Author | Li XiaopingCopy the codeThe day before yesterday, I attended the Conference of Unwon Manufacturing industry held by THE Ict Institute. There were many enterprises attending the conference and they came from all walks of life. I was very impressed at the conference. I think back to 2019, when I searched the term “cloud native” on the search engine, the search frequency was relatively low at that time, and 2019 was the year when cloud native started to take off in China. While cloud native session on this year, there have been a lot of enterprises to participate in, these enterprises in technology, products, and is applied in ecological cloud native, so, the entire cloud native has from the beginning of technology into the industry, now developed into the larger industries, and the scale of the industry every year at very fast speed in growth.
Today, there may be a lot of consulting agencies, enterprises, or individual developers are reading cloud native, perhaps many people have a more in-depth understanding of cloud native. Everyone can agree that cloud native is definitely about the cloud, but what does it change and what value does it bring to the enterprise? The core point should be to change the application architecture of the enterprise; Another possibility is not to change the application architecture, but to reshape the entire operation and maintenance system based on cloud native. But the purpose behind all of this is to accelerate the value creation process of the enterprise. In short, it is the same as the manufacturing enterprise to improve the production line. The core point is to improve our production line as a software enterprise.
Alibaba’s practice of cloud native has been going on since 2006. We have accumulated a lot of experience in the process of doing cloud native. We believe that cloud native provides multiple values for enterprise digital innovation today:
First, resource resilience. The word elasticity is easy to understand, but there are actually different levels of elasticity. For example, based on vm elasticity, the elastic capability is provided in minutes. If the application based on these technologies is millisecond, then the minute level only solves the resource elasticity problem, and the whole application high availability problem needs to be solved further. If elasticity goes to the application level, to the millisecond level, the high availability problem has been solved to a certain extent.
In addition, systematicThe stability ofAnd that’s what people are paying a lot of attention to. Cloud native is to pull out the non-functional features of the entire software construction process and put them on cloud native products, helping to liberate application development from non-functional processing and focus more on functionality. Again, cloud native has a lot of tool ideas that can make us better, and overall software development time from code to live is dramatically reduced. In the same way, we’re accumulating a lot of data today based on cloud native observability, which can be combined with machine learning capabilities to help us improve the user experience of the enterprise. These can be of great value to the business.
Ali cloud original practice process
Today, cloud native in CNCF, domestic related open source, as well as the promotion of tripartite organizations, can make an enterprise in the selection of technology has a lot of options. One of the questions that you often face is, among all these choices, who do you choose in order to actually achieve production availability? Especially when our business needs to be launched in a very short time, in the stage of rapid business development, what kind of architecture should we choose, what kind of open source products, this is a difficult problem in front of the majority of enterprise technology decision makers and architects. In the field of cloud native, Ali cloud is relatively early to do research. From 2006 to 2009, Internet middleware began to develop and ali Cloud was formally established. During the whole process, we solved many business problems through cloud native. Through the application of cloud native technologies, the rapid development of Taobao has been well supported in the early stage, and the construction of Ali in The middle and Taiwan has been well supported since 2015. Today, as alibaba’s entire production system and core system are 100% on the cloud, the cloud native technologies we have used in this process. Like container technology, microservice technology support scale is more than a million. Relevant research shows that such cloud native landing scale is very leading in the world. In fact, for many enterprises, such scale may not be necessary, but Ali has accumulated a lot of core technologies by solving the performance and stability problems under such a large scale, and can eventually transform these technologies into products, which can be exported through Ali Cloud to serve the vast number of customers in all walks of life.
