Alibaba Cloud and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology released the "Cloud Computing Open Application Architecture" standard, accelerating the large-scale implementation of cloud-native applications

Introduction to On May 26, 2021, the "Cloud Computing Open Application Architecture" standard document jointly initiated by more than 10 units such as Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology was released at the "Cloud Native Industry Conference". The architecture is based on the open source project "Open Application Model (OAM)" jointly initiated by Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft Cloud, and aims to provide cloud application managers with unified application description specifications and open application capabilities The management framework aims to promote the large-scale implementation of simple, efficient, and controllable cloud-native application management and delivery methods in more industries and enterprises.

Source | Alibaba Cloud Native Public
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On May 26, 2021, the "Cloud Computing Open Application Architecture" standard document jointly initiated by more than 10 units including Alibaba Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology was released on-site at the "Cloud Native Industry Conference". The architecture is based on the open source project "Open Application Model (OAM)" jointly initiated by Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft Cloud, and aims to provide cloud application managers with unified application description specifications and open application capabilities The management framework aims to promote the large-scale implementation of simple, efficient, and controllable cloud-native application management and delivery methods in more industries and enterprises.

Nowadays, cloud native has become an important driving force for enterprises to quickly respond to market demands and help businesses continue to develop. As the global digitalization process continues to deepen, building an efficient, agile, and automated technical support platform has become a rigid demand for companies to shape their core competitiveness. In this context, the trend of transforming traditional application R&D models to cloud-native applications has gradually become a consensus, enabling enterprises to maximize the use of cloud-native dividends, obtain lower R&D costs, and improve business innovation efficiency. Cloud native has become the shortest path for enterprise digital innovation.

Although progress has been made in some key areas, for most industries and enterprises, the exploration of cloud-native large-scale applications is still in its infancy. This is because in essence, cloud native is a set of guiding ideologies for the design of software and infrastructure. It cannot be referred to by a specific technology and has a high threshold. Therefore, concerns about the security, reliability, performance, and continuity of cloud-native technology in large-scale applications are common in enterprises. The "2020 China Cloud Native Survey Report" released by CNCF shows that more and more organizations are seeking the best solution to use cloud native technology. 42% of users implement cloud native landing based on hybrid cloud. Will continue to grow.

The "Cloud Computing Open Application Architecture" standard points out that, unlike traditional application development, applications relying on cloud computing are no longer simple executable files and need to deal with a large number of external dependencies before they can be used by end users. In the traditional model, developers of cloud computing applications need to spend a lot of energy to design the overall deployment architecture of the application, and to clarify the various cloud services that the cloud computing application needs to rely on. There will also be some problems in this process, such as untimely allocation of cloud resources, unreasonable cloud service configuration, and the need to switch between various cloud products during the application launch process. There are two major reasons for the above problems. One is that applications cannot define the relationship between applications and cloud resources in a unified and self-describing way; the other is that cloud infrastructure is not delivered to applications in a unified, standard, and efficient way.

In the future of cloud native technology, large-scale popularization is inevitable. Only with the application as the center, the cloud-native technology system can "transport" the infrastructure capabilities for the application in a more efficient way. The important value of the open application architecture is that it can provide a set of unified application description specifications for the majority of cloud application managers, realize the decoupling between cloud computing applications and the underlying platform, and solve the problems of application deployment and migration difficulties. At the same time, the separation of concerns between developers, operation and maintenance and platform operations personnel allows different roles to focus on domain knowledge and capabilities, making application delivery more efficient, reliable and automated.
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Figure: Open Application Model (OAM)

The essence of cloud computing open application architecture is a highly extensible application definition and capability management model, which can provide users with a unified standardized application programming interface (API) and framework. It is compatible with any specific container runtime, orchestration software, and cloud provider. It has nothing to do with business or hardware configuration. All platforms that comply with this interface and framework can provide services for applications that conform to the development application architecture and provide users with a completely consistent application management experience. The architecture has the following characteristics:
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• Separation of concerns between development and operation and maintenance : Developers focus on business logic, and operation and maintenance personnel focus on operation and maintenance capabilities, allowing different roles to focus more on domain knowledge and capabilities.
• platform-independent and highly scalable : application definition and platform implementation decoupling, application description supports cross-platform implementation and scalability.
• Modular application deployment and operation and maintenance features : Application deployment and operation and maintenance capabilities can be described as high-level abstract modules, development and operation and maintenance can be freely combined and support modular implementation.

Figure: Complete workflow based on KubeVela
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In November 2020, the CNCF application delivery field team and the OAM community jointly announced that the OAM standard implementation on Kubernetes KubeVela project is officially open source. In April 2021, KubeVela v1.0 was released, marking that the OAM model has achieved maximum verification results in cloud-native application delivery scenarios. KubeVela v1.0 not only represents a stable API, but also represents a mature usage paradigm, proving that an open application architecture based on OAM is a platform that can fully release the potential of cloud natives and allow end users and software delivery parties to start from the first day. An effective path to fully enjoy the advantages of cloud native technology.
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Li Xiaoping, Head of Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Product Development
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As a representative of the core initiator, Li Xiaoping, head of Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Product R&D, delivered a live speech on the theme of "Cloud Native, the Shortest Path to Enterprise Digital Innovation", and said after the meeting: "Openness, standards, and agility are The key to the rapid development of cloud-native technology. Cloud-native is helping companies get through the “last mile” of digitalization. Under such a key node, a common definition and construction of the entire industry is required. As a pioneer and practitioner in the cloud-native field, Alibaba has always insisted on giving back to the society based on its own best practices for many years, including building inclusive cloud-native products and services for enterprises, and building a cloud-native ecosystem with developers. In 2019, we and Microsoft Cloud jointly open-sourced open applications Model (OAM), based on the practical experience of Alibaba, Microsoft, Oracle and other well-known companies at home and abroad in OAM, and the community together to create a complete implementation of OAM on Kubernetes KubeVela. Today, I am very happy to work with the Institute of Information and Communications Technology based on this The foundation of the project is to jointly publish the "Cloud Computing Open Application Architecture" standard to promote the evolution of cloud native together with the industry, to help more enterprises and developers to collaborate more efficiently, and to welcome new opportunities for the development of the digital economy."

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