Author | Liu Yu (flower name: Jiang Yu)
In 2021, the serverless architecture started a new year of vigorous development in "The Forrester Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2021" released by Forrester, an authoritative consulting agency. In the report, not only the evaluation of the world's mainstream serverless platforms, but also a more scientific summary of the past technology development, the prospect and exploration of the future development vision of the product.
As one of the important trends in cloud computing in the next decade, serverless architecture has shown great potential. Forrester believes that the rise of serverless architecture has made FaaS (Function As A Service) a new way of providing cloud computing capabilities after IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. expects that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will migrate from the original host architecture to the serverless architecture.
- In 2018, Gartner, a world-renowned IT consulting and research organization, released a report, listing serverless architecture as one of the top ten technology trends that will affect infrastructure and operation and maintenance in the future;
- In 2019, UC Berkeley stated in the paper "Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing" that "Serverless architecture will become the default computing paradigm in the cloud era";
- In 2020, CNCF released the "2020 China Cloud Native Survey Report". In the report, we can see that the serverless architecture is continuing to grow. 31% of units are using serverless in production, 41% are evaluating, and 12% plan to use it in the next 12 years. month use;
- In the past 2021, not only the evaluations and reports of Forrester and Datadog, but also the trend of Serverless in the process of COVID-19 affecting the global economy and technological development.
This article will be through the development of Serverless architecture, including but not limited to all kinds of institutions Serverless architecture evaluation, research ; each cloud vendor on Serverless architecture construction ; Serverless architecture community development and ecological expansion situation etc. Review the development of the serverless architecture in 2021, and make a relevant inventory and summary of the development of the serverless architecture.
Industry and Serverless Architecture
1. Serverless architecture in the eyes of the industry
2021 will be a year of great attention for serverless architecture. In this year, not only a series of institutions such as Forester and DataDog will pay attention to serverless architecture; More abundant; more and more industries have begun to recruit talents with serverless architecture on the community and platform.
This not only shows that the serverless architecture has undergone several years of development, gradually matures and is accepted by more people; it also more intuitively shows that the serverless architecture has truly "been more widely concerned". So far, marks that the serverless architecture has begun to play a more important role in the process of promoting cloud computing.
1) In March 2021, the authoritative consulting agency Forrester released the first quarter of 2021 FaaS platform (Function-As-A-Service Platforms) evaluation report
In this more rigorous and scientific evaluation, there are three cloud vendors in the leader quadrant, namely Alibaba, Amazon and Microsoft; there are also three cloud vendors in the list in China, namely Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei.
Although the commercialized serverless architecture was first kicked off by AWS, Chinese cloud computing companies quickly entered the ranks of pioneers in the development of serverless, and not only Alibaba Cloud Function Computing is in the leading position, but also has a very high ranking. The top Tencent Yunyun function was rated as a strong performer by virtue of its product service matrix, partner ecology, and excellent performance in the dimension of customer scale.
2) DataDog will also release a Serverless related report
In the report, DataDog believes that the utilization rate of serverless has surged by 250%, so serverless has been pushed to the front again and has become the focus of many people's attention.
According to DataDog research, businesses that have been using Lambda have significantly increased their usage since 2019. By early 2021, these companies are calling functions 3.5 times per day than they were two years ago. Additionally, within the same set of Lambda users, each enterprise's functions run an average of 900 hours per day.
It can be seen that the business scale of the architecture is rapidly expanding. In addition to the content related to the 161fb4c40e28d6 user volume and , this research report also includes the architecture 161fb4c40e28d8, tool chain selection, and at runtime. Information worth watching. Through these data, it is not difficult to find that compared with 2020, Serverless abroad will expand rapidly in 2021, the function execution time will continue to increase, the usage methods will become more mature, and the developer tools will be more open.
3) In 2021, the job opportunities of the
It can be seen through a recruitment platform that in the past year, not only 161fb4c40e2910 major cloud vendors talents, but also Guangzhou Opal, Juhuasuan, Zebra, NetEase, Agora, companies in the 161fb4c40e2912 industry, including related talents, which fully shows from another perspective that the serverless architecture is gradually gaining popularity and has been adopted by more company teams, and the related talent gap is also gradually appear.
