Exclusive interpretation of Leifeng.com: The layout and strategy of Alibaba Cloud's native applications

Introduction to Cloud has always hoped to be able to make standardized technologies to connect with community standards and industry standards. This simplifies many processes for Alibaba Cloud customers, and its capabilities are also the mainstream in the future.

Article source: Leifeng.com

Author: Yang Li

Original title: "Exclusive Interpretation: The Layout and Strategy of Alibaba Cloud Native Applications"

Original link: https://www.leiphone.com/category/industrycloud/nBx5G5lhmwof2RtY.html

Interviewee | Ding Yu

Produced | Leifeng Network Industry Group

Evolving to this stage, cloud native has shortened the customer's digital transformation path. If everything in the cloud-native era is based on the customer's perspective, then further dismantling is to focus on the customer's business scenarios and system architecture, rather than the past and laborious way of stacking people. How to correctly guide customers to share the benefits of cloud native technology? Ding Yu, Huaming Shutong, Alibaba researcher and head of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud native application platform. What he saw and gave may not be the only solution for customers' digital transformation, but it is a result of many years of practice by Alibaba Cloud. The optimal solution to a certain type of problem.

Looking back over the past fifteen years, Alibaba's cloud-native practice has been accompanied by the increasing complexity of the group's business scale and supporting scenarios. Internally, as the world’s largest e-commerce trading platform, Alibaba Taobao’s e-commerce business on Double 11 every year brings great technical challenges; externally, Alibaba Cloud supports 3 million corporate customers worldwide and helps customers solve problems. At the same time, it will pay attention to the development of its business. In fact, the emergence of different problems at each stage is also the innovation engine for Ali's own product technological breakthroughs.

If you disassemble the changes in Alibaba Cloud's native practice in the past 15 years, then you must be inseparable from this logic: self-research-self-use-open to the cloud.

• The first stage: From 2006 to 2011, Taobao Mall switched from a centralized architecture to a micro-service distributed architecture, and the core solution was to solve the problems of high availability and stability.
• The second stage: 2011-2015, began to invest in containers to solve the problems of cost and operation and maintenance efficiency.
• The third stage: 2015-2019, promote the full commercialization of product technologies, and fully embrace cloud-native standards.
• The fourth stage: 2019-present, from supporting the full cloudification of the core system on Double 11 to supporting the full cloud nativeization of the core system.

It can be said that Alibaba has caught up with two dividends, one is the dividend of Internet economies of scale; the other is the dividend of cloud computing. By continuously solving the problems encountered in these dividends, it is possible for Alibaba to build these products and have the opportunity to comprehensively upgrade the next-generation cloud-native technology and continue to feed back to customers.

However, not all companies have the opportunity and time (window period) to contact and shape the cloud-native capabilities of their business.

"Before cloud native, only highly capable companies could solve this problem, but with the emergence of cloud native, every company can achieve cloud and extremely flexible capabilities, which is the release of a universal dividend. "Ding Yu said.

At present, Alibaba Cloud has 300+ cloud-native products and thousands of solutions to provide all-round capability support for enterprise digital innovation. Represented by container technology, due to the combination with the cloud, it can shield the differences of infrastructure downwards, become a new interface for cloud service calls, and support various products upwards.

So how do we further understand cloud native, and what kind of advanced enterprises can take the lead in taking the path of cloud native practice?

Ding Yu, Alibaba Researcher, Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform

In this interview, Ding Yu shared with us the evolution route of Alibaba Cloud's native practice in the past 15 years, as well as observations in the field of cloud computing and thinking about the future development of the business. There are many lessons for cloud native companies and practitioners. Place. The following will be a complete summary of this exclusive interview.

Two "30%"

There are too many interpretations of cloud native from the perspective of technology or vendors. This time we try to see what changes cloud native brings from the perspective of customers.

