Contribute to Dubbo Ecology, Ali Nacos open source program
At Aliware’s Dubbo Developer Salon in Shanghai on Saturday, Guo Ping (Kun Yu), a senior technical expert of Alibaba, announced a new open source project of Alibaba. Alibaba plans to launch a new open source project called Nacos in July. In his speech at the event, Kun Yu introduced the original intention of the open source project. “We will contribute the Service discovery, configuration and Service management platform used by Alibaba in the construction of shared Service system to the open source community through the Nacos project, and further unleash Dubbo in the era of cloud native and Service Mesh by creating the classic combination of Dubbo + Nacos,” he said. Nacos will focus on the seamless connection and support of mainstream open source communities such as Spring Cloud and Kubernetes Cloud native systems.” The project is expected to open the first test preview by mid-July, with a release of version 0.8 scheduled to begin production availability in the next six to eight months.
Video playback of the event
What is Nacos/N ɑ:kəʊs/?
Nacos, Alibaba’s new open source project, is positioned as “a dynamic service discovery, configuration and service management platform that is easier to help build cloud-native applications”.
Nacos has three main functions:
- Service discovery and service management
Dynamic Service discovery is critical when adopting modern application architectures that are service-centric, such as microservices and cloud-native approaches. Nacos supports both DNS-BASED and RPC-based service discovery (such as Dubbo/gRPC), and provides you with real-time health checks of services to prevent requests from being sent to unhealthy hosts. You can also easily implement service breakers based on Nacos. Nacos provides powerful service metadata management, routing and traffic management strategies to help you build stronger microservices platforms.
- Dynamic configuration Management
Dynamically configured services allow you to manage the configuration of all applications or services in a centralized and dynamic manner in all environments. Dynamic configuration eliminates the need to redeploy applications and services when the configuration is updated. It makes it easier to help you implement stateless services and more easily to extend service instances flexibly on demand.
- Dynamic DNS Service
The dynamic DNS service that supports weighted routing enables you to implement middle-layer load balancing, flexible routing policies, traffic control, and simple DNS resolution services in the production environment of data centers, helping you realize DNs-based service discovery more easily.
Why open source Nacos
He also explained in detail why Alibaba chose to open Nacos at such a time and what the thinking behind it was. In his speech, Kun yu said that his idea was based on the following points:
- Distributed infrastructures centered around services are becoming increasingly important
The world is changing faster, and the pace of innovation and market competition is becoming increasingly fierce. How to achieve ultra-fast business growth has become the main theme of business competition. Bike-sharing has become popular all over the country almost overnight. The time it takes for valuations to go from $0 billion to $10 billion is getting shorter and shorter, while the average life span of a company, according to S&P, has fallen from 60 years in the 1960s to 15 years today. All this suggests that the speed and intensity of innovation and competition is increasing.
On the other hand, the agility and effectiveness of technical infrastructure are taking up an increasing proportion in the elements of business success. The revolution of cloud computing in the delivery mode of resources and services has brought about a revolutionary improvement in efficiency and a more agile infrastructure (starting a business no longer needs to buy machines and find a computer room for hosting, From six months to prepare before the cycle to the present level of hours on the cloud to create a full range of services), and in the application architecture level, the service architecture model of flexibility, resilience, rapid syntagmatic and paradigmatic atomic services to innovation, and provided the condition for rapid business innovation and trial and error, has been more and more application platform to prove its effectiveness, technology infrastructure, more agile, It provides a foundation for business agility and competitive advantage.
Today, no matter cloud computing, microservices or cloud native centered around Kubernetes, all emphasize the application architecture mode with “service” as the core. If 15 years ago we were talking about building single system with “everything is the object”, then today we are talking about “everything is the service”. The transformation of Taobao as a service 10 years ago followed this trend, and the micro-service architecture thought 8 years ago also followed this trend. Today, various distributed infrastructures oriented to “services” are becoming more and more important. From the perspective of Alibaba’s 10 years of service development experience, Are the existing open source solutions for large-scale service discovery and service governance and service sharing already perfect? According to alibaba service through these years of production experience, we feel that there is no.
- Alibaba’s experience in building a “shared service system” can be replicated on a large scale across industries
Alibaba China concept and system, and the cloud in correspondence with the original on the spirit of “tao”, namely “thick technology platform, thin application” fast support business innovation and trial and error, thus win the market, middle system advocates the twin-engine architecture, skip the “big data”, but the middle business, is a large, in order to “service” as the center of the sharing service platform, Online service precipitates business data and synchronizes it to big data platform for calculation and mining. Big data platform guides business and service innovation through data feedback, and builds a service registration and service governance platform that can precipitate and share “service” system.
- “Service governance, service precipitation, service sharing and sustainable development of service” is the core value proposition of “shared service system”
To support innovation from a seedling to a towering tree and the continuous evolution of service platforms, all this requires a strong service platform and service infrastructure.
