Technology Inventory: Technology Evolution and Future Trend Prospects of Cloud Native Middleware

Author: Hu Weiqi (Bai Mu)

Alibaba Chairman and CEO Zhang Yong shared at the Yunqi Conference

In the past few years, with the rapid development of the cloud native technology ecosystem, middleware technology is also evolving in line with this general trend. If we want to talk about the general direction of middleware evolution, I think it is cloud native. That said, there are two meanings here.

The first is the cloud-native nature of the middleware's own architecture and runtime. As we all know, middleware is basically a stateful application, which plays a very central role in the entire IT architecture, and has very high requirements for IO, performance, and stability. Therefore, the capacity management, delivery, and operation of middleware have always been Maintenance and disaster recovery are both problems in the industry. However, with the gradual maturity of the cloud-native technology system, the current middleware is cloud-native. With the help of cloud-native technology, it first solves its own problems of elasticity and resilience, and secondly, based on K8s +The running base of the container solves the operation, maintenance and delivery problems of middleware.

The second is the cloud nativeization of developers using middleware. The current cloud-native middleware usually appears in the form of BaaS or SaaS, which helps users shield the underlying operating environment differences and operation and maintenance complexity. Users can complete the call to the middleware through standardized APIs. This form The advantage is that the middleware is gradually infrastructureized, and developers can pay more attention to business development, thereby improving the overall development and operation and maintenance efficiency of the enterprise.

Is there a fundamental difference between cloud-native middleware and on-premises PaaS middleware?

To talk about this, we just need to understand what the nature of cloud computing and cloud native is. Now the industry has basically reached a consensus on the definition of cloud native, and we will not discuss it here. Combined with the characteristics of middleware, the essential difference between cloud native middleware and local PaaS middleware is mainly elasticity, stability, high availability, and security. performance, cost of use, etc.

Elasticity: cloud-native technology system brings a good expansion mechanism and elastic architecture to middleware, and then uses the massive resources on the cloud to achieve on-demand elastic expansion and contraction of middleware, so that users do not need to prepare in advance related resources, and no longer need to worry about whether the capacity meets business needs.

Stability: In terms of stability of , you need to analyze the factors that affect the stability of middleware, mainly including hardware, operating system, network, storage, operation and maintenance, etc. Using the complete IaaS and PaaS capabilities on the cloud can be very efficient. Build a high-quality stability guarantee system for middleware in various fields, which cannot be achieved by local middleware.

High Availability: In terms of high availability, is an inherent advantage of cloud computing and cloud native. The remote disaster recovery of multiple computer rooms, multi-link network guarantee, complete observability system and diagnostic capabilities, etc., can be said to be the middle of cloud native. The high availability provided by the software has already made users no longer need to worry about the impact of business continuity caused by middleware.

Security: Everyone knows that a very major vulnerability was discovered in the Java field last year, but this is only one of the cases. The software and systems we use, including middleware, cannot avoid loopholes or bugs. In terms of software, our requirement for the efficiency of vulnerability repair is the highest priority, and users do not need to bear the potential data and system risks brought by the vulnerability.

usage cost: The cost here is a generalized cost, including resource cost, labor cost, time cost, etc. With cloud native middleware, users no longer need to pay attention to a series of high-level personnel such as middleware release, upgrade, operation and maintenance The transaction invested does not need to pay for the vacancy rate of resources. Take message middleware as an example. We can often see that the number of messages pushed by many enterprise users can vary between peak and trough periods of business. Hundreds or even thousands of times. With the elastic capabilities of the cloud, customers no longer need to worry about wasting resources during business troughs, saving a lot of costs.

What are the important developments in the middleware field in 2021?

Accelerate the output of middleware in different environments with the help of cloud native technology base: The coverage of cloud native technology ecosystem is getting wider and wider. Under the general trend of distributed cloud and borderless computing, middleware is also accelerating the output to different environments. For example, for different CPU architecture platforms, in the past, middleware mainly ran on the X86 architecture, but with the rapid development of the ARM architecture, a large number of middleware can now support running on the ARM architecture. In addition, middleware is also beginning to be suitable for different computing places, such as edge computing, especially in the more segmented field and regional edge fields.

Middleware is gradually becoming service-oriented and transparent: Middleware sinks basic capabilities through BaaS and SaaS forms, empowers lightweight and agile cloud-native applications, and solves user efficiency and cost issues. Cloud-native development expectations.

Closer integration of open source and business: The core of cloud native technology is based on open source. With the continuous advancement of the cloud nativeization process of middleware, the development of open source middleware is becoming more and more active. This aspect can accelerate middleware and cloud native. The combination of ecology, on the other hand, we can see that under this trend, middleware is becoming more and more open, and standards will be gradually introduced based on open source in various sub-sectors. Is the majority of middleware developers and users.

What technological breakthroughs must be mentioned in Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native middleware?

