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

Introduction to EDAS officially came to the 4.0 era and released a number of blockbuster new capabilities; at the same time, in conjunction with a 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 enterprise application architecture Modernization upgrade.

Author: An Shaofei

Review & Proofreading: Campfire

Editing & Typesetting: Wen Yan

Foreword

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) first development and design: from the original hierarchical/modular monolithic architecture to comprehensive microservices, using SpringCloud, Dubbo, Servicemesh and other technology stacks to build microservices. In this process, research and development Staff need to design microservice-oriented architecture, testers need to design test cases for micro-service architecture, write automated tests, and at the same time, as the environment goes to the cloud, it is also required that the development environment and the cloud environment can be connected and debugged.

2) followed by application delivery: from the previous virtual machine & batch script to complete the deployment and delivery, to the general standardized delivery through the container, K8s and other technologies, in this process, there are also some new requirements, such as batch Quickly deploy and deliver through application templates, and implement multi-scenario management and delivery through applications across clusters.

3) The is the changes in online operation and maintenance: from the original virtual machine dimension operation and maintenance to the container cluster dimension operation and maintenance. We need a higher perspective to help the development and operation students of the enterprise. Here we are A bird's-eye view operation and maintenance concept is proposed, and all K8s resources are viewed 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 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 ADD's product design is to improve the efficiency and productivity of enterprises in the development and design phase of cloud-native applications. It has 6 major features:

1. visual application architecture design: helps 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: realizes front-end "no code" development;
3. back-end code online development and debugging: ensures code security;
4. One-stop integration of interface-oriented test case management and automated execution configuration capabilities: realizes online automated testing;
5. integrates mainstream project management tools: improves the management efficiency of cloud-native development projects;
6. business application components are efficiently reused: uses the application component store to achieve comprehensive asset reuse;

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: Because there are different R&D teams for microservices, the environment is also diverse. When facing the corresponding microservice environment, special configuration adaptation is required, such as test parameters and automation use cases. The choice and so on.
2. challenges of As enterprise resources gradually become cloud-based management, most applications are also deployed in public clouds or current private cloud environments, which brings many testability challenges, such as Alibaba Cloud’s VPC environment The internal network cannot be accessed directly from the external network, and elastic IP or other open-up solutions are required; and with the containerization of applications, the network topology in K8s will also bring corresponding complexity.
3. use case generation: many cases, the development will focus on business research and development, which invisibly brings the cost of communication and collaboration to the test students. Because they do not understand the contract of the microservice interface, the use case generation cannot be quickly realized.

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 testing, and test history records can quickly generate API templates.

1. Then, through the test environment management , the microservices in the cloud are opened, and the API template and the setting ability of the test environment parameters are provided, and a set of test configurations can be directly mapped to an application in a microservice environment.

1. Provides a use case management function, unified template management 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 testing tool for microservices is equivalent to providing users with a microservice-oriented private network Postman on the cloud to automate the execution of use cases with one click, complete the microservice testing on the cloud, and improve the efficiency of microservice testing.

New upgrade of EDAS 4.0-End-cloud joint debugging 3.0

In response to changes in the deployment architecture of development and testing, EDAS 4.0 has comprehensively upgraded the end-to-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 microservice demand scenarios.

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

1. bi FBI Micro services: daily development, research and development probably written by local consumers Consumer Services, Provider may also be a service provider, so the two-way intermodulation is very necessary. 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 inter-modulation.

1. horizontal product support: Because micro-service applications often need to rely on resources such as DB, MQ, Redis, etc. when they are started or run, End-Cloud Joint Tuning 3.0 also provides corresponding support, in addition to micro-services, databases, caches, message queues, etc. It can also be accessed locally.

1. PaaS layer capability support: For the development of some commonly used diagnostic and observation capabilities, End-Cloud Joint Commissioning 3.0 also provides services such as service authentication, flow control, and link diagnosis capabilities to better improve the efficiency of development joint commissioning.

EDAS 4.0 brand 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.

EDAS 4.0 new upgrade-"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 control is no longer appropriate. It requires stocking and requires 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 dimensions: guarantees the stable operation of business applications by providing lossless and flow control capabilities, and then provides business-oriented gray-scale publishing capabilities to achieve controllable launch of applications, plus flexible triggers based on business indicators to achieve business Flexible load.

1. Application dimension: supports observing upstream and downstream calls according to the application topology, and uses 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.

1. Resource Dimension: provides one-click retrieval to quickly locate the 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.

summary

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 centralization of some enterprise businesses. 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 to view EDAS related introduction~

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