From 2012, after the concept of serverless was officially proposed; in 2014, AWS led Lambda to start the commercialization of serverless; in 2017, major manufacturers have deployed the serverless field; in 2019, serverless became a hot topic and was discussed by many people in KubeCon Participate in the discussion; by 2020 and 2021, various institutions will conduct large-scale research, evaluation and reports on the serverless architecture, and many enterprises have begun to select the serverless architecture to make it a large-scale implementation.
With the continuous advancement of time and the continuous progress of various technologies, Serverless is developing in a more complete and clear direction. It is believed that with the advent of the 5G era, serverless will play a crucial role in more fields.
2. Serverless architecture in the eyes of academia
At the stage of rapid development of cloud computing, the form of cloud computing is also constantly evolving. From IaaS to PaaS to SaaS, cloud computing has gradually "found the correct development direction".
In an article titled "Why The Future of Software and Apps is Serverless" written by Iron.io's VP Ken Form in 2012, a new point of view was put forward and the word "Serverless" was brought into the fold for the first time. the public view. :
Even though cloud computing has gradually emerged, everyone is still revolving around servers. This won't last long though, cloud applications are moving towards serverless, which will have a major impact on application creation and distribution,
1) 《Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back》
In 2018, the development of serverless was faster than expected. This year, UC Berkeley published this article expressing concerns and challenges to the serverless architecture.
Points made in this article:
Today's FaaS offerings take a giant step forward in cloud programming by providing autoscaling capabilities, which provide a virtually manageable, seemingly limitless computing platform. However, they ignore the importance of efficient data processing; secondly, they hinder the development of distributed systems.
Any new technology or concept will encounter certain challenges and concerns, just like when cloud computing appeared, it was also considered by some people (such as Oracle President Larry Ellison, GNU founder Richard Stallman) to be just another commercial hype. Concept, nothing new, even stupid.
Of course, it has also been proved that any new thing can grow more robustly only after experiencing various challenges and doubts, and Serverless is no exception.
2) 《Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing》
In 2019, one year later, UC Berkeley published another article on the serverless architecture. In this article, the author sharply asserted that serverless will be rapidly adopted and developed rapidly in the next ten years.
And made more radical assertions about the Serverless architecture:
Serverless will become the default computing paradigm in the cloud era and will replace serverful computing, which also means the end of the server-client model, and the serverless architecture will lead the next decade of cloud computing.
In the academic world, not only for the Serverless UC Berkeley published a number of papers, many domestic and foreign universities have invested enough energy to conduct scientific exploration Serverless field. From the current point of view, Serverless has become a research hotspot in the academic world. Every year, papers related to Serverless architecture have a relatively obvious growth trend:
In 2021, the number of papers on serverless architecture in academia will not only increase again, but its research content and direction will also become more complete and comprehensive, including but not limited to cold start optimization, mirror acceleration, scheduling strategy, caching mechanism and many other hot spots problem.
3) 《FaaSNet: Scalable and Fast Provisioning of Custom Serverless Container Runtimes at Alibaba Cloud Function Compute》
Take the paper jointly published by the Alibaba Cloud function computing team and George Mason University Leap Lab in the USENIX ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference) as an example.
In the article, a more in-depth exploration is made on the problem of "image pulling and cold start optimization" after the combination of container image ecology and serverless architecture. In terms of speeding up the distribution of images, the common mature P2P solutions in the industry do not achieve function-level perception, and most of the topology logic in the cluster is a fully connected network mode, which puts forward certain requirements on the performance of the machine.
These pre-settings are not suitable for the system implementation of FC ECS. For this reason, a lightweight system middleware with high scalability, FaaSNet, is designed and proposed. FaaSNet uses the image acceleration format for container distribution. The target role scenario is FaaS. Large-scale container image startup under burst traffic (function cold start).
The core components of FaaSNet include Function Tree (FT), which is a decentralized, self-balancing binary tree topology in which all nodes in the tree topology are equivalent.
FaaSNet can realize real-time networking according to the dynamic nature of the workload, which has achieved function-awareness, without the need for pre-workload analysis and preprocessing, thereby helping the serverless platform to unlock the technical bottleneck of high scalability and fast image distribution speed, enabling custom container images More in-depth and extensive application of the scene.
