By Ding Yu
Today, thousands of industries are embracing cloud computing and cloud native, digital innovation and upgrading, cloud native connotation has been greatly enriched, so that we can redefine cloud native today. The emergence of cloud-native technology helps developers build loosely-coupled systems that are resilient, fault-tolerant, easy to manage, and easy to observe. It represents technologies such as Kubernetes, containers, DevOps, microservices, service grid, and Serverless. It can be seen that such technologies are a collection of application layer technologies. The traditional advantage of cloud computing is resource pooling. Such intensive management brings elastic distribution and API-based automatic management capabilities. It can be said that only when cloud native computing is combined with cloud computing can it play a real role.
Clouds are born of clouds
What is the combination of cloud native and cloud computing? Is that we said today’s cloud native products, today’s cloud platform provides a large number of cloud native products, including the large data, database, container services, middleware, application PaaS, cloud native security, developer tools, audio and video service, elastic bare-metal server, etc., because of the cloud of raw products, software, hardware, technology, architecture is the true cloud native.
Cloud native opens the era of full cloud development
Today we see cloud native as an upgrade to cloud computing. For cloud platform, the technology represented by container has become a new service field of cloud computing. For developers, it can encapsulates infrastructure downward and shield the differences of heterogeneous environment. Take Alibaba Cloud container service ACK as an example, it can encapsulates 30 cloud products downward, bringing a very simple interface. Supports more than 30 cloud products up, supporting heterogeneous loads and architectures. For enterprises, cloud native is accelerating the digital innovation of enterprises, from the four directions of infrastructure cloud, core technology Internet, application architecture modernization, business data intelligent, help enterprises to achieve business innovation. Today, cloud native has become the shortest path and cornerstone of digital innovation for enterprises. For developers, cloud native reshapes the software life cycle. On the one hand, it optimizes downward, realizes the collaborative optimization of software and hardware, reduces the technical cost and improves the technical efficiency. On the other hand, it supports multiple workloads upwards to bring more nice features to the architecture. Those who pay attention to cloud native must know that CNCF has hundreds of projects, from the development of the whole application to the specific development framework, development tool IDE, test CI/CD, the whole release and launch, change operation and maintenance capacity management, monitoring the overall upgrade, can be said to cover all aspects. Cloud Native brings a new open standard solution to the full lifecycle, so we think cloud Native today has started the era of full cloud development.
Cloud native brings innovation to development mode
Cloud native brings innovation to the development model and provides some very strong features for developers. 1) Architecture: The cloud native development model is a modular architecture that communicates through standardized interfaces and protocols. 2) Application delivery and update layer: Enables continuous automated iteration, integration, and delivery. 3) Operation and maintenance level: standardized and automated operation and maintenance mode. 4) Scalability: it can be automatically and flexibly expanded on demand. 5) Dependency level: it has good portability, that is, there is no vendor locking problem at all, and it is not dependent on the system environment and hardware. 6) Enterprise organization and culture: smooth cross-functional communication and cooperation, strong ability to deal with changes.
So we think cloud native is driving a new era of development, one that belongs to developers.
A new era of cloud native driver development has arrived
Industry research reports today show that container use continues to grow rapidly. According to CNCF’s research, 68% of organizations and businesses will use containers in their production environments in 2021, up 240% from two years ago. Containers are everywhere. For front-end/back-end development, web/mobile/applets, logic/components/frameworks, etc., 68% of developers are also willing to develop on the cloud in 2021, according to market research. Serverless increased significantly, with 25% of developers using Serverless technology and products by the end of 2021.
Aliyun continues to build open source ecology
In order to respond to and lead the changes of The Times and empower developers, AliYun has built a large number of product technologies and open source projects. For the entire technology community, AliYun returns the technical achievements of cloud computing research and development for many years to the world’s top foundations, such as open Atom Open Source Foundation, Apache Foundation, etc. Aliyun hopes to build an open, standard, and healthy development technology ecology with such investment. As a domestic microservice-oriented standard, AliYun has incubated more than 8 projects for the Cloud Native Foundation, such as OpenYurt, an open platform based on edge containers, ChaosBlade, a chaotic engineering tool in the field of distributed high availability, and Nacos, a service registration discovery, which have very complete open source projects. You can say that a developer who wants to build an open source architecture based on cloud native and open source technologies can find their own solution. Ali Cloud has served a large number of enterprise-class head users, such as Ikiki, Huya Live, China Southern Airlines, Ping An Technology, and so on. At the same time, it hopes to build a set of open standard technology system to serve global developers. At present, Aliyun ranks first among Chinese enterprises in the contribution ranking of GitHub, the open source community, with more than 2600 open source projects, more than 30,000 contributors, and more than one million stars and followers.
For cloud native applications, Aliyun has built a one-stop application management and delivery platform
At first, the emergence of cloud native technology was centered on resource management and was not user-friendly to applications. Based on this, Ali Cloud and Microsoft put forward the open application model of OAM, a clear and standardized way to make the interface of developers, operation and maintenance personnel and testers. The OAM provides a unified application description and application delivery interface, a rich and integrated PaaS platform, and the ability to manage and deliver applications in multiple environments and versions. At present, the image has been downloaded more than 100,000, with more than 20 enterprise users such as Bytedance, Fourth Paradigm and Youlike. At the same time, Ali Cloud also promote OAM application management norms, become the industry standard. Last week, the Institute of Information and Communication just issued an OAM as an industry standard.
