EDAS 4.0 helps enterprises realize one-stop microservice architecture transformation and K8s containerization upgrade

Author: An Shaofei
Review & Proofreading: Campfire
Editing & Typesetting: Wen Yan

Preface

In recent years, the digitization of enterprises has become faster and faster with the popularization of the Internet, and the technical architecture has also undergone several changes, especially in the online business sector. In the beginning, the enterprise's requirement was to make the business online and online as much as possible, resulting in the early online business application architecture, that is, the monolithic application, which mainly consists of adding business logic to the Web application and storing back-end data in the database.

With the increase of online services and the increase of more visits, it is found that single applications can no longer support services, and gradually evolve to distributed applications. At the same time, load balancing is added to the front end to accept increasing requests, and more middleware and databases such as messages and caching are also introduced in the middle.

As the development of cloud computing evolves to the cloud-native era, enterprise applications have also begun to build containerization and microservices for the cloud. In this process, different changes from the previous stage have been brought about. The main abstraction is Changes in application development and design, application delivery, and online operation and maintenance.

New demands for cloud-native application services

With cloud-native applications increasingly becoming the mainstream technology architecture, how cloud-native applications can make better use of cloud services, realize cloud-service-oriented architecture design, and make business more agile research and development, and rapid joint debugging verification is particularly important. This requires the platform to provide a one-stop PaaS product to support it.

1) The first is the development and design: from the original hierarchical/modular monolithic architecture to a comprehensive microservices, the technology stacks such as SpringCloud, Dubbo, and Servicemesh are used to build microservices. In this process, R&D personnel need For microservice-oriented architecture design, testers need to design test cases for microservice architecture, write automated tests, and at the same time go to the cloud with the environment, it also requires that the development environment and the cloud environment can be connected and debugged.

2) Application delivery: From the previous virtual machines & batch scripts to complete the deployment and delivery, to the general standardized delivery through container, K8s and other technologies, some new requirements have also appeared in this process, such as batch applications Templates for rapid deployment and delivery, and cross-cluster applications to achieve multi-scenario management and delivery.

3) The third part is the change of online operation and maintenance: from the original virtual machine dimension operation and maintenance to the container cluster dimension operation and maintenance, a higher perspective is needed to help the development and operation students of the enterprise. Here we present a bird's-eye view The concept of operation and maintenance is based on a bird's-eye view of all K8s resources from the application perspective. The operation and maintenance management is no longer solely for the K8s atomic resources such as Deployment, Service, and Ingress, but a bird's-eye view of unified supervision and control to achieve operation and maintenance.

EDAS 4.0 comprehensive upgrade & ADD 1.0 heavy release

In response to the new demands arising from the evolution of new scenarios in the three stages of the life cycle mentioned above, EDAS officially released version 4.0, adding new capabilities such as multi-cluster application management, microservice API management and testing, and end-cloud joint debugging 3.0. At the same time, a major release of new products --- ADD v1.0, a cloud-native application development and design platform, greatly improves the efficiency of cloud-native application development.

Next, we will introduce them in detail one by one.

Cloud native application design and development platform ADD 1.0 released

In response to the needs of the development and design stage, the cloud native application design and development platform ADD came into being. The original intention of the ADD product is to improve the efficiency and productivity of the enterprise in the development and design phase of cloud native applications. It has 6 major features:

1. Visual application architecture design: Help enterprises to conveniently settle and maintain the original architecture discussion design on the offline whiteboard;
2. Front-end web application drag, pull, and drop design: realize front-end "no code" development;
3. Online development and debugging of back-end code: to ensure code safety;
4. One-stop integration of interface-oriented test case management and automated execution configuration capabilities: realize online automated testing;
5. Integrate mainstream project management tools: improve the management efficiency of cloud-native development projects;
6. Efficient reuse of business application components: With the help of the application component store, comprehensive asset reuse is realized;

EDAS 4.0 new upgrade-microservice API management and testing

In the process scenario of microservices, we summarized the following three challenges:

1. Multi-environment adaptation challenges: Since microservices have different R&D teams, the environments are also diverse. When facing the corresponding microservice environment, special configuration adaptation is required, such as the selection of test parameters and automation use cases. and many more.
2. Application testability challenges: With the gradual cloud management of enterprise resources, most applications are also deployed in public clouds or current private cloud environments. This brings many testability challenges, such as the inability in Alibaba Cloud’s VPC environment. Direct external network access requires elastic IP or other open-up solutions; and as applications are containerized, the network topology in K8s will also bring corresponding complexity.
3. Challenges of use case generation: In many cases, development will focus on business research and development, which invisibly brings the cost of communication and collaboration to test students. Because of the lack of understanding of the microservice interface contract, use case generation cannot be quickly achieved.

