Li Xiaoping, Chief Architect of Alibaba Cloud Middleware: Why do enterprises need cloud native?

作者｜李小平

The day before yesterday I attended the Cloud Native Industry Conference held by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology. There were many companies participating in the conference, and they came from all walks of life. I was very impressed at the conference. I remembered that in 2019, I searched for the word "cloud native" on search engines. The search frequency was still relatively low at that time, and 2019 was another year when cloud native began to develop rapidly in China. At this year’s cloud native venue, many companies have already participated. These companies are applying cloud native in technology, products, and ecology. Therefore, the entire cloud native has changed from the original technology to the industry. It has developed into a relatively large industry, and the scale of this industry is growing at a very fast rate every year.
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Today, there may be many consulting agencies, companies, or individual developers who are interpreting cloud native. Perhaps many people have a deeper understanding of cloud native. Everyone can agree that cloud native is definitely related to cloud, but what has it changed and what value does it bring to the enterprise? The core point should be that the application architecture of the enterprise can be changed; another possibility is to not 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. put, 160da9ad0074eb is the same as the production line improvement of a manufacturing company. The core point is to improve our production line as a software company.
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Alibaba's cloud native practice began in 2006. We have accumulated a lot of experience in the process of becoming cloud native. We believe that today cloud native provides multiple values for enterprise digital innovation:
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One is resource elasticity . The term flexibility is easy for everyone to understand. In fact, flexibility has different levels. For example, based on the elasticity of virtual machines, the elasticity provided is minute-level. If applications based on these technologies are millisecond-level, then the minute-level only solves the problem of resource elasticity, and the entire application high availability problem needs to be further resolved. If elasticity reaches the application level and reaches the millisecond level, the high availability problem has also been solved to a certain extent.
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In addition, the stability of the system is also an aspect that everyone is very concerned about. Cloud native is to pull out the non-functional features of the entire software construction process and put them on the cloud native products, to help application development free from the non-functional processing process and focus more on functionality. Similarly, cloud native has many tool concepts that can make us better, and the entire software development time from code to online is greatly shortened. Similarly, today we will accumulate a lot of data based on cloud-native observability, which can be combined with the capabilities of machine learning to help us improve the user experience of the enterprise. These will bring greater value to the business.
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Alibaba Cloud's native practice course

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Today, cloud native, driven by CNCF, domestic related open source, and tripartite organizations, can give a company a lot of options when it comes to technology selection. Everyone usually faces a question. Among so many choices, who to choose in order to truly achieve the purpose of production availability? Especially when our business needs to go online in a very short time, at the stage of rapid business development, what kind of architecture and open source products should we choose? This is for the majority of enterprise technology decision makers and The problem facing the architect.
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In the cloud native field, Alibaba Cloud started self-research relatively early. From 2006 to 2009, when Internet middleware began to develop, to the formal establishment of Alibaba Cloud, we solved many business problems through cloud native. Through the application of cloud-native related technologies, it has well supported the rapid development of Taobao from the early stage, and after 2015, it has well supported the construction of Alibaba's middle-station, and today, as Alibaba's entire production system and core system are all 100% Going to the cloud, the cloud-native technologies we use in this process, such as container technology and micro-service technology, support scales of more than one million.
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Relevant research shows that such cloud native landing scale is very leading on a global scale. In fact, for many companies, these scales may not be used, but Alibaba has accumulated a lot of hard-core technologies by solving such large-scale performance and stability problems, and finally can turn these technologies into products. , Through Alibaba Cloud's external output, serving the majority of customers in all walks of life.