We think cloud native is a very profound change to the overall software, or to the development process of software companies. First, K8s has become the standard interface for software delivery, changing not just operations but the entire production chain from CICD to subsequent launch. Because all the production process is changed, as well as many enterprises through the cloud native to reshape the software architecture, software architecture from the traditional architecture into a new, we call it the application of modern architecture, so the cloud native further change can be improved through the tools of production enterprises of production relations, ultimately affect the enterprise, Makes the enterprise in the software development process has been greatly accelerated. Ali Cloud has accumulated strong technical competitiveness in the process of cloud native practice, which is reflected in the following aspects: first, we have many leading technologies to solve the problems of stability and reliability in the field of cloud native, and the problems of high concurrency on a large scale. At the same time, we will export all of these technologies through open source. We know that in the cloud native world, enterprises need open source and open technologies, not technologies locked down by a single vendor like Alibaba. In the process, we have accumulated the core capabilities of many products based on open source technology standards. In terms of products, in addition to the cloud native application architecture you see, it also includes cloud native database and cloud native big data.
There are a lot of evaluations in the field related to cloud native. In these evaluations, for example, Aliyun container product ACK got full marks in Gartner evaluation last year, and Aliyun was one of only two global manufacturers that got full marks. This year, Ali Cloud was selected for Gartner container competition pattern again. In the field of emerging computing forms, Ali Cloud entered the Forrester FaaS Leadership quadrant this year, and function computing received the highest score for FaaS products worldwide. In the observability, Ali Cloud represents the domestic cloud vendors into Gartner APM quadrant. All these tripartite evaluations reflect the capabilities of Alibaba cloud products on another level. Container architecture, we are based on open source K8s technology system, based on ali Cloud hardware to do in-depth optimization, in more fields and scenarios for the vast number of K8s applications to provide services. We output the ability of large scale cluster management in K8s cluster to ACK products, so that ali Cloud customers can get rid of the complexity of large scale cluster management when managing clusters. Perfect diary, for example, as a unicorn beauty makeup industry company, their business develop very fast, but in the process of rapid business growth, they are faced with the problem is in how to better promote the scenario of reserved resources, and on how to promote the better way to solve the function of the new line, and the stability of the demand. In this process, they are using PTS as pressure test, all applications running on an ACK platform, through a large pressure test simulation for traffic, which can put the whole big from the large state investment is needed to have the ability of the big contributors to normalized pressure measurement, and through this ability makes the system stability problems related to get fast convergence.
Cloud native middleware
In addition to microservices, messaging, and various application tools, cloud native middleware also provides many solutions based on common IT scenarios in the enterprise. Ali Cloud middleware was born in the large-scale call scenario within the group. It is compatible with open source and integrates more product capabilities, such as observability and high availability, which are excellent in the whole promotion process, and all belong to the cloud native middleware product system. In the area of middleware, we also work with many enterprise customers. Changjietong is a SaaS enterprise, so far has made cloud management for more than 4 million small and micro enterprises. ToB application types of complexity is higher, the biggest problem is the whole software release frequency is very fast, how under the high frequency software release can better solve the software bugs, or solve the stability problem of inadequate design, this is in the process of preliminary discussion chang access business group raised concerns. The application of cloud native middleware not only solves the observability problem of the entire application, but also enables the application to have 360 degree observability without dead Angle. Through application detection, various possible instability risks can be quickly found in the whole process of pressure measurement, so that the corresponding risks can be quickly converged.
Serverless
Many academic institutions have made in-depth research in the field of Serverless, and we predict that Serverless is likely to become the next mainstream technology trend. Ali Cloud achieves industry-leading millisecond billing in the Serverless field, as well as deep optimization in the bottom of the whole Ali cloud, so that customers’ applications really achieve intelligent flexibility, extreme operation and greatly improve development efficiency. Ali Cloud has also reached in-depth cooperation with many enterprise customers to implement Serverless landing practice. By helping customers transfer applications to Serverless technology system, application deployment can be achieved quickly. At the same time, the application stability, operation and maintenance are entrusted to cloud products like Serverless to solve.
