Comics | Understand Serverless in one go!

Introduction to provides a stage for young people who love technology to challenge world-class technical problems, hoping to use technology to create greater value for the whole society.

Author | Liu Xin

Uh, I may be the generation that needs no struggle in the eyes of others.

I have experienced some of the colorful life that everyone likes to hear.

My home is a chain supermarket, mainly in a few second-tier cities.

When I was in elementary school, various chain stores began to install computers, and purchased and installed complete cash register equipment.

My dad said to learn from those big supermarket chains to improve production efficiency.

At that time, I was very interested in cash register software with gray interface, but my parents didn't let me touch them.

Later, they bought me a computer. At that time, there were not many people in the town who had a computer, and children of relatives often came to me to play on the computer.

Because of my early contact with computers, I chose computer science when I was in college.

A few weeks after I was in college, my dad asked me:

At that time, I didn't even have a concept of database or anything, and I was still learning the complement of one's complement. I told him: Yes, but not now. Wait for a year or two for me.

My dad said it doesn't matter. According to his thinking, we don't need to be able to write completely, as long as we understand how to write, we can leave the specific implementation to the software company.

But it is important to understand how the software is made, because it can help us think from the perspective of the supplier when buying software, know ourselves and the enemy, and narrow our information gap.

This is the essence of trading.

In 2005, in my junior year, the school wanted to hold a software development competition. There were three propositions in total. In fact, all scenarios were basically covered, and students could play freely. So I thought of the cash register software in the supermarket.

At that time, Taobao was just getting hot, why not learn it, and completely innovate my dad's business model from offline to online!

The entire online mall, browse products, shopping carts, place orders, and deliver, but we mainly sell our own sources.

The technology used at that time was MySQL + Java + JSP, and then I bought a server to run the service.

When demonstrating this system in school, I got the highest score.

With joy, I tried to apply this system to actual business, starting with the pilot at my head office.

Unexpectedly, my dad poured cold water on me. He said that our users here do not have the habit of shopping online, and the delivery problem cannot be solved.

I was dissatisfied, and insisted on trying. Sure enough, there was a huge difference between ideal and reality, and I fell into a big somersault.

Although I did a lot of activities and handed out flyers to promote the mall, very few actually shop online.

Some people who are willing to try new things, I bought things on the Internet, I personally drove them to deliver them.

After graduating and going home, I wanted to study abroad, but my dad dragged me back. I first studied with Lao Zhang, the person in charge of the information department, and then slowly took over.

At that time, every supermarket in the family was very big, with 10 or 20 POS machines, and every supermarket had a server and a database.

The POS machine is directly connected to the server of the supermarket, with a typical client/server structure.

In that era, I guess everyone is like this!

To be honest, such a software architecture seems to be quite stable on the surface. As long as the machine has no problems and the power supply is stable, the entire cash register system will be no problem. But in fact it faces many shortcomings:

1. The machine is really broken, and there are really broken cases

2. Every time there is a product data to be updated, the management staff of each store must be notified to update. It is normal for errors to occur.

3. When updating the software, engineers need to go to each site to configure and update 4. It is difficult to unify data for each store. When statistical data is collected every month, it is not possible to know the current data of each branch anytime and anywhere. 5. etc... ....

Each store operates a set of systems separately. If this shortcoming is listed, it will be endless.

I suggest Lao Zhang set up a central computer room, centralize the software, and connect each store to a unified computer room server, so as to solve the above problems:

After the system transformation, after bidding and bidding, we chose a strong local company to do it.

I took advantage of my computer expertise and helped Lao Zhang find many problems.

It seems that what my dad said is right. It is important to narrow the information gap.

The central computer room has been in operation for several years, and the effect is good, but the management of my own computer room is very troublesome.

Usually, we need to plan and purchase servers carefully, install software, and be responsible for operation and maintenance. We also set up a team to deal with these things.

What's more annoying is that hacker attacks are everywhere

There are also downtimes and Internet disconnections. An accident is a major event, affecting all supermarkets. I don't know how many times I was woken up in the middle of the night.

This is not a big deal. One year in order to cooperate with the supermarket promotion during Double 11, I let my dad buy a lot of servers at once. After Double 11, all of them were idle, which made my dad angry enough.

So when Alibaba Cloud appeared, my eyes gleamed. This was simply set up to understand and save me.

Go to the cloud immediately, immediately, and fully.

The operating system will automatically install it for you according to your requirements. Naturally, you don’t need to worry about the network, just buy it directly as you need the bandwidth.

There is no need to worry about security issues. If something goes wrong, I can tell my dad confidently: Look, this is not my problem, it’s Alibaba Cloud’s problem, haha.

