Why does "application management and delivery" become the new value focus of cloud native?

Introduction to "cloud native application management and delivery" become an important value focus on Kubernetes? What role will CNCF App Delivery SIG play in promoting the rapid evolution of application layer technology on top of Kubernetes? What innovations will be expected in this field? Let us understand what App Delivery SIG's new Co-chairs Deng Hongchao thinks.

Author｜Deng Hongchao

Recently, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the world’s top open source community, announced the re-election results of the "Application Delivery SIG", senior technical experts from Alibaba Cloud and the start-up of the Kubernetes Operator mechanism One of the authors, Hongchao Deng will serve as the new team Co-chairs with Jennifer Strejevitch, a senior R&D expert at VMware.

About CNCF App Delivery SIG

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According to the official introduction, the role of the CNCF field team is to "help the entire ecosystem understand the best practices in these technical fields, and work closely with the CNCF TOC (Technical Oversight Committee) to identify sustainable open source projects or help them make up for shortcomings." . CNCF currently has three domain groups under its jurisdiction. App Delivery SIG is the first “application”-centric domain group officially established by the CNCF Foundation. Today, when the core focus of the cloud computing ecology is quickly focused on "cloud native applications", this group is hailed by the community as the "CNCF most valuable field group".
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As more and more companies and developers begin to evolve their businesses and technologies to cloud native, container technology represented by Kubernetes has become a new interface for cloud computing. From Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft's joint open source OAM + OpenKruise combination to emergence, to Alibaba Cloud's open source framework KubeVela, which further enables platform builders to become popular, why "cloud native application management and delivery" will become an important value focus on Kubernetes ? What role will CNCF App Delivery SIG play in promoting the rapid evolution of application layer technology on top of Kubernetes? What innovations will be expected in this field? Let us understand what App Delivery SIG's new Co-chairs Deng Hongchao thinks.
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Application management and delivery-a new focus of value in the cloud native field

Deng Hongchao, Alibaba Cloud senior technical expert, one of the original authors of the Kubernetes Operator mechanism, the core maintainer of the open source project OAM and KubeVela project, a former CoreOS software engineer, has many years of research and practical experience in the Kubernetess application management system.
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Q: Congratulations on becoming the Co-chairs of CNCF application delivery team! First introduce yourself to everyone, right?
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Deng Hongchao: is very honored to be elected to this post in June this year, and I am very grateful to the community partners for their support. After graduating from school, I have been working around "open source" and "cloud native". Previously, I worked for CoreOS and was one of the early engineers of the Kubernetes project. I co-led the design and development of core components such as Scheduler and APIServer with the community. I also co-created and promoted the Operator extension mechanism with my colleagues. The emergence of Operator has promoted the coordinated development of the entire CNCF ecosystem. At Alibaba, I am mainly responsible for the architecture design of the cloud native application platform. I have created projects such as KubeVela and OAM to upgrade Alibaba's application platform infrastructure and improve the efficiency of developer R&D and delivery. I hope that through the joint efforts of myself, my teammates, and community partners, I will continue to promote the development of cloud native concepts.
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Q: What kind of organization is the CNCF application delivery field team? What is the background of its establishment, the issues it focuses on, and the mission it undertakes?
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Deng Hongchao: CNCF App-Delivery TAG (Technical Advisory Group), which is called CNCF Application Delivery Field Group in Chinese, is the first and only "application"-centric field group of the Foundation. It plays a vital role in the development and expansion of cloud-native application delivery technology. It aims to help the entire ecosystem deeply understand the best practices in this technology field, and work closely with the CNCF TOC (Technical Oversight Committee) to identify potential Continuous open source project.
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CNCF broadly divides user groups into three categories [1]:

1. Infrastructure research and development;
2. Development of tools for application programming, operation and maintenance and testing;
3. Application developer.

