On the road of digital transformation, holding a map in hand, but the road has to go on its own

Introduction to The author of this article comes from the R&D Center of China Life Insurance Co., Ltd., and has relatively senior experience in enterprise digital transformation and cloud native practice. The following content is compiled from the author's thoughts on the newly published "Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Architecture Practice".

Author｜Xiao Sheng

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The author of this article is from the R&D Center of China Life Insurance Co., Ltd., and has relatively senior experience in enterprise digital transformation and cloud native practice. The following content is compiled from the author's thoughts on the newly published "Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Architecture Practice".

Original intention

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As IT practitioners in the financial industry and participating in the digital transformation process of traditional enterprises, we have been thinking about two questions: First, what is digital and why? The second is how to promote digital transformation, and how to plan and adjust the path, tools, organization, etc.?
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Everyone often confuses the concepts of informatization and digitalization, thinking that by launching some business systems or putting in some digital markets, the IT construction goals have been completed. But in fact, this may only change the form of the flow of some information and data to the leadership, and there is no change in the working mode of the entire business; the original manual operation still requires manual operation, and the process that needs to be followed (or even new Some new processes have been added to the system), the efficiency has not changed significantly; whether the performance of the company has improved, whether it is positively related to IT construction, whether the cost performance is cost-effective, etc., these often lack effective evaluation methods, and it is easy to fall into Pseudo-digital pit.
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Any architecture must serve the corporate strategy, and cloud native architecture is no exception!

Enterprises must be clear about the relationship between business strategy and cloud IT strategy, that is, cloud IT strategy is only the necessary technical support for business strategy, or cloud IT strategy itself is also part of business strategy.
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I very much agree with the views mentioned in the book "Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Architecture Practice" that technology ultimately serves the value of the enterprise. Therefore, we believe that digitization is based on the ability of information to improve business models, aggregate all links and data in the entire value chain, and focus on guiding business operations and decision-making; the final form of expression is "full amount of all-element data + The intelligent form of automation + real-time.

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The main demands of digital business for technical architecture are to ensure business continuity, rapid business launch, business cost control, and technology to empower business innovation.
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In order to enable the business development team to deliver high-quality delivery faster and more steadily to meet increasingly faster business needs, "small front-end, large-medium platform/large back-end" is the way to go. Because only by making the front-end lighter, the business development team can focus more on the business and deliver more agile; while the mid-stage and the back-end are more important, high-quality design and specifications are deposited in it, and the best practice reusability is also Just higher.
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The core idea can be summarized in one "160f0ef2faebd2 sinks ".
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When we sink public technical capabilities and methods to the development framework, to the basic platform, and to the automated specification process, applications built based on these capabilities can be very agile and are born in a high-quality architecture. In the system (the so-called winning is at the starting line), and the cloud native architecture is the best practice methodology for the sinking of this ability.
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set off

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Cloud native architecture is a set of architectural principles and design patterns based on cloud native technology, designed to help enterprises and developers make full use of the platform capabilities and elastic resource capabilities provided by the cloud platform.

Cloud native includes cloud native technology, cloud native products, cloud native architecture, and development concepts for building modern applications.
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Modern applications and cloud-native applications are built or implemented based on cloud-native architecture and development concepts, such as 7 architecture principles such as service-oriented principles and elastic principles, 10 architecture modes such as computing and storage separation mode, event-driven mode, and DevOps, R&D concepts such as GitOps.
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Cloud-native architecture and cloud-native development concepts are built or implemented based on cloud-native technologies and products, including container technology, DevOps technology, microservices, Service Mesh, Serverless, cloud-native big data, cloud-native AI, cloud-native security, etc. Technologies and products. Among them, the concept of Open Application Model (OAM) is refreshing. It extends the standardized declaration of resources in PaaS to the standardized declaration of applications and configurations, "making simple applications simpler, and making complex Applications are easier to manage".
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Finally, cloud-native products and cloud-native technologies require cloud infrastructure based on public, private, or hybrid clouds. The composition of cloud native is such a progressive relationship.
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The road traversed