And the machine can be easily expanded, the CPU core from 4 cores to 8 cores, the memory from 16G to 64G......

From now on, the server in our computer room will be laid off.

In a blink of an eye, more than ten years have passed. With the development of supermarket IT systems, I have also grown from a teenager who wrote online shopping malls in JSP to the company's technology leader.

Technology is constantly changing, and mini programs have emerged. We have also made mini programs. We used preferential information to attract customers' attention and registration by scanning codes, and slowly accumulated millions of fans.

Every month, we send coupons to members in the mini program, which can be consumed in offline stores.

Unexpectedly, this will be terrible. The number of requests for buying coupons is difficult to accurately estimate, and it is also difficult to estimate how many virtual machines need to be prepared to deal with it.

I quickly mobilized all of my relationships to solve this problem. By chance, I discovered a new technology: functional computing, or Serverless.

The platform will create corresponding function instances to execute according to the number of requests, without manual intervention, and instantly elastically expand the capacity to deal with traffic bursts.

Who has the strongest serverless technology in China?

Cloud Function Computing stands out by virtue of its advantages in product capabilities, security, strategic vision, and market size. The 1615938dbc53fc product capability ranks first in the world . This is the first time that a Chinese cloud manufacturer has entered. FaaS leader quadrant.

It just so happens that we used Alibaba Cloud's virtual machine before, that's it!

In addition to function computing, because the business needs to query the membership database, we hope that it can also be seamlessly and elastically expanded, so we use Alibaba Cloud's table storage.

With this serverless system, you no longer need to consider the server, how much CPU and how much memory the virtual machine uses, it is full of flexibility!

Function deployment is also very simple, you don't need to consider the underlying details at all, just update the function with one click.

The Double Eleven that year was very stable, and cost estimates were made afterwards: When I bought cloud servers in the past, I would evaluate the performance according to the highest possible concurrency. It is estimated that when the transaction volume increased by 120% that year, the cost was saved by 45% compared with previous years! The efficiency of R&D delivery has also increased by more than 30%!

From then on, my dad looked at me with admiration, and his eyes became softer.

Of course, besides technology, I still care about business very much. Not long ago, I set up a live broadcast room for the company to promote my products on the platform.

Later, after thinking about it, it was boring to play by myself. I tried to contact merchants from all walks of life near the supermarket and invited them to join my live broadcast room and chat about selling goods together. In fact, not many shops took care of me at the time, only the owner of a bathing center was interested in this. I have to say that the owner of the bathing center is very capable of nagging, and he is a match for me.

During the first live broadcast, our supermarket chain and various branches of the bath center held a joint discount event, but that night the live broadcast turned from selling goods to talking about cross talk.

We hold the live broadcast once a week, and more and more netizens hear it, and more and more orders are transacted. The trading volume on the night of the live broadcast can even match the total volume of the past week.

During the live broadcast, there are always enthusiastic netizens who take the initiative to connect to the microphone. Technically, it is necessary to connect the pictures of multiple netizens and synthesize a new picture with the host’s picture. This is called " mixed ".

Since Lianmai’s audience is not fixed, I have to consider a certain degree of concurrency and flexibility. Our cross talk live broadcast is only once a week, and it is impossible to reserve a large number of servers to cope with business peaks.

I have tasted the sweetness of Serverless before. This time I immediately asked the R&D department to use Alibaba Cloud Function Computing to handle the mixed flow requirements.

When the amount of concurrency increases, function computing automatically expands multiple execution environments to process real-time data streams. When the business peak period passes, resources are automatically reduced, which is very cool.

Of course, the application of Serverless is not only these, but also our "crosstalk" videos need to be transcoded and optimized for streaming. I also used Ali's function calculations, which saved more than 60% of computing resources.

In the past two years, I have deeply experienced the benefits of : 1615938dbc5805 does not need to consider the server at all, just concentrate on implementing your own business logic!

Over the years, technology has been constantly changing along the way. This year I was fortunate enough to be invited by the School of Computer Science of my alma mater to share with you.

During the speech, I mentioned the programming competition in the university that year, which was also the starting point of my programming career.

It just so happens that I know that Alibaba Cloud has hosted a cloud-native programming contest, and I also want to share this contest with my friends: this contest was available in 2015, and it was called the Middleware Performance Challenge at that time. It has a history of 7 years. , Upgraded to a cloud native programming challenge last year, attracting a total of more than 23,000 teams, covering more than 10 countries and regions.

The competition provides a stage for young people who love technology to challenge world-class technical problems, hoping to use technology to create greater value for the whole society.

Click to sign up for the competition immediately, the 60w bonus is waiting for you!

https://tianchi.aliyun.com/specials/promotion/cloudnative2021

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