We believe that cloud-native changes to the entire software or the development process of software companies are very profound. First of all, K8s has become the standard interface for software delivery. It changes not only operation and maintenance, but the entire production chain from CICD to subsequent releases. As all production processes have changed, and many companies have reshaped the software architecture through cloud-native technology, the software architecture has changed from a traditional architecture to a new, what we call a modern application architecture, so cloud-native can use this production tool The improvement of the company further changes the production relationship of the enterprise, and ultimately affects the enterprise, which makes the enterprise obtain a great speed in the software development process.
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In the process of cloud native practice, Alibaba Cloud has accumulated strong technical competitiveness, which is reflected in these aspects:
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1. We have a lot of leading technologies to solve the stability problems, reliability problems in the cloud native field, and high concurrency problems on a large scale. At the same time, we will export all these technologies in an open source and open form. We know that in the cloud-native world, what enterprises need is open source and open technology, not technology locked in by a single vendor like Ali. In this process, we have accumulated hard-core capabilities of many products based on open source and open technology standards. In terms of products, in addition to the cloud-native application architecture you have seen, it also includes cloud-native databases and cloud-native big data.
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There are a lot of evaluations in cloud-native-related fields. In these evaluations, such as Alibaba Cloud Container Product ACK, got full marks in Gartner's evaluation last year. Only two of the global manufacturers got full marks, and Alibaba Cloud is one of them. One. This year, Alibaba Cloud was once again selected into the Gartner container competition landscape. In the field of emerging computing forms, Alibaba Cloud entered the Forrester FaaS leader quadrant this year, and functional computing won the world's highest score for FaaS products.
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In terms of observability, Alibaba Cloud has entered the Gartner APM quadrant on behalf of domestic cloud vendors. All these tripartite evaluations reflect the capabilities of Alibaba Cloud products from another level. In terms of container architecture, we are based on the open source and open K8s technology system, and deep optimization based on Alibaba Cloud's hardware, to provide services for a wide range of K8s applications in more fields and scenarios. We export the ability of super-large-scale cluster management in the K8s cluster to the ACK product, so that Alibaba Cloud customers can get rid of the management complexity of large-scale clusters when managing clusters.
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For example, Perfect Diary, as a unicorn company in the beauty industry, their business is developing very fast, but in the process of rapid business development, the problem they face is how to better reserve resources in the big promotion scene, and How to better solve the newly launched functions and the stability of demand during the big promotion. In this process, they used PTS as a pressure test, all applications ran on the ACK platform, and simulated the traffic of the big promotion through the pressure test, so that the whole big promotion can be upgraded from a state that requires a large investment to a normalized operation. The ability to greatly promote pressure testing also enables rapid convergence of system stability-related issues through this ability.
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Cloud native middleware

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In addition to microservices, messaging, and various application tools, cloud-native middleware also provides many solutions based on common IT scenarios in enterprises. Alibaba Cloud middleware was born in large-scale invocation scenarios within the group. It is also compatible with open source and incorporates more product capabilities, such as outstanding observability and high availability during the entire promotion process. All belong to the cloud native middleware. Piece product system.
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Also in the field of middleware, we also have corresponding cooperation with many enterprise customers. Chanjet is a SaaS company, and has so far provided cloud management for more than 4 million small and micro enterprises. The application complexity of ToB type is relatively high. The biggest problem is that the release frequency of the entire software is very fast. How to solve the various bugs of the software under the high-frequency software release, or solve the deficiencies in the design The issue of stability of the company, this is the focus of Changjietong raised during the preliminary discussion process. through 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 angles. Through application detection, various possible instability risks during the entire stress testing process can be quickly discovered , So that the corresponding risks can be quickly converged.
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Serverless

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Many academic institutions have conducted in-depth research in the field of serverless, and we foresee that serverless is very likely to become the next-generation mainstream technology trend. Alibaba Cloud achieves industry-leading millisecond-level billing in the serverless field, as well as deep optimization at the bottom of Alibaba Cloud, enabling customers' applications to truly achieve intelligent flexibility, extreme operation and maintenance, and greatly improve development efficiency. Alibaba Cloud has also reached in-depth cooperation with many enterprise customers to implement Serverless implementation. By helping customers to migrate applications to the Serverless technology system, they can achieve faster application deployment. At the same time, it delegates application stability and operation and maintenance to Serverless. Such cloud products to solve.
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solution

