Application Architecture Steps into the "Serverless" Era, Serverless Technology Ushers in New Development

Abstract: At the 2021 Cloud Native Industry Conference with the theme of "Native Accumulation, Cloud Leading the Future", Huawei Cloud Serverless Function Service Product Manager shared "Huawei Cloud Serverless Function Service, which makes development to the cloud extremely simple and efficient" Keynote Speech.

On May 26, the 2021 Cloud Native Industry Conference with the theme of "Native Accumulation, Cloud Leading the Future" kicked off in Beijing. The Huawei Cloud Serverless Function Workflow (FunctionGraph) passed the basic capability requirements, platform observable capabilities, and services. Performance, service security, and service measurement accuracy are five categories and 20+ tests. With stable, reliable and efficient service capabilities, it has been awarded the Trusted Cloud Function as a Service Capability Certification. At the same time, in the Cloud Native 2.0 sub-forum, the product manager of Huawei Cloud Serverless Function Service shared a keynote speech on "Huawei Cloud Serverless Function Service, which makes development to the cloud extremely simple and efficient".

HUAWEI CLOUD FunctionGraph won the Trusted Cloud Function-as-a-Service Capability Certification

Serverless, as one of the important forces in the development of cloud native technology, has opened the "serverless" era of application architecture, bringing new ideas to architecture design and developer programming. The rise of serverless technology has greatly simplified the programming model of cloud computing, allowing developers to focus on application innovation without having to pay attention to servers.

The application architecture continues to evolve. Serverless 2.0 carries all-round high-efficiency application development

The increase in application complexity and the development of cloud computing continue to promote the continuous evolution of application architecture and programming methods. The initial development of the monolithic architecture is simple and fast. As the scale of the system increases, problems such as the inability to independently upgrade and evolve due to the coupling of the architecture continue to enlarge. The architecture began to evolve towards microservices and gradually became the mainstream. Applications were split according to the granularity of microservices. The interface was standardized, and the environment was standardized. It could be upgraded and released on a daily or weekly basis, helping applications achieve rapid iteration. The service architecture brings convenience to developers, but it also brings complexity. Users still need to pay attention to server configuration, back-end service management and other operation and maintenance tasks, and cannot enjoy the maximum convenience brought by the cloud.

Serverless architecture is a further extension on the basis of microservice architecture. According to the usual definition in the industry, Serverless = FaaS (Function as a Service) + BaaS (Backend as a Service). Compared with microservices, FaaS reduces the granularity of resource scheduling to functions. For stateless, short-term processing tasks, through functional programming, it further reduces the threshold for application development and shortens the application launch cycle. However, the current FaaS is usually not suitable for long-term tasks, big data processing, etc., and the communication delay performance between functions is low, which is called the Serverless 1.0 stage.

At the Serverless 2.0 stage, its application range will be greatly expanded on this basis, and the entire scene will support various application loads. Its typical features include: it can support long-running tasks; a built-in data system that can support stateful functions and big data processing; a built-in communication system that can communicate with each other through a bus with high performance.

HUAWEI CLOUD Serverless function workflow FunctionGraph allows development to focus on application innovation

During the research and practice of Serverless technology, Huawei Cloud proposed: Serverless, as a computing paradigm in the second half of cloud computing, needs to solve the problems of general application development, seamless connection of original application systems, support for heterogeneous hardware, and has a complete tool chain, Cloud services can enable more developers to enjoy the dividends brought by Serverless.

HUAWEI CLOUD Serverless Function Workflow FunctionGraph is a function computing service with orchestration capabilities. It provides interface management and one-stop function development and online functions. It supports 6 major languages and supports 10+ types of function trigger types; Abundant trigger types, integrate multiple cloud services through event triggers to meet the needs of different scenarios; automatically schedule resource running functions according to the requested concurrent number to achieve extreme flexibility on-demand; if the function running instance is abnormal, the system will start a new instance for processing Follow-up requests to realize self-healing of faults in seconds.

Multi-scenario application and practice based on Huawei Cloud Serverless

The IT resources of the Serverless architecture can be flexibly scaled according to demand, and can be roughly divided into the following categories in terms of scenarios:

type 1: single-purpose stateless class, typical applications include small program back-end, Web back-end, and third-party service provider docking. The use of functional programming for such applications can greatly simplify the development process and achieve hourly delivery.

Type 2: event-driven type, such as real-time image processing, real-time data stream processing, IoT event processing, etc. This is the most typical type of serverless application, which is characterized by event-driven + computing glue layer. The logic of computing glue layer is implemented through functions.

type three: elastic scaling applications, such as video transcoding, video live broadcast, hot event push, etc. The characteristics of this type of application is that the amount of traffic is usually unpredictable, and it requires infrastructure to be able to make the underlying resources insensitive and automatic and fast Shrink without affecting the processing of the business layer.

In terms of the implementation of the Huawei Cloud Serverless scene, the application practice on the mobile terminal has been fully realized. For example, during the 2020 epidemic, Huawei Negative Screen implemented the "New Pneumonia Epidemic Real-time Broadcasting" application based on the Serverless architecture to go online one day, which greatly improved the agility of application development.

Another typical application scenario is about serverless practice in video processing. In this scenario, multiple AI special effects rendering functions need to be inserted into the same live video stream, and a large amount of data needs to be transferred between functions. Under the existing function architecture, it needs to go through multiple external Storage reads and writes, and the general use of state built-in function technology reduces the access time of a read and write from 200ms to 5ms, thereby meeting the end-to-end business delay requirements.

In the outlook of "Cloud Programming Simplified" released by Berkeley in 2019, it is proposed that Serverless will become the next-generation default computing paradigm for cloud computing. For cloud computing application architecture, the serverless technology in the "serverless" era will surely lead the next stage of cloud computing. HUAWEI CLOUD will also focus on customer value and gather the cloud native 2.0 Serverless solution. The curtain opens and creates unlimited possibilities!

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