Software and hardware synergy to improve middleware performance: continuous iteration of software and new hardware features is the most efficient way to release technical dividends. This year, Alibaba Cloud has carried out multi-faceted layout and attempts in this regard. The overall performance of the message middleware MQ has been improved by 20%. In some scenarios of gateway and service mesh, the processing efficiency of requests has been improved by 260%. The improvement brought by these technological evolutions has been provided by Alibaba Cloud through cloud services. For users of cloud-native middleware, for example, in products such as service mesh ASM and MSE, the performance based on Multi-Buffer technology has been revealed to achieve TLS acceleration.

Reconstructing middleware based on cloud native brings performance leap: In June 2021, Alibaba Cloud released Nacos 2.0, an open source registration and configuration center. The new 2.0 architecture designed with cloud native concepts greatly improves performance by 10 times, and the kernel is divided into two parts. Layer abstraction, implement plug-in extension mechanism, support 10w-level instance scale, and support service grid ecology; at the same time, Alibaba Cloud provides the corresponding cloud product MSE registration configuration center on the cloud.

​Nacos 2.0 before and after the upgrade performance comparison pressure test

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Middleware capabilities are highly integrated: In the gateway field, Alibaba Cloud has integrated traffic gateways and service gateways and launched a cloud-native gateway, which can reduce users’ usage and maintenance costs by half; in the messaging field, Alibaba Cloud has launched messaging, Event and stream integrated messaging platform - RocketMQ 5.0, focusing on the cloud-native evolution of messaging infrastructure, focusing on post-processing scenarios in the messaging field, supporting stream processing and light computing of messages, and helping users achieve nearby computing and computing of messages. Analytics and will fully embrace Serverless and EDA.

cloud message queue RocketMQ 5.0 new upgrade: message, event, stream fusion processing platform

What are the main parts of the current middleware?

The definition of generalized middleware is very broad, such as messages, microservices, gateways, databases, integration platforms, etc., all belong to the category of middleware. Here I will briefly talk about the fields of messages and microservices:

Message middleware: With the rapid development of big data and AI, the development focus of message middleware has gradually shifted from the business message field, which was the focus of online applications and microservices in the past, to the field of big data and stream computing. Alibaba Cloud has launched Apache RocketMQ 5.0-preview. This version begins to redefine message middleware and integrate messages, events, and streams as the main development direction in the future, and has also received positive responses from community developers; in addition, The integrated message collection, transmission and processing platform of cloud, edge and terminal will also be the key layout direction of message middleware in the future. These new features of RocketMQ will be the first to be launched in Alibaba Cloud's MQ products.

Microservice middleware: We are talking about microservices in a broad sense, including Service Mesh, which is currently developing rapidly. Service Mesh, through the architecture that separates the control plane and data, can indeed solve the efficiency of business code release, decoupling, and multi-language support. There are very good benefits, but at the same time, problems such as increased architectural complexity and increased end-to-end delay are brought about. These problems hinder the large-scale production of Service Mesh. Therefore, the current technology development trend mainly focuses on solving these two types of problems, such as based on Technologies such as eBPF improve transmission efficiency, new proxyless architecture solutions, etc. Alibaba Cloud Service Grid ASM products are also exploring eBPF performance optimization and introducing the integration of gRPC Proxyless and Sidecar modes; in the field of traditional microservices, Spring Cloud, Dubbo, etc. are very mature The open source framework is still the main choice for microservices, but we also see that with the continuous expansion of the use scale of microservices, there are more and more demands on how to use and manage microservices well, such as service governance, distributed transactions, Zero trust will become the next development focus. Alibaba Cloud has launched the MSE cloud product in this field to export the accumulation of years of middleware microservice governance in the past as a service.

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The development trend of the middleware field in 2022?

In the past few years, Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native practice of promoting middleware has proved that in the cloud-native era, middleware still plays a vital role, and is constantly innovating in new scenarios, new boundaries, and new forms.

New scenarios: As more and more diverse computing loads and data are moved to the cloud, especially new scenarios such as big data, stream computing, and AI that have developed rapidly recently, new requirements for middleware are bound to be put forward;

New frontier: According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of enterprises will use distributed cloud, and distributed cloud has become the first choice for the next-generation IT architecture of a large number of enterprises. In this context, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-edge integrated application delivery will become the core demands. On the one hand, middleware needs to have its own delivery and deployment problems in distributed cloud scenarios, and on the other hand, middleware needs to solve distributed cloud scenarios. Business data flow problems in scenarios;

New form: Serverless will become the mainstream form of next-generation cloud computing. Under this trend, middleware will gradually evolve from the current BaaS and SaaS forms to the serverless form.

The above content is taken from an exclusive interview with Hu Weiqi, a senior technical expert of Alibaba Cloud, by InfoQ. Based on the original content, relevant reference and extended reading are supplemented to facilitate developers to better understand.

about the author:

​Hu Weiqi (flower name: Bai Mu), senior technical expert of Alibaba Cloud, head of middleware technology, has been responsible for e-commerce resource scheduling system, resource elastic scaling system, container project, edge container service, etc. in Alibaba.​