Author: An Shaofei

Review & proofread: Campfire

Editing & Typesetting: Wen Yan

preface

In recent years, the digitization of enterprises has been developing faster and faster with the popularization of the Internet, and the technical architecture has been changed several times, especially the online business. At the beginning, the enterprise’s demand was to make the business online as much as possible, which gave rise to the early online business application architecture, namely single application, which mainly added business logic and back-end data to the Web application database.

As the number of online services increases and more access is increased, individual applications cannot support services and gradually evolve to distributed applications. At the same time, load balancing was added to the front end to handle the increasing number of requests, and more middleware and databases such as messages and caches were introduced in the middle.

With the evolution of cloud computing into the cloud native era, enterprise applications have also begun to build cloud-oriented containerization and microservitization. In this process, different changes have been brought, mainly in application development and design, application delivery, and online operation and maintenance.

New demands of cloud native application services

As cloud native applications increasingly become the mainstream technology architecture, it is particularly important for cloud native applications to make better use of cloud services, realize cloud service-oriented architecture design and make business more agile research and development, and to conduct rapid joint verification. This requires the platform to provide one-stop PaaS products to support.

1) First, development and design: From the original hierarchical/modular single architecture to the comprehensive microservice, using SpringCloud, Dubbo, Servicemesh and other technology stacks to build microservices. In this process, the r&d personnel need to design the microservice-oriented architecture, and the testers need to design test cases for the microservice-oriented architecture. Writing and realizing automated testing, and at the same time, as the environment on the cloud, it is also required that the development environment and the cloud environment can realize the unicom debugging.

2) then the application delivery: from a virtual machine & batch script to deploy delivery, by using technologies such as containers, K8s realize the standardization of general delivery, the process, there have been some new requirements, such as batch through the application of the template to quickly deploy delivery, and by applying the delivery across the cluster to realize the scene management.

3) The third part is the changes of online operation and maintenance: From the original virtual machine operation and maintenance to the container cluster operation and maintenance, a higher perspective is needed to help enterprise development operation and maintenance students. Here, we put forward the bird’s eye view operation and maintenance concept, which overlooks all K8s resources through the application perspective. The operation and maintenance management is no longer carried out solely for Deployment, Service, Ingress and other K8s atomic resources, but realizes operation and maintenance through unified supervision and control from a bird’s eye view.

EDAS 4.0 update &ADD 1.0 release

In view of the new demands generated by the evolution of new scenarios in the three stages of the life cycle mentioned above, EDAS officially released version 4.0, with new capabilities such as cluster application management, micro-service API management and testing, and end-to-end cloud integration 3.0. At the same time, a new product — ADD V1.0, the cloud native application development and design platform, was released to greatly improve the development efficiency of cloud native applications.

Next, we will introduce each one in detail.

Cloud native application design and development platform ADD 1.0 was released

According to the requirements of development and design stage, cloud native application design and development platform ADD came into being. The original intention of ADD products is to improve the working efficiency and productivity of enterprises in the stage of cloud native application development and design. It has 6 major features:

  1. Visual application architecture design: help enterprises conveniently precipitate and maintain the original offline architecture discussion design on the whiteboard;

  2. Front-end web application drag, pull, drag design: to achieve front-end “no code” development;

  3. Back-end code online development and debugging: ensure code security;

  4. One-stop integrated interface oriented test case management and automatic execution configuration ability: online automated testing;

  5. Integrate mainstream project management tools: improve the efficiency of cloud biological development project management;

  6. Efficient reuse of business application components: achieve comprehensive asset reuse with the help of application component stores;

EDAS 4.0 new update – Microservice API management and testing

In the process scenario of microservitization, we summarized three challenges:

  1. Multi-environment adaptation challenges: Due to the different r&d teams and diverse environments of microservices, special configuration adaptation is needed in the face of the corresponding microservice environment, such as the selection of test parameters and automated use cases, etc.

  2. Testability challenges of applications: With the gradual cloud management of enterprise resources, most applications are deployed in public or private cloud environments, which brings many testability challenges. For example, the VPC of Ali Cloud cannot be directly accessed from the Internet, and elastic IP addresses or other access solutions are required. And with the application containerization, the network topology in K8s also brings the corresponding complexity.

  3. Challenges of use case generation: In many cases, the development will focus on business research and development, which will virtually bring the cost of communication and collaboration to the test students. Because they do not understand the contract of microservice interface, they cannot realize use case generation quickly.

In order to solve the above challenges, we provide one-click testing tool (API management and testing) for cloud micro-services to solve the corresponding problems:

  1. Through the API quick test capability, you can directly open up the EDAS application, initiate the test, and test history can quickly generate API templates.