In order to solve the above challenges, we provide one-click testing tools (API management and testing) for microservices on the cloud to solve corresponding problems:

1. Through the API quick test capability, you can directly open up the EDAS application, initiate a test, and the test history record can quickly generate an API template.
2. Then, through the management of the test environment, the microservices in the cloud are opened up, and the ability to set API templates and test environment parameters is provided, and a set of test configurations can be directly mapped to an application in a microservice environment.
3. Provides a use case management function, unified template management of use cases, and realizes use case adaptation, that is, this use case can be configured and executed according to the running microservice environment.

Therefore, EDAS's one-click microservice testing tool is equivalent to providing users with a microservice-oriented private network Postman on the cloud, which automatically executes use cases with one click, completes microservice testing on the cloud, and improves the efficiency of microservice testing.

New upgrade of EDAS 4.0-End-Cloud Joint Commissioning 3.0

In response to changes in the deployment architecture of development and testing, EDAS 4.0 has fully upgraded the end-cloud joint debugging capabilities of microservices, which is also the third upgrade since 2020. This upgrade can support enterprise users to quickly run local code in the process of containerized development, and connect with microservices on the cloud. The local can be a container or a process, which is a good realization of a set of microservice environment on the cloud, and multiple R&D and collaborative development of microservices demand scenarios.

The terminal-cloud joint debugging 3.0 has mainly upgraded three major capabilities:

1. Two-way joint debugging of microservices: In daily development, the R&D local may write Consumer service consumers or Provider service providers, so it is very necessary to realize two-way intermodulation. After the local application is pulled up, with the help of the channel service provided by the tool, it is easy to get through the proxy on the cloud and perform intermodulation.
2. Horizontal product support: Because micro-service-oriented applications often need to rely on resources such as DB, MQ, and Redis when they are started or run, terminal-cloud joint debugging 3.0 also supports corresponding support. In addition to micro-services, databases, caches, message queues, etc. Can give local access.
3. PaaS layer capability support: For the development of commonly used diagnostic and observation capabilities, End-Cloud Joint Commissioning 3.0 also provides capabilities such as service authentication, flow control, and link diagnosis to better improve the efficiency of development joint commissioning.

EDAS 4.0 new upgrade-multi-cluster application management

We see that with the development of business, some enterprises gradually have challenges and demands such as cluster-level disaster recovery, multi-regional deployment, and simultaneous business deployment of applications, and some enterprises have to deploy their businesses overseas to ensure compliance, and Some government and enterprise customers need to centrally control applications in various places.

In order to cope with the challenges of new business scenarios for application delivery, EDAS 4.0 also provides a brand new multi-cluster application management support, with the help of a unified application template to achieve universal cross-cluster application deployment management. For example, creating applications, updating applications, changing application configurations, etc. The management capabilities on the left side of the original single cluster are all upgraded to multi-cluster dimensional capabilities. In other words, it is possible to conduct unified governance and unified observation of a multi-cluster application entity from the perspective of multi-cluster applications. It is no longer necessary to jump back and forth between multiple clusters, solve the aforementioned new challenges in business scenarios, and help customers Realize the requirements of cluster disaster recovery and multi-site deployment.

New upgrade of EDAS 4.0-"a bird's-eye view" operation and maintenance

Finally, in response to changes in online operation and maintenance, the EDAS 4.0 upgrade provides a bird's-eye view operation and maintenance support.

Cloud-native applications will have smaller granularity after microservices and containerization. Therefore, fine-grained management and control are no longer appropriate. They need to be restocked and require a bird's-eye view of management, operation and maintenance. We believe that bird's-eye view operation and maintenance can be carried out layer by layer from the dimensions of business, application, and resources.

1. Business dimension: By providing flow lossless and flow control capabilities, to ensure the stable operation of business applications, and then provide business-oriented gray release capabilities to achieve controllable launch of applications, plus flexible triggers based on business indicators to achieve flexible business loads .
2. Application dimension: Support the observation of upstream and downstream calls according to the application topology, and use application observation and alarms to ensure timely detection of application-level service interface problems. And you can directly make uniform changes at the application level, without having to go deep into the underlying workload dimension to operate.
3. Resource dimension: Provide one-click retrieval to quickly locate resources associated with any application in EDAS. The resource profile capability is also added. The resource profile of the application is directly associated with the application instance, which can help users to detect mismatched and idling specific instance resources with one click, and provide dynamic scheduling to achieve more reliable dynamic resource allocation.

Summarize

EDAS is a very mature product. From the 1.0~2.0 era, it is built around the enterprise business center. It can better help enterprises realize resource clustering and business elasticity. It also provides a standard service-oriented development framework. Supported the online and mid-Taiwan business of some enterprises. By 2020, we have released EDAS 3.0, which realizes the integration of business application supervision and control, and provides non-intrusive dual-mode microservice support (that is, Java+ multilingual microservices).

Now, EDAS has officially entered the 4.0 era and released a number of blockbuster new capabilities; at the same time, in conjunction with the new product-cloud native application design and development platform ADD 1.0, together release the cloud native application development & operation and maintenance PaaS product family to help modernize enterprise application architecture upgrade.

Click here , you can view EDAS related introduction~