The Past and Present of Cloud Native (1)

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Preface

The blogger transferred to Alibaba Cloud in April 20 to engage in back-end research and development in the direction of industrial intelligent manufacturing. Because of the need to solve the deployment problems in heterogeneous environments and multi-cloud environments (public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud) at different customer sites, , So I have been exploring and practicing cloud-native related technologies.

The term cloud native has been very popular in recent years, and readers often ask me: What exactly is cloud native? What is the difference between it and the traditional architecture? In what scenarios can it be applied? What value can it bring? Should I invest energy in learning it? and many more...

Take advantage of the National Day holiday to have a good chat with everyone on this topic. First, I will share a popular science article "The Past and Present of Cloud Native (1)", and I will continue to share my understanding of cloud native and my daily work about cloud native. Practical experience, I hope to inspire everyone~

The origin of cloud native Pivotal

Pivotal is a leader in the field of agile development (Google was also its customer at the time), and was born famous (EMC, VMware, etc.). It has launched Pivotal Cloud Foundry (2011 ~ 2013 PAAS world ) and 1615ef663e480f Spring ecological series framework, is the pioneer and pathfinder of cloud native.

In 2013, Matt Stine, the technical manager of Pivotal, first proposed the concept of Cloud Native.

In 2015, Matt Stine in "Migrating to Cloud Native Application Architectures-Migrating to Cloud Native Application Architecture" pamphlet defined several characteristics in line with cloud native architecture:

• Compliant with 12 patterns ( Twelve-Factor App ): a collection of patterns for cloud-native application architecture
• Microservices architecture (Microservices): Independently deployed services that only do one thing at a time
• Self-Service Agile Infrastructure (Self-Service Agile Infrastructure): A platform for providing application environments and services quickly, repeatably and consistently
• API-based Collaboration: The interaction between services is based on interfaces instead of local method calls
• Anti-Fragility: The system can withstand high loads

The original text is from: https://www.mattstine.com/publication/migrating-to-cloud-native/

In 2017, in an interview with InfoQ, Matt Stine made a small adjustment to the definition of Cloud Native Architecture, which has the following six characteristics:

• Modularity
• Observability
• Deployability
• Testability (Testability)
• Disposability
• Replaceability

The original text is from: https://www.infoq.com/articles/cloud-native-panel/

In 2019, VMware Tanzu acquired Pivotal. Its official website gives the latest definition of cloud native and the architecture principles of cloud native:

• Cloud native is a methodology that uses the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model to build and run applications. When companies use cloud-native architecture to develop and operate applications, they can more quickly respond to customer needs and bring new ideas to the market.
• Although public cloud has affected almost all industries’ thinking about infrastructure, cloud-like delivery is not limited to public environments. Cloud-native development is suitable for both public and private clouds. You only need to care about how the application is created and deployed, regardless of where it is deployed.
• More importantly, it can provide developers with on-demand access to computing power and modern data and application services. Cloud native development integrates DevOps, continuous delivery, microservices and containers.
• Cloud native architecture principles: DevOps, Microservices, Containers, Security

The original text is from: https://tanzu.vmware.com/cloud-native

Cloud Native Development CNCF

CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation), is a foundation organization jointly led by companies such as Google, RedHat, etc., the leaders in open source infrastructure. Its purpose is very clear. The Docker company in the container circle. CNCF has been a pioneer in the field of open source community orchestration through the Kubernetes project, and has since taken up the banner of cloud native definition and promotion.

In 2015, Google focused on combating Docker, so its definition of cloud native is relatively narrow, including the following three aspects:

• Microservice architecture
• Application containerization
• Support container orchestration and container scheduling

In 2018, known as the first year of cloud native, a large number of technology companies began to accept the concept of cloud native and joined the cloud native family one after another. In addition, mainstream cloud computing providers have successively joined the CNCF to continue to enrich the entire cloud-native ecosystem. CNCF redefined cloud native (and greatly expanded the extension of cloud native):

• Cloud native technology is beneficial for organizations to build and run elastically scalable applications in new dynamic environments such as public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Representative cloud native technologies include containers, service grids, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs.
• These technologies can build loosely coupled systems that are fault-tolerant, easy to manage, and easy to observe. Combined with reliable automation, cloud native technology enables engineers to easily make frequent and predictable major changes to the system.
• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is committed to fostering and maintaining a vendor-neutral open source ecosystem to promote cloud native technologies. We democratize the most cutting-edge models to make these innovations available to the public.

The original text is from: https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/main/DEFINITION.md

In 2021, hundreds of companies and institutions have joined CNCF to participate in the construction of cloud native, including large technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Huawei, and Alibaba Cloud. As of now (October 2021), CNCF has graduated 16 projects and 23 projects are in incubation. The following is the CNCF panorama:

The original picture is from: https://landscape.cncf.io , continuously updated...

In order to help enterprises and institutions better implement cloud-native applications on a complex infrastructure, CNCF provides ten specific implementation steps as a whole, and different steps can be combined with the products or services listed in Landscape to choose. The following is the cloud native practice roadmap given by CNCF:

The original picture is from: https://github.com/cncf/landscape , which is continuously updated, the Chinese translation is as follows:

With such a detailed cloud-native practice roadmap, I believe that every developer can easily build their own cloud-native applications.

summary

As cloud native ecology and boundaries continue to expand, the definition of cloud native has been changing. Different companies (Pivotal & CNCF) and different people have different definitions of it, and the same company has different definitions of cloud native at different time stages. Inferring from Moore's Law, the definition of cloud native will definitely continue to change in the future.

We might as well go beyond the technical level and try to analyze the two companies Pivotal and CNCF from the perspective of organization and position:

• Pivotal is positioned at the PaaS layer for end-to-end solutions and digital transformation. It has a set of models in terms of culture, process, methodology, blueprint planning, software development methods, etc. The main users are traditional large and medium-sized enterprise CIOs, and the overall strategy is top-down ；

• CNCF is based on the entire cloud computing ecosystem and technological innovation and changers, focusing on technology, tool chains and underlying infrastructure. The main users are developers in the open source community, the Internet and emerging companies. The influence can be imagined, and the overall strategy is self-defense. Bottom up
• Conclusion: Pivotal is the pioneer of Cloud Native concepts and methodology, and CNCF is the best practitioner of Cloud Native.

No matter how the definition of cloud native changes, its essence is to help developers and enterprises how to ensure that loosely coupled systems can be better monitored and managed on a complex infrastructure. Cloud-native ecological applications are becoming more and more luxuriant. I believe that in the near future, more great technologies will land on our side and affect everyone of us.

refer to

• "Cloud native is here, but unevenly distributed" https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/152430776
• "CNCF-Introduction to Cloud Native Computing Foundation" https://www.wenjiangs.com/doc/nicwvs6u
• "Basic History of Open Source: CNCF and Trail Map" https://blog.csdn.net/liumiaocn/article/details/100653635