The market acceptance and landing maturity of cloud native itself in the entire industry is getting higher and higher. This comes from two intuitive feelings that cloud native brings to enterprises.

• One is the optimization of costs and resources. Many companies have purchased cloud resources for a month, but the actual use may only be a week. The ability of enterprises to go to the cloud and use the cloud flexibly is not strong. They can only use time to exchange space and buy more time to solve the problem of weak ability. But cloud native solves this problem, allowing users to take it at any time and return it when it is used up, which in itself is a very strong resource optimization.

During the epidemic last year, customers in the online education industry, supported by Alibaba Cloud, increased their resource utilization rates by nearly 50% to 60%. Customers can manage resources downwards, and manage AI, big data, databases, audio and video and other tasks upwards. Through flexible scheduling, hybrid deployment, and management of the full lifecycle of tasks, DevOps, etc., the optimization of the entire lifecycle can be achieved.

• The second is the optimization of research and development efficiency. The R&D efficiency of an enterprise often depends on the advanced nature of the architecture. Cloud Native has realized full-stack optimizations such as release, launch, operation and maintenance, and development tools, which has improved the throughput capacity of R&D personnel in unit production.

A piece of data shows that Walnut Programming uses cloud-native observability product ARMS to reduce operation and maintenance workload by 30% and shorten the average time for fault location by 60%.

"We will definitely do something, that is, as long as companies come to try it, they will like it and are willing to continue to use it. The cloud-native technologies and products provided by Alibaba Cloud have good versatility and advancement in the industry, and are the development trend of enterprise digital innovation The main line of the company. Although there may be a certain conceptual learning cost for corporate customers, this kind of practical efficiency improvement and cost reduction is very valuable for the company’s future development in the next five years, ten years or even more. ."

Prior to this, Alibaba Cloud has brought two "30%" improvements through cloud native technologies and products, that is, 30% improvement in R&D efficiency and 30% reduction in IT costs. It hopes to achieve external empowerment of millions of enterprises through its own practice. Perform cloud native transformation.

In the process of contacting customers in various industries, Ding Yu was deeply touched:

"The advantages of cloud native feedback to the customer side will have obvious changes, but this change is not what customers care about most. Customers are more concerned about how to achieve business success and help themselves achieve digital transformation. These are the core issues. Alibaba From this perspective, Cloud will provide corresponding product solutions according to customer needs. These are essentially cloud-native systems, but the product form and level will be different."

The "28 Principles" in Cloud Native

As mentioned above, Alibaba proposed and completed the full cloudification of its core system in 2019, and in 2020 it proposed full cloud nativeization of the core system, and fully supported the group's Double 11 promotion through cloud-native products. Cloud native does not happen overnight, especially for a huge system like Alibaba, it is a gradual process, but we will quickly see the changes brought about by cloud native in some emerging businesses.

For Alibaba, the final state of cloud native will probably be in the 28th state, that is, at least 20% will still be self-built, 80% of the business will be cloud native, and 100% cloud native will not be achieved.

The reason is that in the era of enterprises going to the cloud, more talk about IaaS going to the cloud. Under the effect of scale, the cost of cloud computing can be as low as the cost of water and coal power, from self-built computer rooms to leased services, allowing corporate customers to intuitively feel the sharp drop in costs. But at the level of PaaS, different roles and scenarios, tools, and services are involved. The differences of PaaS begin to emerge, such as enterprise development tools, operation and maintenance tools, enterprise cloud management platforms, and internal IT systems. This part is very long. It hasn't been fully cloud-native for some time.

Alibaba's own business volume is very large, if full cloud native means to do a lot of customized services, this is not the optimal solution. The realization of 80% cloud-native in the future also represents Ali's own determination to invest in cloud-native technology, and it can even waste some costs to solve the problem of legacy assets.

In 2016, Alibaba achieved 100% containerization, replacing the original business construction method with a new generation of containerization. This can be said to be unique among Internet companies.

