Service grid defines a new path for enterprises to go to the cloud! | Forrester X Ant Group Releases Service Grid White Paper

Forrester believes:

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

In a normalized hybrid heterogeneous environment, facing the diversified trend of cloud-native application paths and full-dimensional challenges, enterprises must effectively combine service grid technology with microservices in order to truly release the dividends of cloud-native technology.

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.

The white paper first systematically analyzes the risks and challenges faced by global enterprises under market trends such as asset modernization and digitization, and the challenges they face. Forrester proposes a technology strategy model that adapts to the future (Future Fit).

That is to take the customer as the center, help companies quickly restructure their business structure and capabilities, adjust their operating methods, and meet the needs of future customers and employees with adaptability, creativity and resilience. The platform, practice and partners will become the 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 in order to truly release cloud native technology. dividend.

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.

• Observability

Through the service grid, the Sidecar agent can actively observe the invocation relationship of related microservices and perform unified log records of link information. And enterprise-level service grid monitoring tools should be able to analyze and correlate the telemetry data generated by the service grid. 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.

• Microservices GovernanceMicroservices

The main governance capabilities 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.

• Grayscale 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.

• Manageability of microservice framework

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. The microservice framework itself only needs to focus on the core 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-grade distributed architecture SOFAStack in the evolution process of the five-generation architecture in the past ten years and after sufficient iterations and verifications.

The service mesh product SOFA Mesh 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 to achieve gray release, blue-green Deployment and rolling upgrades help enterprises with digital 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. In this way, applications can be quickly implanted in Sidecar to complete the Meshization, obtain distributed dividends, safe and 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.

Interviews with Ant Group customers mentioned that 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-level rural credit with a total assets of more than one trillion yuan.

With the rapid development of financial technology, the bank is actively accelerating its digital transformation. In the process of transformation, a series of problems such as the difficulty of unified management of heterogeneous systems and the binding of technology stacks were encountered. Ant Group SOFA Mesh helps this user:

Build a bank-level communication network, heterogeneous system service governance, low-cost cloud native landing, realize non-intrusive and smooth cloud access, no need to modify business code, no need to consider dependencies;

At the same time, it supports flexible evolution of the architecture, compatible with traditional heterogeneous systems such as ESB, and helps customers maximize the value of going to the cloud.

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

• Unified monitoring capabilities

SOFA Mesh can realize the unified monitoring of traditional technology stack and cloud native environment, and improve the efficiency of problem location.

• Accurate fault location

For the service cloud native environment that has completed the transformation of microservices, the service grid provides powerful traffic control capabilities, and accurately locates faults through the call chain.

• Resource consumption saving for failure review

For financial companies with extremely high regulatory requirements, they must conduct a comprehensive review 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 capacity improvement

The public components, business components, and security components of the decoupled microservices 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.

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