4) 《Faa$T: A Transparent Auto-Scaling Cache for Serverless Applications》
In addition, as the top conference in the field of cloud computing, SoCC, in the papers received in 2021, you can also see the shadow of many serverless architectures.
For example, the paper using Microsoft Azure Functions as the experimental platform, aiming at the characteristics of function stateless in the serverless architecture and the Cache problem of the FaaS platform, proposes an automatic scaling distributed cache Faa$T for serverless applications, which can greatly improve the Performance of serverless functions. Compared with the existing method of using external storage as a Cache system, Faa$T can reduce most of the overhead.
4)《ServerMore: Opportunistic Execution of Serverless Functions in the Cloud》
This article introduces a server-level resource manager, ServerMore, in view of the short execution time and low resource requirements of serverless functions. Serverless functions and Serverful virtual machines can be scheduled to execute tasks on the same physical machine. ServerMore dynamically adjusts the CPU, memory bandwidth and LLC resources on the server to ensure that the hosting between Serverful and Serverless workloads does not affect application tail latencies .
By selectively using serverless architectures and inferring performance against black-box serverful workloads, ServerMore improves resource utilization by an average of 35.9% to 245% compared to previous models; while delaying serverful applications and serverless architectures minimal impact.
In the past year, academic research on serverless architecture has become increasingly popular, and many excellent serverless architecture related papers have appeared in top conferences in various fields, which not only contributes to the prosperity of the serverless academic ecosystem, but also helps to break through the serverless architecture. The technical bottleneck is to realize the upgrading of the technical architecture in the field of cloud computing.
In addition, the domestic book monograph will gradually increase in 2021. In just one year, there will be "Front-end Serverless: Full-stack Serverless Architecture Practice", "Serverless From Beginner to Advanced" The publication of books including "Architecture, Principles and Practice", "Serverless Engineering Practice: From Beginner to Advanced", "Huawei Serverless Core Technology and Practice" has greatly enriched the domestic serverless training and education material ecology.
With the development of time, the serverless architecture has played an increasingly important role in more fields. While attracting more attention, the serverless architecture has gradually become the research object of many scholars and laboratories. The organic integration of industry, how to empower academic scientific research through industry, the iterative upgrading of industrial technology architecture through academic scientific research, and the advancement of the entire industry, this is not only what the serverless architecture needs to do, but also today's Serverless architecture is doing.
Serverless Architecture Development
1. Serverless architecture driven by manufacturers
Although CNCF released the "CNCF Serverless Whitepaper V1.0" in 2018, it clarified the technical overview of Serverless, the status of the ecosystem, and formulated relevant specifications and standards, but today, the Serverless architecture is more level, It is still mainly driven by cloud vendors.
On the one hand, it promotes the upgrading of technology iterations, and on the other hand, it promotes the implementation of serverless architectures in more fields; today, when the cloud computing competition has become fierce, the performance of serverless architectures in different manufacturers, the speed of update iterations and future development plans are also abnormal. fierce.