In contrast, many emerging forces in the cloud-native era may have the biggest advantage that there is no legacy asset problem that Ali faced 20 years ago. It is much easier for them to achieve 100% cloud-native.

Take the retail industry as an example. The competitive situation in this industry determines that companies must be at the forefront, actively embrace digital transformation methods, use data to drive business, open up connections with customers, and realize store management and digital marketing.

New businesses such as omni-channel marketing in the retail industry are often 100% cloud-native, but for some existing business sectors, companies may not have much motivation, energy, and ability to achieve cloud-native.

Ding Yu mentioned, “We have to recognize a contradiction. We can solve the core business digital transformation problem of the enterprise, but we cannot make a set of solutions to satisfy all the systems of the enterprise. Cloud native is not a master key to help enterprises solve all of them. The problem."

An "emerging power"

There will be certain demands in all walks of life for the advanced productivity brought by cloud native. It's just that whether that day comes or not depends on the industry and the maturity of the customer.

Container + Kubernetes has become a new interface for cloud computing, which can support upstream businesses including big data, AI, blockchain, edge computing and other emerging loads. At this level, cloud native does not distinguish between industries, it is determined according to the characteristics of the scene and the technology platform.

But this does not mean that different customers have the same requirements for cloud-native technology applications. In fact, there are obvious differences in the acceptance and preferences of different industries.

For example, offline physical industries such as government, enterprises, finance, etc. prefer platform-level PaaS products, hoping to have a good experience, low threshold, high stability, and iterability; while Internet companies do not accept PaaS, and they prefer to be modular and scalable. Assembled, they have a certain degree of flexibility and openness. Such companies often have strong technical strength and have the idea of controlling themselves.

In addition, Internet companies' preference for Serverless is very obvious. Serverless has greatly moved the interface of the cloud up, reducing the energy consumption of developers. Within the Alibaba Group, business sectors such as Xianyu and Gaode took the lead in using serverless technology before the Alibaba Group.

"It's hard to say which business will come to the fore. The business's thirst for new technologies is the same, but different business sectors will try some new areas and products according to their own capabilities and stages."

Standards and open source accelerate cloud native

Speaking of the concept alone, cloud native did not have a general standard definition until around 2013, and it was continued to be interpreted by the CNCF in 2018. But in fact, Alibaba Cloud also has its own understanding of cloud native.

In Alibaba Cloud's view, cloud native has a narrow and broad understanding. In a narrow sense, cloud native comes from containers, and enterprise IT architecture must be combined with cloud to have better advantages. The advantage of cloud native is that it can give full play to the capabilities of the cloud and use the advantages of the cloud to build a flexible, scalable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-maintain system.

At the same time, the cloud itself is also undergoing changes and upgrades. For example, the upgrade of the Shenlong server and the coordinated optimization of software and hardware with the container have greatly improved the performance and elasticity indicators; the combination of the database and the cloud native can run the database on the container and separate storage and calculation. Flexible automated operation and maintenance of databases.

The cloud has actually transformed the way technology is implemented.

In a broad sense, the connotation of cloud native may be richer. It is born and changed for the cloud, and the cloud is born and grows. This practice method has far exceeded the significance of containerization.

Take the Alibaba Cloud cloud native application platform that Ding Yu is responsible for as an example. Unlike the container services, middleware and other products we have understood before, the cloud native application platform is a rich platform involving multiple role systems. It is neither a container platform nor a PaaS, but it needs to connect with many core third-party SaaS service providers and PaaS service providers, and open compatibility interfaces to customers. Then, standards and open source may be one of the directions to improve the future commercialization system.

For example, Alibaba and Microsoft jointly launched a standard specification OAM (Open Application Model) for building and delivering cloud-native applications in the community. Its core concept is "application-centric". The reason is that the cloud-native technology of the past five years mainly solves problems downwards, but now it can support many tasks upwards, but it lacks the standardization of model management.