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From the beginning, CNCF focused on "infrastructure", because this group of people constituted the main body of the CNCF community, and they also promoted the development of the industry toward the cloud native roadmap [2]. As the core value of the cloud native ecosystem gradually focuses on the "cloud native application" itself, CNCF has gradually shifted its focus to the side of application developers and began to pay attention to related projects of application programming, operation and maintenance, and testing. In this context, CNCF has established an application delivery field group to serve as a bridge connecting infrastructure and developers, and establish closer ties with application development and operation and maintenance personnel.
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The CNCF application delivery field team focuses on application construction, deployment, management, and operation and maintenance in cloud-native scenarios, solving the core issues in the entire application delivery life cycle, identifying and correcting the gap between application management open source project theory and practice, Promote the standardization of application delivery tools and processes. This group is responsible for "coordinating and connecting the concerns, end users, and open source projects in the application delivery field in a far-sighted manner." In terms of organizational structure, the team is usually led by recognized technical experts in the application delivery field, and reports upward to the CNCF TOC. At present, the group also has the following Working Groups (WG): GitOps, Operator, Cooperative Delivery, Chaos Engineering.
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Q: What are the current status, trends and challenges in the field of cloud-native application delivery? What potential open source projects have you observed in the community?
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Deng Hongchao: current status of the cloud native application delivery field is that although the container application delivery form with k8s as the core is gradually popular, the differences between different application platforms on k8s are still very large. This is due to the lack of standardized and unified application delivery and management methods on top of k8s-the entire community previously focused too much on "infrastructure" and ignored the standardization of the application layer.
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In the past year, as the cloud native focus gradually shifted to the application layer, we were able to see a series of standardization trends in the entire ecosystem:
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• Using the Sidecar model to provide developers with distributed system programming primitives, decouples infrastructure and core business, simplifies the distributed application programming experience, and fully embodies the concept of "capacity sinking and value rising". The typical representative of this trend is the Dapr project.
• Use Kubernetes as the Universal Control Plane to achieve unified management and control of multi-cloud platforms and provide cloud-native developers with a consistent infrastructure consumption experience. The typical representative of this trend is the Crossplane project.
• Using GitOps as the entrance to continuous delivery, relying on the orchestration capabilities of infrastructure as code/data (IaC/IaD) tools, to achieve a delivery pipeline with Git as the core, improve the delivery experience and efficiency of developers, and fully reflect the indispensability. Concepts such as changing infrastructure and declarative orchestration. Typical representatives of this trend are the Argo CD and Flux projects.
• Use Mesh-based progressive release, use the combination of operator + service mesh to control application upgrade deployment and traffic management, and improve the efficiency and success rate of application release. Typical representatives of this trend are Flagger and Argo Rollout projects.
• Use standardized application models to build a unified delivery plane, achieve unified management of operation and maintenance assets in a hybrid environment, provide cloud native developers with a self-service delivery and management experience, and give the platform itself more powerful scalability. Typical representatives of this trend are OAM standards and the KubeVela project.

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And as these trends are gradually standardized in the ecosystem, we can see that cloud native ecological technology will bring new application delivery forms:
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• First of all, through the cloud-native system, these standard capabilities are quickly sinking into the cloud computing capability pool, allowing users to use these standardized capabilities on demand like water and electricity, thus bringing huge benefits to end users in reducing costs and improving efficiency.
• Then, through the standardized system, we will see the birth of a cloud-native "app store": 1. From the perspective of infrastructure, more platform capabilities can be added; 2. From the perspective of end users, Use more capabilities in one environment. In this way, the cloud-native producers and consumers release large-scale productivity through standards and regulations, forming a prosperous ecosystem like the iPhone app store.
• Finally, more and more basic platform capabilities are going on the road of collaborative development, and ultimately bring users an extremely smooth and mixed experience. Through the unified application delivery plane, both open source and private customized tools will be managed in a unified manner, and exposed to users with a set of standard processes and interfaces. In this way, we will redefine the "internal tools": 1. Internal operation and maintenance assets and the latest open source technology can be mixed based on a set of standards, so that the original technology assets can be guaranteed while also enjoying open source cloud native technology. And the convenience brought by the community; 2. New capabilities do not need to change the original project but are based on open source standards to expand and develop, which can increase the output of new functions, thereby improving the efficiency of platform research and development, and ultimately improving the efficiency of platform delivery . This series of experiences is also Dagger [3] (the latest creation of Docker founder Solomon).

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Q: As Co-chairs of the group, what are your plans to promote the development of the group and the evolution of cloud-native application delivery?
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Deng Hongchao: , I will focus on application management and delivery, cloud-native programming model, developer experience and other areas focused on "application developers" at CNCF, and join the community to incubate and absorb more potential open source projects into CNCF , And write white papers to provide best practices in application delivery related fields. At the same time, we should also realize that the CNCF application delivery field team is still very young, and there are many new ideas and ideas that can be put into practice. I will also support and assist in the establishment of more working groups to meet and adapt to the development needs of the community. .
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Within Alibaba, we have also conducted many explorations on cloud-native application management and delivery capabilities recommendations in large-scale scenarios, and passed these practices through OAM/KubeVela [4] , OpenKruise [5] , OpenYurt [6] and other open source projects to give back to the community, and we will continue to collaborate with the community to promote the deployment and distribution of cloud computing infrastructure and cloud applications in more vertical fields such as AI and edge. Evolution, and more companies and developers, make "ubiquitous cloud computing" a reality.
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Finally, the development of the cloud native ecosystem is inseparable from the efforts of everyone in the entire community. Looking at the world today, Chinese companies are the best examples of cloud-native technologies in the world, and China's open source power is also growing in the world. I hope that through our joint efforts, we will continue to innovate, reflect, revise, and re-innovate, and continue to solve the key issues of cloud-native application delivery, make it easier to build a cloud-native application platform, and change the delivery experience of cloud-native developers. It's smoother.
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Related Links

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[1]CNCF：
https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2019/09/12/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-application-delivery-sig/
[2] Cloud native roadmap: \_ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/trailmap/master/CNCF\_TrailMap\_latest.png\_
[3] Dagger：
https://dagger.io/
[4]OAM/KubeVela:
https://kubevela.io/
[5]OpenKruise:
https://openkruise.io/en-us/
[6]OpenYurt:
https://github.com/openyurtio/openyurt

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