  2. Then, through the test environment management, it can get through the micro-services in the cloud, provide the ability to set API templates and test environment parameters, and directly realize the mapping of a set of test configurations to an application in a micro-service environment.

  3. Provide a use case management function, unified template management of use cases, to achieve use case adaptation, that is, the use case can be selected according to the running microservice environment of the corresponding configuration execution.

Therefore, EDAS’s one-click test tool for micro-services is equivalent to providing users with a micro-services-oriented private network Postman on the cloud. The one-click automatic execution of use cases completes the micro-service test on the cloud and improves the efficiency of micro-service test.

EDAS 4.0 new upgrade – End cloud Interconnect 3.0

In view of the change of deployment architecture for development and testing, EDAS 4.0 comprehensively upgrades the end-to-end cloud tuning capability of microservices, which is also the third upgrade since 2020. This upgrade can support enterprise users in the container development process, quickly run the local code, and cloud micro services through the integration. The local can be a container or a process, which is a good way to realize a set of micro-service environment on the cloud. Multiple R&D teams cooperate to develop micro-services.

3 main upgrades of Endcloud Integration 3.0 include:

  1. Two-way intermodulation of micro-services: in daily development, the local developer may write Consumer service consumers or Provider service providers, so it is very necessary to achieve two-way intermodulation. After the local application is pulled up, the channel service provided by the tool can easily get through the proxy on the cloud for intercommunication.

  2. Horizontal product support: Because microservice applications often rely on DB, MQ, Redis and other resources when they start or run, the end cloud 3.0 also provides corresponding support. In addition to microservices, databases, cache, message queues and other resources can also be accessed locally.

  3. PaaS layer capability support: For some commonly used diagnostic and observation capabilities in development, eUM3.0 also provides capabilities such as service authentication, flow control and link diagnosis to better improve the efficiency of development joint coordination.

EDAS 4.0 new update – Multi-cluster application management

With the development of business, some enterprises are faced with challenges and requirements such as cluster-level APPLICATION DISASTER recovery, multi-regional deployment, and simultaneous service delivery; some enterprises need to deploy their services overseas to ensure compliance; and some government and enterprise customers need centralized control over applications in different places.

In order to meet the challenge of application delivery in new business scenarios, EDAS 4.0 also provides new support for multi-cluster application management, with a unified application template to achieve common cross-cluster application deployment management. For example, the management capabilities of creating, updating, and changing application configurations in a single cluster on the left can be upgraded to multi-cluster dimensions. In other words, a multi-cluster application entity can be managed and observed in a unified manner from the perspective of multi-cluster applications, eliminating the need to jump back and forth between multiple clusters. In this way, new challenges in service scenarios mentioned above can be solved, and customers’ demands for cluster Dr And multi-site deployment can be realized.

EDAS 4.0 new upgrade — “bird ‘s-eye view” operation and maintenance

Finally, EDAS 4.0 upgrade provides a bird ‘s-eye view support for online operation and maintenance changes.

Cloud native applications, after microservice and containerization, will become smaller in granularity, so it is no longer appropriate to carry out fine management and control. They need to be kept in a free range and need to be managed from a bird’s eye view. We believe that a bird ‘s-eye view of operation and maintenance can be developed layer by layer from the dimensions of business, application and resources.

  1. Service dimension: Ensures the stable operation of service applications by providing non-destructive and flow control capabilities, and then provides business-oriented grayscale publishing capabilities to realize controllable online applications. In addition, flexible service load is realized by elastic triggering based on service indicators.

  2. Application dimension: Monitors upstream and downstream calls based on the application topology. By using application observation and alarms, application-level service interface problems can be detected in a timely manner. And you can make uniform changes directly at the application level without having to drill down to the underlying workload dimensions.

  3. Resource dimension: Provides one-click search for resources associated with any application that is quickly located to EDAS. In addition, the resource portrait capability is added. The application resource portrait is directly associated with application instances, which can help users detect specific instance resources that are incorrectly matched or idled with one click. At the same time, dynamic scheduling is provided to achieve more reliable dynamic resource allocation.

conclusion

EDAS is a very mature product, from the era of 1.0 to 2.0, centering on the construction of enterprise business center, better help enterprises to achieve resource clustering and business flexibility and scalability, and provide a standard service-oriented development framework, but also well support some enterprises to online and centralized business. In 2020, we released EDAS 3.0, which enables governance of business applications and provides non-intrusive support for dual-mode microservices (i.e. Java+ multilingual microservices).

Now EDAS has officially entered the 4.0 era with a number of blockbuster new capabilities; At the same time, we jointly released the PaaS product family of cloud native application R&D & operation together with the new product, ADD 1.0, to help modernize and upgrade the enterprise application architecture.

Click here for EDAS introduction