise improve application performance, An operator that improves user satisfaction.
- Serverless blockbuster Upgrade: Release full link acceleration
Under the Serverless architecture, container images and Java applications are two very common vectors for developers to deploy applications on the cloud. Among them, the container mirror for its subversive innovation, has become the era of cloud native application deployment format the DE facto standard, but the container mirror will need to download and extract the data through the network remote, for GB level image, pull level of time could be up to minutes, objectively amplifies the cold start side effects, hinder the Serverless evolution of real-time application. Java stands alone in its performance excellence, but behind that performance is impressive startup performance for Java applications, which also affects their performance under the Serverless architecture.
This function calculates the blockbuster container image acceleration technology and reduces the container startup delay by 50-80%. The burden of image optimization originally belongs to developers is transferred to function calculation to further help developers improve production efficiency and focus on business innovation. This technology is derived from ali Group’s super-large scale and highly complex scene container environment, which has profound accumulation of mirror storage and acceleration technology, and has excellently undertaken the severe challenges of three years’ double Eleven, Double Twelve, Spring Festival and other big quick scenes. Serverless Application Engine (SAE) launches Java application startup acceleration For the first time, it combined the cold start acceleration technology of Alibaba Dragonwell (the long-term support version of Open JDK of Ali Cloud), multi-thread running acceleration technology and SAE’s own in-place upgrade strategy and image preheating strategy to realize the end-to-end start speed of Java application by 45%. It takes only 15s at the fastest and improves multi-threading performance by 30%.
Ali Yunyun is the shortest path of enterprise digital innovation
With cloud on the enterprise becoming the industry trend, the era of building software services using open source technology and cloud products has arrived. How to better embrace cloud computing, embrace cloud native, and accelerate innovation with technology will become the key to the success of enterprise digital transformation and upgrading.
In the future, every enterprise in the world will be a digital software enterprise. There may be no unified path for digital transformation, but it has been verified by practice that cloud native is the shortest path for enterprises to realize digital innovation. Aliyun cloud native is committed to providing five core values for enterprises: resource flexibility, system stability, agile application, business intelligence, credible security, so that enterprises can rest assured to use the cloud, use the cloud.