It turned out that it was very difficult to commercialize open source, but today’s situation is different. A large number of open source software can provide services on the cloud. Regardless of whether containers, big data, or audio and video services, you can develop applications that comply with standards and specifications. Reach customers.

This way of embracing open source also ultimately affected the open standards of software and formed the core feature of Alibaba Cloud's native application platform.

Open source is still on the way

There is a saying inside Alibaba called "Because I believe, I see." No matter which party the final conclusion leads to, the whole process of All In you are actually proving your vision.

Compared with the past, open source has formed a new business path due to changes in cloud computing subscription models. At present, Alibaba Cloud has more than 2,600 open source projects, and the number of Stars exceeds one million, which is unimaginable in the past.

Take the development of container technology as an example. During the period from 2011 to 2016, many container service vendors experienced such a standard runaway. Alibaba Cloud only replaced its own container technology in 2016 and chose Docker, which had become the de facto standard in the industry at that time.

This undoubtedly returns to a question: the choice of technology, is it self-research or use open source technology?

For Ali, the use of open source or third-party products simply cannot support its scale and volume. If it can be supported, the cost is also very high. If the company is all self-research, it will bring a problem at the same time. It is not easy to recruit people. From language to platform, framework, and architecture, it is self-research. Talent training is the problem, and it may not be easy to find a job after talents leave.

So the final guideline is that there must be standards. This standard can be oriented towards the universality of the industry, so that talents are easy to recruit, and at the same time it can absorb external forces, and self-developed things have the opportunity to form commercialization.

Looking at it now, after many years of practice, Alibaba Cloud has become a lot of de facto standards (such as Dubbo, RocketMQ), and it also follows the trend of the industry and adopts many industry standards (such as Kubernetes).

Alibaba Cloud has always hoped to be able to make standardized technologies to connect with community standards and industry standards. This simplifies many processes for Alibaba Cloud customers, and its capabilities are also the mainstream in the future.

"Integrated" with partners

Today, a large number of traditional software vendors, independent software service providers, and channel partners hope to provide more value innovations to end customers through their own transformation and upgrading. In fact, they do not lack a large number of proven delivery capabilities, nor do they lack good ideas, but the problem is that it is difficult to break through themselves in a short time by embracing new Internet technologies.

Today there are old SaaS vendors as well as new SaaS vendors. The difference is that new SaaS vendors will pursue the extremes of cost and productivity, and will develop entirely through the cloud. These vendors were born after the era of cloud computing. If they do not enjoy the dividends of this era, they have no accumulation of advantages compared with old SaaS vendors, so they should seize the advantages of technological advancement.

A few days ago, Alibaba Cloud and APM manufacturer Borui Data have cooperated in the observable field. With the help of Alibaba Cloud's native technology products, Borui has realized the deployment of Borui in the cloud dial test of SaaS delivery products and realized the large-scale development of the Internet.

In this regard, Ding Yu mentioned, “Borui hopes to penetrate into the SaaS field with Alibaba Cloud and move closer to the cloud computing architecture, because Borui sees that more customers will be on the cloud in the future, and it also hopes to enter this market quickly. At this stage, it is necessary to bring observables into a new stage of development through concepts, cases, and technology forward-looking."

Although at present, the industry’s understanding and practice of cloud native is still uneven, Alibaba Cloud hopes to drive more enterprises to join the cloud through "self-certified prophecies" during the mental construction stage of the cloud native market. Come native.

At present, all industries are embracing cloud computing, which requires cloud vendors to continue to consolidate the cloud foundation, including servers, networks, computing, storage, etc., to form a very strong technical advantage; at the same time, the occurrence of enterprise digital transformation will definitely occur Relying on cloud computing, if you want to get the dividends of the cloud, you must rely on cloud native technology.

Under this trend, cloud-native databases, cloud-native big data, cloud-native middleware, cloud-native security and other services are also quietly changing because of the cloud.

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