In the past 2021, various cloud vendors have made great efforts in the serverless field. From the perspective of the FaaS platform, in the past year:
- In order to obtain higher performance, many cloud vendors have begun to upgrade and innovate their underlying technology architecture on a large scale, including: Alibaba Cloud Serverless has migrated to the Dragon architecture on a large scale, and released it at the 2021 Yunqi Conference Serverless GPU instance; Yuanrong, as the core of Huawei Cloud Serverless, went from behind the scenes to the front and released FunctionGraph 2.0;
- In order to further integrate the serverless architecture and the container image ecosystem, major manufacturers have supported the serverlessization of container images. AWS Lambda continues to make efforts at the container image level, and currently supports the serverless deployment of 10G images;
- In order to achieve better observable results and help businesses and developers get the detailed status of resources more quickly, AWS Lambda officially launched Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights in December last year, and will continue to update it in April and 2021. In November, AWS Lambda container images and AWS Lambda functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors were supported respectively; and Alibaba Cloud Function Calculation is also continuously updated and iterative in terms of observability, aiming at more performance indicators, abnormal indicators, and tracking indicators. For more detailed processing and analysis, it also provides more detailed support for asynchronous calls, in addition to instance-level indicators pioneered in the industry;
- At the event ecology level, AWS Lambda has strengthened the integration of related event sources such as SQS and MSK authentication in the past year, and further strengthened the integration with EventBridge, providing a unified access plane to support EDA architecture application development; Cloud Function Computing chose to deeply integrate with EventBridgt from the very beginning. Through a standardized and unified way, it connected with the event sources of Alibaba Cloud ecosystem and customer business SaaS systems, and quickly expanded its event ecosystem from dozens of event sources to nearly 100. Through the EventBridge trigger, it can provide developers with rich support for event source triggering capabilities, empower more business scenarios, and help customers integrate with the Serverless ecosystem more conveniently;
Of course, in the past year, the serverless architecture has developed rapidly, although the above has briefly summarized the underlying technical architecture, container image ecology, observability, and event ecology of various cloud vendors. But in fact, in 2021, the efforts of various cloud vendors in the serverless architecture, especially the FaaS platform, will not only stop there. CFC also gradually supports functions such as single instance and multiple concurrency...
As the "default computing paradigm in the cloud era" described by UC Berkeley, the contributions of various cloud vendors in serverless architecture in 2021 can be said to be various. Of course, from the perspective of FaaS alone, it is not difficult to find that in the process of updating and iterating of various cloud vendors, there are several important routes that are gradually becoming clear:
- The event ecology is gradually enriched, especially the integration of message middleware and FaaS platform is more and more closely;
- The relationship between the FaaS platform and the container ecosystem is getting closer and closer, and the support for the container ecosystem is getting stronger and stronger;
- New runtime support, the old runtime has gradually become one of the burdens faced by the FaaS platform. Various cloud vendors are not only striving to support more updated runtimes, but also trying to expand their own Custom Runtime and Custom Container application scenarios ;
- Traditional framework migration has gradually become a relatively clear scenario support, and most cloud vendors have begun to introduce traditional framework migration solutions and serverless deployment solutions;
- As an important part of the serverless architecture, the FaaS platform has gradually been unable to meet more serverless business deployment scenarios, and the application hosting model is emerging. Although in the past, some articles have questioned that this model does not conform to the spirit of serverless, facts and time have proved that the application hosting model is an indispensable technology selection in the development of serverless architecture;
- The application scenario drive of the FaaS platform is becoming more and more obvious. Whether it is SAM launching a machine learning inference template suitable for AWS Lambda or Alibaba Cloud Function Computing releasing GPU instances, scenario-based support has gradually become one of the important directions and goals for technology upgrades and iterations. one;
- Since the FaaS platform may make business resources more fragmented, more delicate and more scientific rights management needs are gradually emerging;
Serverless cloud computing is the next 10 years, the main form, driven by cloud vendors, Serverless architecture in addition to being a quick update iterations FaaS level, in BaaS level is constantly accelerating pace of progress .
With the popularization of cloud native and serverless concepts, event-driven has once again become a buzzword in the field of cloud application architecture. In 2018, the Gartner evaluation report listed the Event-Driven Model as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends, and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) will become the mainstream of microservices in the future. The report also made the following predictions:
By 2022, the software model of event notification will be the solution for more than 60% of new digital businesses; at the same time, by 2022, more than 50% of business organizations will participate in the ecosystem of event-driven digital business services;
In May of the same year, the Cloud Native CNCF Foundation hosted the open source CloudEvents project, which aims to describe events in a unified and standardized format to enhance the interoperability between different services, platforms and systems. The importance of the diagram cannot be overstated.
In the past year or so, the efforts of various cloud manufacturers in the event ecology can be seen. Taking Alibaba Cloud as an example, after launching the EventBridge event bus in 2020, it has been continuously upgraded and iterated in the past year, adding nearly 100 event accesses. From IaaS to PaaS, hundreds of millions of events are generated every day, and they are more deeply integrated with function computing; while in AWS, EventBridge products have been updated every month on average in the past year, including but not limited to CloudWatch Synthetics uses Amazon EventBridge to support updates and iterations of canary events, the ability to share events between event buses in the same account and region.
