Author: Song Jingchao, founder of Cloud Native community, Tetrate evangelist.

This article is for CSDN’s “Cloud Native People” column interview, in fact, I have been writing Kubernetes and cloud native annual summary and New Year outlook since 2017, today here to express my opinion, welcome everyone’s discussion and correction.

Cloud native is evolving

Cloud native is a kind of behavior and design concept. In essence, any behavior or method that can improve resource utilization and application delivery efficiency on the cloud is cloud native. The history of cloud computing is the history of cloud biogenesis. Kubernetes started the prelude of cloud native 1.0. The emergence of service grid Istio leads the micro-service in the post-Kubernetes era. The rise of Serverless makes cloud native continue to advance from the infrastructure layer to the application architecture layer. We are in a new era of cloud native 2.0.

The industry trends

Recently, some domestic cloud manufacturers, such as Ali Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei cloud have released their own cloud native related architecture and practice white papers.

  • In July 2020, China Academy of Information and Communications released the White Paper on Cloud Raw Industry (2020).
  • On December 20, 2020, at Tencent Techo Park developer Conference 2020, Tencent Cloud officially released the “Cloud native Best Practices Roadmap”, along with a “Cloud Native Roadmap Manual” of more than 30,000 words.
  • On December 23, 2020, Ali Cloud Native Combat Summit released “White Paper on Cloud Native Architecture”.
  • On December 30, 2020, Huawei Cloud and Forrester jointly released “Cloud Native White Paper: Embrace cloud Native First Strategy” at TechWave Cloud Native 2.0 Technology Summit in Shenzhen.
  • At the beginning of 2021, Alibaba Dharma Institute releases the top ten technology trends in 2021, among which “cloud native reshaping IT technology system” is one of the technology forecasts for 2021.

“Cambrian Explosion” of cloud Native projects

Cloud native has gone through the “Cambrian explosion”, marked from 2018 Kubernetes graduation to the deep cultivation route. There are a dizzying number of open source projects in the Cloud Native space, see Awesome Cloud Native in my collection.

In 2020, CNCF accepted a total of 35 projects to join the FOUNDATION, and several projects graduated or advanced, bringing the total number of projects hosted by CNCF to more than 80.

Image from CNCF Annual Report 2020

The debate over cloud native is really a debate over standards

Windows has the upper hand on PC, iOS and Android on mobile, and Linux on server. What about distributed operating systems for cloud computing? The answer is Kubernetes.

In 2020, Kubernete announced that Docker would be abandoned after v1.20. In fact, Docker is not the default and unique container runtime in Kubernetes. In fact, any Container Runtime that supports the CRI (Container Runtime Interface) or OCI (Open Container Initiative) standards can run in Kubernetes. As shown in the figure below, container, the English word for container, is also the meaning of container. In fact, there is more than one type of container. The container type is standard only by Kubernetes, otherwise it is only fitting.

Kubernetes consolidates standards for resource object formulation and scheduling on the cloud by developing CRDS and operators on top of them. However, this is limited to the management of a single application. How to manage complex multi-cluster and hybrid cloud environments, how to manage inter-application traffic, and how to ensure the security of the call chain? The service grid, represented by Istio, is designed to solve this problem.

Cloud native trend: Application management on the cloud

Kubernetes has laid the foundation of cloud native infrastructure, with the migration of monitoring, storage, AI, big data and other technologies, from a single application level has become increasingly mature, and in the use of cloud native architecture, especially the management of cloud applications, and in the heterogeneous environment, multi-cluster, hybrid cloud has become the normal situation, How to manage applications on the cloud becomes tricky.

Kubernetes laid the foundation for cloud native with its pioneering new declarative apis and modulator patterns. We’ve seen Projects like Google’s Anthos, Azure’s Arc, and AWS’s recent open source EKS D all focus on hybrid cloud management, making the cloud ubiquitous. In addition, after two years of promotion and fermentation, Service Mesh will see more and more applications.

Cloud native and open source communities

At present, the most lacking of enterprise cloud biochemical transformation — routine and combination. For basic software, enterprises tend to choose open source projects and modify them according to their own needs, while there are many cloud native open source projects. Enterprises have too many choices to start from, rather than no choice. Like the example below on how to draw an owl. We can think of the enterprise’s vision of cloud bioengineering as this owl. These open source projects are like the circle in step 1. You might think that once you use Kubernetes, it’s like drawing two circles and no one teaches you how to do the rest.

The core of the open source community is to teach developers how to draw this owl. Open source doesn’t have to be free and philanthropic, and it comes with a price. The purpose of open source community is to balance the common interests of developers, end users and suppliers, and a neutral open source community is conducive to the ecological advantages of open source.

In recent years, with the boom of cloud native, a large number of startups in this field were born in the United States. They provide various cloud native solutions based on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc., as can be seen from the scale of each KubeCon sponsor. At present, there are not many companies in this field in China, and the company scale of the cloud native end-user community still lags behind the number of foreign companies.

It is against this background that I initiated the Cloud Original Community in early 2020, started preparations and officially established on May 12, committed to promoting cloud native technology and building developer ecology. The cloud native community adopts the organizational form of SIG (special interest Group) and WG (working group), builds discussion groups based on open source projects and different professional fields, cooperates with manufacturers to hold regular offline meetup, and invites experts from the community to regularly broadcast live in the cloud native College of Station B.

conclusion

Open source should focus on the end user and developer ecosystem, which in the Apache Way means “community over code”, and projects without community will not last long. Therefore, we can see that some domestic cloud vendors will actively put open source projects into operation and hold various activities. We see CNCF playing a significant role in the promotion of cloud native, and similar foundations will be established in China in 2020. We hope to see more neutral foundations and communities established, and more manufacturers involved in providing better solutions for end users.

Finally, I would like to thank The editor Song Hui of CSDN and the invitation of CSDN Cloud Computing.

For more on the issue:

  • Liang sheng: It doesn’t make sense to be a contributor to open source projects
  • Huawei cloud CTO Zhang Yuxin: cloud native has entered the deep water zone
  • APISIX: The essence of open source is to leverage developers

Personal introduction

In my career, I have been engaged in Java development, big data operation and maintenance, DevOps, open source management and other work. My personal hobbies are studying and promoting open source technology and concepts, photography and travel. Currently, he works as Developer Advocate at Tetrate, an enterprise service grid startup, and as the director of Cloud Native Community, a neutral Cloud Native end user Community.

I’ve been involved in open source my entire career, going back to college. When I was in college, I began to use The Linux system (Ubuntu) to learn. When I first entered the workplace, I was also oriented to the open-source ecosystem of Hadoop and various open-source middleware. I started to contact Docker in 2015 and entered the cloud native field in 2016. In 2017, I started to write the first open source Chinese e-book in the field of Kubernetes, “Kubernetes Handbook — Kubernetes Chinese Guide/Cloud Native Application Architecture Practice Manual”. The book is still being updated till now. In 2018, he started open source management and service grid community ServiceMesher at Ant Group. In 2020, he joined Tetrate, a startup building enterprise service grid based on Istio, Envoy and Apache SkyWalking.