In recent years, the development of cloud computing is in full swing, and heterogeneous changes are changing with each passing day. This is a clear development trend at the infrastructure layer. It is worth noting that with the increasing complexity of the infrastructure, it also brings great challenges to the unified resource scheduling of the entire infrastructure. In the increasingly complex heterogeneous infrastructure, how should existing applications and incremental applications go to the cloud? Faced with the challenges posed by a large number of heterogeneous infrastructures, how can companies maximize the value of going to the cloud?

Service grid (SOFAStack Mesh) is an enhanced service grid platform independently developed by Ant Group based on financial-grade production practices. It deeply integrates traditional microservices and Service Mesh technology. Its core technology has undergone large-scale production by Ant Group. Practice verification. It deeply and seamlessly connects SOFAStack classic application services and container application services, providing customers with a simple and easy-to-use Service Mesh architecture support platform. Currently, service grids have been widely used in large financial institutions.

Recently, Ant Group and Forrester Corporation jointly released the "Total Economic Impact of Ant Group Service Grid" (hereinafter referred to as the white paper). The white paper is based on the SOFAStack, the cloud-native distributed architecture of Ant Group, combined with the cost savings and business benefits of customers, to provide a new path and reference practice for enterprises to go to the cloud.

White Paper first systematic analysis of the risks and challenges of global enterprises in the assets of modern, digital and other market trends facing the challenges, Forrester made to accommodate future (Future Fit) technology strategy model, that is customer-centric, to help businesses quickly Restructure business structure and capabilities, adjust operation methods, and meet the needs of future customers and employees with adaptability, creativity and resilience. Platforms, practices, and partners will become key factors in building this technology strategy.

Forrester believes that cloud-native platforms, including containers, microservices and service grids, will become the core engine for building modern enterprises that adapt to the future.

Forrester pointed out in the report that in a normalized hybrid heterogeneous environment, facing the diversified trend of cloud native adoption paths and full-dimensional challenges, enterprises must effectively combine service grid technology with microservices to truly release cloud native technology Bonus.

Specifically, enterprise technology decision-makers and practitioners should actively embrace service grid technology, and commit to achieving strategic and platform-based empowerment in a heterogeneous distributed environment in the following four aspects: observability, microservice governance , Grayscale release and deployment, and manageability of the microservice framework.

Through the service grid, the Sidecar agent can actively observe the invocation relationship of related microservices and uniformly log the link information, and the enterprise-level service grid monitoring tool should be able to monitor the telemetry data generated by the service grid Perform analysis and correlation to provide enterprise development and operation and maintenance teams with visual link topology, real-time monitoring reports, policy-based alarms, and distributed tracking and fault location capabilities.

management also include service discovery, traffic management, secure communication, and application elastic scaling. The service grid improves the configurability and robustness of microservices runtime through mechanisms such as policy-based health checks, dynamic routing, automatic retry, service fuse, service degradation, and service current limiting, thereby significantly simplifying microservices in heterogeneous environments. The technical complexity of service governance.

gray-scale release and deployment The service grid provides a gray-scale proxy opening mechanism and an effective rollback mechanism that are transparent to the caller and the server, so as to achieve integrated, refined and intelligent gray-scale release and deployment capabilities. While ensuring business continuity and customer experience stability, it accelerates customer value delivery.

framework manageability With the help of service grid, enterprises can sink service governance capabilities from various heterogeneous microservice frameworks to the infrastructure level where the service grid is located, and the microservice framework itself only needs to focus on the core of the business Implementation and language differences, so as to realize the lightweight of the microservice framework at the service governance level.

In the face of technological development and market demand, Ant Group has gradually developed a set of financial-level distributed architecture SOFAStack in the evolution process of the five-generation architecture for more than ten years and has gradually precipitated a set of financial-grade distributed architecture SOFAStack, of which the service grid product SOFA Mesh It is an enterprise-level cloud-native network communication solution developed based on the Istio open source project. It provides distributed applications with traffic management, security encryption, observability, service governance and other capabilities, achieving gray-scale release, blue-green deployment, and rolling upgrades, helping enterprises to digitalize Transformation.

Ma Zhenxiong, product director of Ant Group's Digital Technology Division, believes that, compared to other cloud methods, Service Mesh can achieve cross-platform, cross-protocol, and non-intrusive transformation of business codes, so that applications can be quickly implanted in sidecars to complete the mesh and obtain distribution. Type dividends, security are observable, and the entire architecture evolves smoothly. In the process of architecture upgrade, enterprises can proceed step by step, step by step, and achieve end-to-end security, credibility, and full-link observability.

Through interviews with Ant Group customers, Forrester found that both traditional financial institutions and Internet financial institutions face common challenges under hybrid architecture, including infrastructure upgrades, application development upgrades, and cloud-on-cloud interactions. Forrester said that for financial institutions, grid services can achieve significant cost reductions and efficiency gains in terms of single application transformation costs, cloud-native environment developer efficiency, operation and maintenance security management efficiency, and replacement of legacy systems. After studying three years of data and calculating, after using Ant's service grid products, the return on investment of its customers reached 99%. "

Take, for example, a provincial rural credit facility with total assets of more than 1 trillion yuan.

With the rapid development of financial technology, the bank is actively accelerating its digital transformation. In the process of transformation, we encountered a series of problems such as the difficulty of unified management of heterogeneous systems and the binding of technology stacks. Ant Group SOFA Mesh helped the user build a bank-level communication network, heterogeneous system service management, and low-cost cloud native landing. Achieve non-intrusive and smooth cloud migration, no need to modify business code, and no need to consider dependencies; at the same time, it supports flexible evolution of architecture, compatible with traditional heterogeneous systems such as ESB, and helps customers maximize the value of cloud migration.

In addition, SOFA Mesh can also achieve the following important non-quantitative important benefits:

unified monitoring capabilities SOFA Mesh can achieve unified monitoring of traditional technology stacks and cloud native environments, and improve the efficiency of problem location.
Accurate fault location For the service cloud native environment that has completed the micro-service transformation, the service grid provides powerful traffic control capabilities.
Accurately locate faults through the call chain.
failure recovery resource consumption saving For financial companies with extremely high regulatory requirements, a comprehensive review should be carried out after a failure occurs to ensure the future availability of the system and avoid similar accidents. However, re-listing also consumes a lot of time for development and operation and maintenance personnel, which has an impact on work efficiency.
component capability enhancement decoupled microservice public components, business components, and security components can all achieve performance improvements.

In the future, Ant Group hopes to work with more partners and use the successful practical experience of SOFAStack and service grid to allow more enterprise users to go to the cloud at low cost and move towards a new era of digital cloud native.

Click [White Paper] to view the full text of the white paper for the first time!


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