In addition to the continuous improvement of the event ecology, the infrastructure of the serverless architecture is also being rapidly built. Serverless DB has become one of the focuses of many manufacturers' exploration, and the workflow has gradually become a "must fight".
With the slogan of All on Serverless, the slogans of Serverless First and Serverless Faster continue to sound. In the past year or so, we have to feel the development speed of technology and the growth speed of serverless architecture driven by manufacturers.
2. Community-driven
The development of the serverless architecture is inseparable from the drive of cloud vendors and the support of the open source community. architecture is gradually becoming more general and better to use, whether it is the continuous attention and empowerment of the serverless architecture by foundations such as CNCF, or the construction of the serverless architecture by other serverless communities and open source projects. The technical architecture has become a simpler and more valuable technology selection.
1. Construction of tool chain
In the past year, as an emerging serverless tool chain project, the Serverless Devs open source tool officially released version 2.0. from the slogan of "no vendor lock-in" to "serverless application full life cycle management tools".
From multi-cloud deployment support, to open source tool chain construction, to open serverless community building, from the official release of the Serverless Devs Model, to the launch of the shortest path migration solution for traditional frameworks under the Servelress architecture, to bold exploration at the level of serverless application debugging, successively Release local debugging, end-cloud joint debugging, cloud debugging and other functions, and finally to the construction and launch of the -cloud industry-level solution Serverless Application Center, 161fb4c40e2f1c Serverless Devs is building an open source and open Serverless toolchain system through the power of the open source community , to create a community platform that has no vendor lock-in and allows developers to use the serverless architecture like a mobile phone.
When it comes to the construction of the serverless tool chain, we have to say the Serverless Framework, as an overseas veteran serverless tool chain open source project with over 40,000 Stars.
In the past year, the Serverless Framework has also been intensively updated and iterated. After the upgrade from the Plugin version to the Component version, the Serverless Framework has cooperated more closely with Tencent Cloud Functions in China. In the past year, Serverless Framework has made bold explorations and brave attempts at the level of Cli Design, the dimension of functional support, or at the level of enterprise-level development and application. In China, it also launched the Serverless Application Center service with Tencent Cloud Function. , to provide developers with more convenient application deployment methods and application management capabilities.
Of course, in addition to the multi-cloud developer toolchain systems at home and abroad such as Serverless Devs and Serverless Framework, many serverless-related open source toolchain systems at home and abroad have also undergone rapid iterations and upgrades in the past year, including AWS SAMCLI, CloudBaseFramework, etc. It is worth mentioning that CloudBaseFramework, a cloud-native integrated deployment tool, as a very potential developer tool, has also made a lot of contributions to the open source cause in the past year, including but not limited to CloudBase CMS Open source content management systems, etc.
2. Serverless development framework
In addition to the open source at the tool level, the open source framework with Serverless First as the core has also flourished in the past year. There are old-fashioned IoC system designs based on the original Midway, reuse of the original decorators and decoupling capabilities. At the same time, the code is decomposed into different functions and released to Midway FaaS of various cloud platforms; there is also a TypeScript-based serverless first, componentized, platform-independent progressive application framework Malagu; of course, there are more than 150 iterations in one year. A version of the excellent framework FaasJS, etc.
In the past year, the serverless development framework contributed by the open source community is not only that, but no matter from which point of view, it is not difficult to find that as the serverless architecture has gradually become the technology selection for many businesses, the migration and deployment of traditional frameworks is based on serverless The architecture and the framework system with Serverless First as the core idea complement each other and become an important connection point for the main developers to use the serverless architecture faster, simpler and more convenient to use.
In addition to the construction of the tool chain, the serverless framework is also booming. In April 2021, the Baidu function computing engine EasyFaaS was officially open sourced as a function computing service with light dependencies, strong adaptability, low resource consumption, stateless and high performance Engine, EasyFaaS has also become another excellent open source function computing engine after OpenWhisk, Knative and many other open source serverless platforms.