The solution
In the rapid development of cloud native technology, only through continuous technological innovation, product innovation, it is possible to make cloud native technology better serve the majority of enterprise customers. Today, Ali Cloud released four solutions: full-link pressure measurement solution, remote multi-activity solution, resource mixed part solution, observable solution. These solutions can effectively solve problems that have not been well solved in the traditional domain. For example, the full link pressure test, we all know that the full link pressure test is a good thing, the big problem is in the application of pressure test process to make the application of minimal transformation, or even do not do transformation, so the ali cloud upgrade of the full link pressure test can help enterprise applications to solve these problems. After the continuous use of cloud in today’s enterprises, whether public cloud or private cloud, will encounter the overall CPU utilization is not high, mixing enables a variety of offline tasks and online tasks can be deployed together, respectively enjoy the advantages of resource scheduling, so that the overall CPU utilization of the machine room has been relatively improved. In this process, the stability and resource occupation caused by mixing should be solved. Ali is a relatively early application of large-scale mixed department, such as the support of e-commerce double 11 cloud native products. Today, we are also turning mixing capabilities into solutions for export. As we all know, Ali is a relatively early implementation of the unitary architecture, through the unitary architecture to achieve more live. Today we see the architectural capability of unitized wholeness as a living solution. In addition, it supports not only the scenarios of private data centers and private clouds, but also the scenarios of public clouds and hybrid clouds. Observability has always been a topic of special attention, because through observability we can actively discover all kinds of risks that may occur during the operation of the system. Today, ali Cloud upgrade observability solution includes from dial measurement to a variety of front-end performance monitoring, all the way to back-end applications, and even extend to cloud services.
Product upgrade
In addition to the solution innovation, we also made a lot of upgrades in the corresponding cloud native products. The container ACK backup and DISASTER recovery center is newly released, providing container users with integrity protection for clusters, applications, and data: 1. Automatically analyze metadata and storage on which applications depend to create consistency snapshots of applications and data in seconds. 2. Supports the creation of backup plans and automatically creates backups at preset points in time. 3, fully compatible with Kubernetes, and support multi-cluster, multi-region, cross-data center backup and recovery.
ACR releases enterprise-class Serverless construction service, which greatly improves the construction efficiency and experience of cloud native products: 1. Supports matrix construction of multiple operating systems and multiple architecture images, and supports large-scale concurrent task construction. 2, support multi-stage cache build speed, average build speed 30%. 3, support automatic construction of accelerated mirror, AI and other large mirror second load on demand, average startup time reduced by 60%.
In the field of microservices, more and more applications are considering using service grid technology. Users expect service grid to have stronger micro-service governance capability on top of open source technology, so Ali Cloud launched professional VERSION ASM Pro, which has enhanced multi-protocol support, enhanced dynamic expansion capability, refined service governance, and improved zero-trust security system. Compared with the ordinary version released last year, the professional version has significantly improved performance and scale, and further enhanced differentiated competitiveness with open source, reducing the threshold for users to land on the service grid in the production environment.
Gartner predicts that event-driven architecture will become the dominant architecture for business development in the future. Enterprise customers have clear pain points and demands for low code, serverless elastic application architecture and lightweight integration of heterogeneous cloud service data flow in the process of cloud. Based on this trend, AliYun released EventBridge, an event bus product, which aims to unify aliyun cloud services, third-party SaaS vendors and user-defined event standards, and to help users acquire and process massive events quickly and at a low cost through standard, flexible and lightweight core capabilities to drive business development. Over the past few years, we have made further additions and upgrades to EventBridge’s product capabilities:
- In terms of the scale of event ecological integration, 60+ official event source access of cloud products has been added, covering mainstream cloud products such as computing, storage, network and database.
- In terms of event access and processing methods, it has built more than ten kinds of filtering matching conversion logic, and added deep access methods such as cross-network, cross-region and cross-account, which is convenient for large enterprise customers to make deep-level customization such as security and isolation.
- On this basis, Alicloud EventBridge launched the event-driven application Center for the first time, with common event-driven application templates built in. Users can simply configure common event ETL processing, data synchronization and other scenarios without code or deployment.
Ali Cloud has the most extensive cloud native customer base. As more enterprise customers move to the cloud, there will be more complex scenarios, placing higher demands on cloud native technologies, products, and cloud native concepts. Ali Cloud hopes to do more exploration in the field of cloud native with friends from all walks of life. We hope that through cloud native technology, we can really bring more business value to the enterprise and help the overall business innovation of the enterprise.