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In the process of rapid development of cloud native, only through continuous technological innovation and product innovation can it be possible to make cloud native technology better serve the majority of enterprise customers. Today, Cloud released four major solutions: full-link stress measurement solution, remote multi-active solution, resource mixing solution, and observable solution . These solutions can efficiently solve the problems that have not been well solved in the traditional field. For example, full-link stress testing. Everyone knows that full-link stress testing is a good thing. The bigger problem is to minimize the application transformation during the application stress testing process, or even not to make changes, so this time Alibaba Cloud upgraded the full link Stress testing can help enterprise applications solve these problems.
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Today, after enterprises continue to use the cloud in depth, regardless of whether they are on public or private clouds, they will encounter the problem of low overall CPU utilization. Hybridization allows various offline tasks and online tasks to be deployed together, and each can enjoy resources. The advantages of scheduling have greatly improved the CPU utilization of the overall computer room. In this process, it is necessary to solve the problems of stability and resource occupation caused by the mixed department. Ali is an early application of large-scale hybrids, such as cloud-native products that support e-commerce Double Eleven. Today, we are also turning the mixed department capability into a solution for external output.
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Everyone knows that Alibaba realized the unitized architecture earlier, and realized multiple activities through the unitized architecture. Today we take the unitized overall architecture capability as a solution for multiple activities. At the same time, this kind of multi-activity can not only support the scenarios of its own data center and private cloud, but also support the public cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios to realize the multi-activity of the entire application.
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Observability has always been a topic of special concern to everyone, because observability allows us to actively discover various risks that may occur during the operation of the system. Today, Alibaba Cloud’s upgraded observability solutions include dialing and testing to various front-end performance monitoring, extending to back-end applications and even cloud services.
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product upgrade

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In addition to solution innovation, we have also made many upgrades to the corresponding cloud-native products. The container ACK backup disaster recovery center is newly released to provide container users with integrity protection of clusters, applications and data:
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1. Support the automatic analysis of metadata and storage that the application depends on, and realize the creation of a consistent snapshot of application + data in seconds;
2. Support the creation of a backup plan, and automatically create a backup at a preset time point;
3. It is fully compatible with Kubernetes, and supports multi-cluster, multi-region, and cross-data center backup and recovery.

The container image ACR releases enterprise-level serverless construction services, which greatly improves the construction efficiency and experience of cloud-native products:
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1. Supports matrix construction of multi-operating systems and multi-architecture mirroring, and supports the construction of large-scale concurrent tasks.
2. Support the acceleration of multi-level cache construction, and the average construction speed is 30%.
3. Supports automatic construction of accelerated images, realizing on-demand loading of large images such as AI in seconds, and reducing the average startup time by 60%.

In the field of microservices, more and more applications consider using service grid technology. Users want service grids to have stronger microservice governance capabilities based on open source technologies. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud launched the professional version of ASM Pro, which has enhanced multi-protocol support, improved dynamic expansion capabilities, refined service governance, and improved zero-trust security system. Compared with the regular version released last year, the professional version has significantly improved performance and scale, and further enhances its differentiated competitiveness with open source, lowering the threshold for users to land on the service grid in the production environment.
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Gartner predicts that event-driven will become the mainstream architecture for business development in the future. In the process of enterprise customers going to the cloud, there are clear pain points and demands for the low-code, serverless flexible application architecture and how to lightly integrate the data streams of many heterogeneous cloud services. Based on this trend, Alibaba Cloud released the event bus EventBridge. Its goal is to unify Alibaba Cloud services, third-party SaaS vendors, and user-defined event standards, and help users quickly and cost-effectively through standard, flexible, and lightweight core capabilities. Acquire and process massive events to drive business development.
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In the past period of time, we have further expanded and upgraded the product capabilities of EventBridge:
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• In terms of the scale of event ecological integration, 60+ cloud product official event source accesses were added, covering mainstream cloud products such as computing, storage, network, and database;
• In terms of event access and processing methods, more than ten kinds of filter matching conversion logic are built in, and deep access methods such as cross-network, cross-regional, and cross-account are added, which is convenient for major corporate customers to make in-depth security, isolation and other customizations. ；
• On this basis, Alibaba Cloud EventBridge launched the event-driven application center for the first time, built-in common event-driven application templates, users can simply configure and complete common event ETL processing, data synchronization and other scene functions without code and deployment.

Alibaba Cloud has the broadest cloud-native customer base. As more enterprise customers go to the cloud, there will be more complex scenarios, and higher requirements for cloud-native technologies, products, and cloud-native concepts will be put forward. Alibaba Cloud hopes to do more explorations in the cloud-native field with friends from all walks of life. It hopes that through cloud-native technology, it can truly bring more business value to the company and help the company's overall business innovation.