Source | alibaba cloud native public number

Ask Me Anything is a regular column of Start.aliyun.com. Every two weeks, you will find a technology guru to talk about the technology trends you care most about, career choice, personal growth and other issues, and pay attention to the growth of every developer!

On February 2, 2021, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the world’s top open source community, CNCF formally announced the results of its reelection to a new Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). Zhang Lei, a senior technical expert of Aliyun, was selected as the only representative from a Chinese enterprise among the nine seats in this year’s TOC.

Before becoming THE TOC of CNCF, we can see that Lei Zhang has made great contributions to promoting the popularity and ecological development of the concept of cloud native in the local environment of China. He promoted CNCF to release the free “Cloud native Technology Open class” jointly with Ali Cloud. I believe that many developers started their knowledge of cloud native through Lei Zhang’s “first cloud native class”.

Today we’re proud to have Lei Zhang as our first “Ask Me Anything” guest to talk about cloud native technology trends and how individual developers are growing under the new wave of technology.

Q: How do you see Cloud Native’s development and evolution in recent years?

Lei Zhang: With the widespread adoption of cloud native technology, we have seen this new application delivery approach combined with key technologies such as “standard application model” and “Mesh-based progressive publishing” become the mainstream direction of application platform construction in the industry.

Cloud Native, as we all know today, is essentially a set of best practices and methodologies for “using Cloud computing technology to reduce costs and increase benefits for users”. Therefore, the term cloud native since its birth, to grow, and then to today’s great popularity, are in a continuous process of self-evolution and innovation.

Whether it is the great success of container technology represented by Docker in 2014, the rapid rise of container choreography technology represented by Kubernetes after 2019, or the almost “all-encompassing” ubiquity of cloud native today, All reflect the process of Cloud Native concept from concept to practice, and then precipitate new concept and architecture. This continuous evolution based on a core concept, which gradually affects all aspects of the cloud computing field, is a theme behind the growth of the cloud ecosystem in recent years.

Q: What are the major changes you’ve seen in the cloud native space in the last year? What impact do you think it will have?

Lei Zhang: In 2020, we can see that the rapid adoption of cloud native system is bringing “cloud” based revolution to more and more fields, and these fields are rapidly integrated into the cloud computing capacity pool through cloud native system, thus directly bringing “cost reduction and efficiency increase” huge value for end users. Just take THE CNCF open source community as an example. In 2020, Ali Cloud has OpenYurt Edge Container project (Edge field innovation) and OpenKruise workload management (application management capacity sinking) project into the CNCF sandbox. Virtual Cluster (Serverless infrastructure innovation) technology has become an official Kubernetes sub-project, and several core projects such as OAM/KubeVela (Application Delivery innovation + Capacity sink) are incubated. The emergence and popularization of these open source technologies not only provide vital traction for the sustainable development and evolution of the cloud native ecosystem, but also make the core goal of “releasing the dividend of cloud computing” become a reality in different fields.

In 2020, cloud native is still the most rapidly developing thread in the whole cloud computing ecosystem, and it is with this momentum of development, cloud native in the New Year, has started to think about its next development space. In fact, we can already see a variety of vendors and teams actively exploring different areas.

Q: Where do you see Cloud Native going in the future?

Lei Zhang: Today, the development trend of cloud native technology is getting closer and closer to the concept of “software is born and grows on the cloud”. However, it also exposes many problems caused by the original cloud native technology chassis paying too much attention to infrastructure abstraction and management and ignoring the end-user experience and technology. In 2020, we can see that the cloud native community is moving closer to the end user along the path of “sinking capability and rising value”. This explains why, after Kubernetes, Service Mesh is rapidly changing middleware and microservice governance technologies, and GitOps is having a critical impact on the continuous delivery space. OAM and Dapr are further addressing the application abstraction model and service access model.

We expect that in the next few years, the inherent agility and user engagement of cloud native systems will further spread to more vertical fields such as databases, AI, and edge with the huge capacity pool of cloud computing, thus affecting the underlying cloud computing infrastructure and the deployment and distribution of cloud applications more widely. It may even be the future of “cloud computing everywhere.”

Q: In the wave of cloud native technology, how should technicians improve themselves and maintain their competitiveness?

Lei Zhang: The essence of cloud native is a self-evolving set of theories and supporting best practices. Under the tide of cloud native, we technical people should keep an open mind, constantly learn and improve, and enrich ourselves through these theoretical systems and best practices (welcome to start.aliyun.com to know and do hands-on laboratory, immersive experience online interactive tutorial). The vast ecosystem of cloud natives will become the best Arsenal of technical people. On the other hand, the wave of cloud native has just begun. Whether it is the CRD Operator mode of K8s, GitOps, IaC and other concepts, all attach importance to the combination of operation and maintenance experience with development and the integration of operation and maintenance ability into the code, which is also giving space for technical personnel to show their hands and hands. Finally, we also recommend technical people to pay more attention to the combination of cloud native field and other vertical fields, and pay attention to projects that can bring vertical field transformation, such as Service Mesh, OAM and Dapr, so as to lay some technological foundation for the future in advance and maintain their technical competitiveness.

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