- Alibaba will build a service discovery, service and traffic management, and service sharing platform through Dubbo + Nacos and a series of open source projects
Nacos’s relationship to the mainstream open source ecosystem
Nacos will not be a closed system. In addition to supporting Ali’s open source ecosystem such as Dubbo, Nacos also emphasizes the integration of other open source ecosystems, such as Java micro-service ecosystem Spring Cloud, Kubernetes/CNCF Cloud native ecosystem, As the future panorama of Nacos shows
- Dubbo + Nacos, the registry and configuration center for Dubbo
In the production environment of Alibaba, Dubbo and Nacos naturally grow together. Because of the absence of Nacos, the power of Dubbo in service governance, traffic governance, service operation and management is limited and weakened by the traditional registry solution. The open source and openness of Nacos will unleash these powers in user environments that adopt Dubbo
- Nacos will be fully compatible with Spring Cloud
Nacos will seamlessly support Spring Cloud, providing Spring Cloud users with an easier configuration center and registry solution, eliminating the need to hold Eureka in production just for service and configuration. Spring Cloud Config Server, Git, RabbitMQ/Kafka at least four open source products.
- Nacos supports Kubernetes DNS-BASED Service Discovery
In his speech, Kun Yu also said that Alibaba’s practice in VIPServer DNs-based Service Discovery for so many years proved that in the cloud native era, applications will pay more attention to the decoupling of infrastructure, multi-language and even multi-cloud demands, and the future of Service Discovery must be based on the standard DNS protocol. As opposed to proprietary apis or protocols like Eureka or ZooKeeper, and in the cloud, registries are more concerned with availability than data consistency in service Discovery scenarios, Nacos will introduce dns-based Servcie Discovery and focus on availability first. This is why Nacos is seamlessly integrated into the Kubernetes service discovery architecture
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Nacos will bridge the gap between Spring Cloud and Kubernetes
In the future, more and more users of the Java ecosystem will choose the Kubernetes+Spring Cloud combination, but unfortunately, both systems have completely different solutions for service discovery and configuration management. This introduces a great deal of unnecessary complexity to the registry and configuration center requirements of users with both systems. Nacos will attempt to bridge the gap between the two so that the same service discovery and configuration management solution can be used in both systems, which greatly simplifies usage and maintenance costs.
- Nacos with Service Mesh
Preview some Nacos features
At the same time, Kun Yu gave a preview of some features of Nacos 1.0
Each product has its own style and label, kunyu said in his speech that the team will continue to contribute and work hard, hoping to label Nacos with four aspects in the future
In terms of deployment mode, Nacos will support a variety of deployment modes, including the separate deployment of registry and configuration center, and the SaaS deployment service of Nacos will be provided on Ali Cloud. Those who are interested can directly open an account on Ali Cloud to experience the Nacos service for free. Commercial ACM and EDAS ANS put more emphasis on the integration experience with other Aliyun cloud services and other Aliware PaaS commercial products as well as providing commercial services.
Major product milestones and plans for Nacos
Rome was not built in a day, and we will seek it
Because Nacos is based on alibaba production code, the whole system is very complex, comb in code, refactoring and stripping and the internal coupling is a gradual process, so the @ kun yu special remind community before Nacos reached 0.8 production available, not recommended for production, but you can try to use in the development and testing environment, Starting with version 0.8, we can safely use it in production environments. The overall development plan of Nacos is to reach production availability in the next 6-8 months. In the future, contribution of Nacos to the open Source Foundation for further community development will be started soon.
Nacos vs. related open source products
A gentleman is a man of peace but of difference
From the above judgment on the overall business and technical form, we can see that the main difference between Nacos and its competitors lies in the concept. @Kunyu said that strictly speaking, these products on the market are not completely standard with Nacos, but only with the service discovery part of Nacos. The future of Nacos is more about the ability to build a service platform on top of these products, rather than just basic service discovery capabilities.
Community development, welcome to join and contribute to community
DISS is cheap, show me your hand more important than teasing is helping the community develop Nacos
Different from alibaba’s early open source, alibaba’s new round of open source products, including RocketMQ, Pouch Container, Dubbo, Nacos, emphasize the development of community and diversity of community, encouraging more companies and developers to participate in open source projects. Relying on the community to make products better, at the same time, we will focus on internationalization from the very beginning, and direct competition with similar foreign products.
Initially, Nacos plans to recruit at least five more PMCS from other companies and at least 10 external committers in the first year, and since Nacos is in the early stages of open-source projects, there is plenty of room for thoughtful, passionate, and capable developers to get involved. Nacos itself is in desperate need of community help in many ways. There is an urgent need for the participation of technical leaders including front-end and UI construction, Spring Cloud, Kubernetes, Service Mesh system integration and integration, multi-language client, etc. If you are interested in the open source project Nacos, welcome to join the Nacos community.
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