Cloud-native DevOps toolchain to make r&d operations more efficient
For application development, operation and maintenance, Ali Cloud provides cloud native one-stop DevOps, making delivery and maintenance more efficient. The one-stop tool platform, from requirements management to the whole CI/CD online change, breaks down the local and cloud barriers, realizes the whole cloud development, and makes the whole development more efficient. As you can see above, with project management, requirements management, code repository, code management, image management, CI/CD test launch, and the entire developer suite, including external ides, it is a full-cloud development tool platform. Data, intelligent with integrated platform, can get through the data of the whole chain, get through after the comprehensive measurement, find out the enterprise and developers in the entire production process of efficiency bottlenecks, to optimize the basis to follow. Enterprise-level security guarantee, seamless cloud product integration, integration of cloud efficiency products and ECS application management, ACK container services, function computing, etc., are integrated with the highest level of RESEARCH and development capability certification of CIITAC. It currently serves one million service developers and more than 100,000 enterprise customers.
Container services help enterprises improve resource elasticity and significantly reduce computing costs
Containers have become a must-have skill for developers today. Ali cloud container services, provide an ACK, ASK, cloudy/hybrid cloud management, intelligent power dispatching is heterogeneous, operational system, ASM service grid, container application market, and so on infrastructure, rich up to support the architecture of the system, such as micro, stateful application service, large data intelligent application and innovation chain IOT (blocks). Based on this, Aliyun has formed a variety of industrial product and technical solutions, including microservice technology architecture solutions, cloud native big data solutions, genetic computing solutions, DevOps solutions, container Shenlong integration and joint optimization solutions, hybrid cloud container control solutions, and so on. According to Gartner’s public cloud container service report, Ali Cloud has been selected as the only Chinese enterprise for three consecutive years, and was rated as the most complete cloud service manufacturer of global container products. At present, it has served tens of thousands of enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of enterprise developers.
The most popular Serverless product among domestic users
With the development of cloud native, the user interface of cloud computing is moving up, resulting in higher development efficiency. DevOps brings features such as full hosting, no operation and maintenance, extreme flexibility, and fast rollout, allowing developers to focus more on the business logic itself. Serverless has gradually become the mainstream technology of cloud computing today, and it will become a big trend in the future. The Serverless product provided by AliYun is its own Serverless operating pool formed based on Aliyun’s Serverless container 2.0, the third-generation Shenlong architecture, Pangu storage and Luoshen network, which provides four forms: Functional computation-oriented FC, application-oriented SAE, container-oriented layout ASK, container-oriented instance ECI, support a rich application scenario, including the development of full end full station, small program development, online education audio and video development, application packaging, data intelligence development, but also support a very mainstream micro-service architecture. Ali Cloud provides a set of developer tools, components and cloud integrated development capabilities, and also creates an application center, providing a lot of experience optimization, application templates, classic case base, which can make our development more efficient, better secondary development and innovation. We also white-boxed Serverless so we can better understand what’s happening in the technology stack and have more control over it. According to the Forrester FaaS report in 2021, AliYun’s Serverless product capability was ranked the first in the world. In 2020, according to the research of China Institute of Information and Communication technology, Aliyun’s Serverless market share was 66%.
To meet developers’ application-oriented, observable needs
In the face of developers’ demands for observation, AliYun has built an application-oriented one-stop observable product ARMS, which can be used in infrastructure layer, container arrangement and scheduling layer, application architecture layer, business application layer and end testing experience layer. Provides complete log event link indicator analysis, APP monitoring capability, front-end monitoring capability, application monitoring, link tracking performance diagnosis, Prometheus monitoring, cloud alarm service, etc., hoping to achieve automated operation and maintenance through unified o&M capability and observable capability output products. At present, Aliyun has selected the magic Quadrant of Gartner APM in 2021, and is the only cloud manufacturer selected in China. It has served tens of thousands of enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of developers.
Ali Cloud is the leader and best practitioner of cloud native
Ali Cloud has the richest family of cloud native products in China, with nearly 300 cloud native products and nearly 1,000 technical solutions, including container layer, modern application architecture layer, aPaaS micro-service message event driven, application tool Serverless, cloud native big data AI and other product systems. Enterprises growing in the era of cloud origin can build IT technology system completely based on cloud products. Every developer who wants to enhance their own value and create greater productivity can find complete and rich tools and product system in Ali Cloud. Aliyun provides five technical values for enterprises, including resource flexibility, security and credibility, business intelligence, agile application and system stability. It has served thousands of industries, such as transportation, manufacturing, government affairs, media, Internet, finance, retail and communication, and served more than 80% of Chinese technology companies and 60% of A-share listed companies. Customers come from 200 countries and regions, serving more than 3 million customers, 5 million developers, has become a thousand lines of industry behind the technical force. Cloud native promotes the arrival of the era of full cloud development, and enables every developer to become a better self. By using cloud native technology, developers create greater technical value and commercial value, and accelerate the development of digital economy.