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The cloud-native architecture upgrade is a thorough upgrade of the entire IT architecture of the enterprise. When each organization upgrades the cloud-native architecture, it must be tailored to the enterprise's own situation. Among them, organizational capabilities and technology stacks are equally important.
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On the road of digital transformation, the historical burden of traditional enterprises is not small. Restructuring without stopping the business is tantamount to changing the engine, operating procedures, and even crew members of an aircraft in flight.
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The author comes from China Life Insurance Co., Ltd., and has personally experienced a case of servicing technology upgrade. As a last resort, cloud native technology has given us new answers.
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In the initial stage of IT construction, there were many chimney systems; with more and more systems, the demand for interaction between systems became greater and the demand for servicing was put on the agenda. More than ten years ago, the SOA concept represented by bus-based architecture was popular. The systems have been connected to the service bus one after another. However, with the rise of the mobile Internet, service pressure has doubled year by year, and the bottleneck of the bus-based architecture has gradually emerged. A jitter of the bus can easily cause the blockage of various services. The introduction of the micro-service architecture has exacerbated this phenomenon.
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At this time, the service registration discovery model has matured. New systems are all implemented using Spring Cloud and similar products, but the existing systems cannot be modified in this very invasive way, which is costly and risky; and multiple programming languages Starting to appear, it is also difficult to achieve the same service governance between different languages. We can't do anything, we can only maintain the service bus with difficulty, and try our best to improve its robustness from the architectural level. Until a few years ago, we heard about the concept of service grid, which is precisely the non-intrusive SideCar model, and we realized that the answer was coming. At present, we are in the process of comprehensive gridding.
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The SideCar model itself is not new, but why has it become popular again in recent years? In the final analysis, it is the maturity of cloud-native technologies such as container technology and DevOps that have solved the cost and efficiency of the massive SideCar operation and maintenance. Therefore, the cloud native technology itself is also time-sensitive and complementary, and we, as the application side, follow the trend to "break the original steady state and build a new steady state."
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In addition, the design of cloud native architecture also needs to consider changes in organizational structure. As mentioned earlier, a very important cloud-native architecture principle is servicing (including microservices, small services, etc.). A typical principle in this field is Conway’s law, which requires that the technical architecture and communication architecture of the enterprise must be consistent, otherwise it will lead to The malformed service-oriented structure has even led to the increase in organizational communication costs and the increase in "wrangling" phenomena.
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In the implementation of any plan, people are the first element. Conway’s Law will be mentioned when giving technical courses to new colleagues or sharing architecture. The structure of the product is the epitome of the organizational structure, and the more vernacular is "the butt determines the head". To implement some technical structures or management processes, the organizational structure cannot be bypassed; without major adjustments to the organizational structure, the solution we choose may not be the most ideal, but the most suitable under the current organizational structure .
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As for ourselves, we need to remind ourselves at all times, step out of the circle delineated by the organizational structure, and look at the problem and think about the plan from the whole process, the whole scene, and a higher level.
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Own way

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However, one thing to note is that cloud computing service companies, including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and Microsoft, have not built their cloud service software architecture systems in full accordance with these software architecture standards. This is not accidental at all, because these companies are fully aware that cloud computing-based software architecture should be a software architecture suitable for decentralized organizations, rather than a traditional centralized organization-based software architecture. Therefore, traditional software architecture standards need to be further customized and tailored for cloud-native architectures in order to make better use of their value. The software architecture design model will have the interest points of the traditional software architecture design method, but it is different in the specific design method.
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Of course, having a map does not mean that you will not get lost. From the enterprise to the team, each organization has its own pain points and demands, as well as corresponding culture and advantages. After choosing the right direction, you have to explore a path that suits the company's own characteristics. This requires constant practice and trial and error. The Alibaba ACNA architecture design method and its maturity model evaluation system can be used as a reference for the degree and effect of technological architecture evolution in digital transformation.

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The technological strategy of enterprises is gradually shifting to the business structure and its governance direction.” With the deepening and popularization of DevOps, application delivery processes will become more standardized. The increase in cloud service types will also give rise to new development models and development frameworks.
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Finally, I still want to emphasize returning to the original intention. Technology serves enterprise value, comprehensively evaluates the rate of return on investment, and finally realizes the effect of helping enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, reduce risks, and enhance experience.
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recommend

Nowadays, it has become an inevitable trend for enterprises to go to the cloud. As a new technology concept born in the era of cloud computing, cloud native allows enterprises to use the cloud to realize the transition from "cloud" to "cloud". "Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Architecture Practice" is officially produced by Alibaba Cloud, recommended by Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, and Cheng Li, CTO of Alibaba; from design principles, patterns/anti-patterns, technical options, design methods, industry cases and other dimensions Comprehensively summarize the methodology and practical experience of Alibaba Cloud's cloud native architecture.

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