3. A more prosperous community ecology
In 2021, in addition to the vigorous development of open source projects, the serverless community will also become more and more lively. Not only the top conferences in various industries can see serverless topics at any time, the Serverless Days conference will be held again, and the Serverless Developer Meetup will be held successively in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities. , and established a serverless city station in the corresponding region to establish a domestic serverless thousand-person community. At the level of serverless architecture empowering colleges and universities, the Serverless Developer Meetup community has entered Hunan University for the first time, Huawei's serverless campus open class activity Huazhong University of Science and Technology Station, and Tencent Yunyun has developed a campus evangelist training plan.
In summary, it is not difficult to find that the community route of the Serverless architecture is relatively clear:
- The community of serverless architecture has excellent open source projects in terms of tools, frameworks, computing engines and other aspects that are constantly updated and iterated; for now, serverless toolchains focus more on enterprise-level solutions without vendor lock-in , the construction of the scene and application center; the Serverless open source framework is more built with Serverless First as the ideological core;
- In addition to the prosperous open source projects, the serverless community also has gradually lively community activities and communities. Through the activities of various open source organizations, through various conferences and serverless architecture collisions, more people will pay attention to the serverless architecture, and more people will participate in it;
From open source tools to open source frameworks, from no vendor lock-in to Serverless First, from open source computing engines to community meetings, developer activities are becoming more frequent and lively, from enterprises to colleges and universities, enabling the education industry to make continuous breakthroughs and innovations in the field of cloud computing. architecture has gradually begun to move forward rapidly towards the future with more solid steps.
Summarize**
With the development of cloud services, computing resources are highly abstracted. From physical machines to cloud servers to container services, computing resources gradually become more refined.
Since the word serverless was first brought to the public by Ken Form in 2012, the serverless architecture has been continuously updated, iterated, improved and developed in a gesture of "realizing the initial dream of cloud computing".
As 2021 passes quietly, the serverless architecture is gradually taking steps towards its tenth year.
With the continuous improvement of the definition of serverless architecture, the continuous enrichment of event ecology, more and more attention from industry and academia to serverless architecture, and the increasingly perfect and lively open source community, the serverless architecture is no longer a "distinctive vision". The existence of "can't be fooled", but really can help developers focus more on more valuable business logic, make business development more focused, reduce the business innovation cycle, improve business comprehensive efficiency, and A down-to-earth technology selection.
From IaaS to FaaS to SaaS to today's Serverless, the development of cloud computing has undergone tremendous changes in the past ten years. From virtual space to cloud hosting, from self-built databases and other services to cloud databases and other services, the development of cloud computing is rapid, and the serverless architecture is also highly expected by many people.
Perhaps the architecture was at the time of , which has already opened the way from concept to practice on a large scale, as predicted in the Gartner report: By 2025, half of the world's enterprises will adopt FaaS deployment; perhaps, today's serverless architecture, It is still not the final form of serverless architecture; perhaps the spirit of serverless needs further construction and improvement, but it is undeniable that the serverless architecture will be on the way:
“More and more energetic, more and more fast and powerful.”
**_The author says:
_**
When receiving the invitation to write the technical review of the serverless architecture in 2021, the author himself was both excited and frightened, for fear that some excellent events would be buried. Although the Internet is rich in information today, after further study and research, I completed this article. However, it is undeniable that there may still be omissions in this article. I hope you can give me some advice, and you are welcome to learn and exchange together in the comment area. The author himself will continue to learn and improve the relevant knowledge areas.
In addition, the above content is only a partial summary of the author's own study and life, and its views are only the author's own, and do not represent the views of the company, school or published platform. In addition, part of the information in the text comes from The Internet has not been strictly verified. If there is a situation that violates the objective truth, you are welcome to point it out. Finally, I very much hope that students with different views can discuss with me, and hope that more people will participate in the construction of the serverless architecture.
About the author:
Liu Yu (flower name: Jiang Yu) is a Ph.D student majoring in electronic information at National University of Defense Technology, Alibaba Cloud Serverless Product Manager, and Alibaba Cloud Serverless Kylin Evangelist.
For more content, pay attention to the Serverless WeChat official account (ID: serverlessdevs), which brings together the most comprehensive content of serverless technology, regularly holds serverless events, live broadcasts, and user best practices.
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