Let computer education change because of the cloud, Alibaba Cloud officially released the cloud native talent training cooperation plan

This article is compiled from the report made by Alibaba researcher Ding Yu at the China Computer Education Conference. It mainly shares the technical evolution of cloud computing to cloud native, Alibaba Cloud's work and practice in the field of cloud native, as well as an industrial perspective on computer talents. It is expected to work with computer educators in Chinese universities to promote the development of computer education.

Cloud computing brings a new software industry structure

One stage of technology solves one stage of problems, and applied technology has experienced rapid development in the past 30 years.

From 1995 to 2008 , the core demands of enterprises were to solve the problems from small-scale MIS to complex business systems of enterprises, from stand-alone technology to distributed cluster technology (such as CORBA, EJB). middleware (such as WebLogic, WebSphere, IBM MQ, Spring, tomcat).

From 2009 to 2018 , with the rise of Internet technology, enterprises are more concerned about how to solve the cost and scale expansion of business systems supporting hundreds of millions of users. At this time, the technical architecture has changed from distributed cluster technology to Internet technology architecture (such as containers, microservices, DevOps, etc.), and open source middleware products (such as Dubbo, RocketMQ, Spring Cloud) have attracted attention, and many companies have begun to build based on open source projects. own business system.

Beginning in 2019 , with the rise of cloud-native technology, enterprises' demand for digital transformation has become very urgent. Enterprises have begun to pay attention to business agile iteration and data intelligence issues, and cloud-native architecture has emerged as the times require. From Internet architecture to cloud-native architecture, from full-scale cloud deployment to cloud-based innovative applications, enterprises are beginning to use more stable, application-optimized cloud-native products (such as Dragon+Container, Container+AI, Cloud Edge Management , multi-cloud/hybrid cloud management, aPaaS, function computing, cloud native technology middle-end CNStack, DevOps, etc.).

Cloud computing is the culmination of previous generations of technologies, from enterprise application architecture, evolution to Internet architecture, and then to cloud native architecture. Digital upgrade.

It can be said that cloud computing has brought about a new structural change in the software industry.

Today, cloud-native technology has become a must-have skill for developers. Contemporary developers will select technology and develop applications based on cloud products. We also see that applications in the industry are transforming to cloud-native.

In actual production, we can also clearly feel the innovation of the development model brought by cloud native. Great changes have taken place in terms of architecture, application delivery, operation and maintenance, scalability, dependencies, and even the organizational culture of the enterprise. IDC predicts that by 2024, the development of the digital economy will give birth to more than 500 million new applications, which is comparable to the number of applications that have emerged in the past 40 years. Cloud-native technologies and development methods make it possible for these massive new applications to appear in a short period of time.

In the cloud-native era, what is the core competitiveness of cloud products? The foundation of cloud products is to continue to be the representative of advanced productivity, which requires cloud products to have hard-core technical capabilities and to achieve rapid iteration. For any company, it is difficult for its own system to have such tenacious vitality and competitiveness, and the same is true for Alibaba. Therefore, in 2020, Alibaba will fully switch to cloud-native product support, and in 2021, cloud products will be containerized and serverless. Alibaba Cloud has fully entered the cloud-native era.

Alibaba Cloud has the most abundant cloud native product family in China

Alibaba Cloud has more than 300 cloud products and nearly 1,000 technical solutions, including cloud-native DevOps, aPaaS & microservices, message and event-driven, application tools, serverless architecture, cloud-native technology middle-stage CNStack, etc., as well as cloud-native databases, Big data/AI, video cloud, etc. Cloud-native products can provide enterprises with five core values: system stability, resource flexibility, application agility, business intelligence, and security and trustworthiness. It can be said that an enterprise born in the cloud-native era can fully build its IT system based on the cloud, and Alibaba Cloud can provide the most complete technical solutions and product systems.

Cloud native power behind thousands of industries

The core system of STO Express has been fully migrated to Alibaba Cloud. The average daily number of orders processed on the cloud is nearly 30 million. The processing efficiency of requests per second during peak business hours is increased by 30%, resource utilization is increased by 80%, and costs are reduced by 50%.

China Southern Airlines has built a business middle-end solution. China Southern Airlines has realized quasi-real-time query of 39 million cabins on 1.5 million flights of China Southern Airlines, and the average response time of international and domestic flight orders is only 2 seconds.

This year's Beijing Winter Olympics is the first Olympics to be fully cloud-based. The cloud-native product family stably supports the core business system of the Beijing Winter Olympics. More than 2.7 billion people around the world participate in interactions, broadcast more than 6,000 hours of content, and provide services to more than 32,000 staff. , the overall cloud energy consumption is reduced by 70%.

NetEase Cloud Music is a national-level app. It builds a flexible and high-availability audio and video processing system based on function computing FC. The service landing speed is increased by 10 times, the mirror cache is activated in seconds, and the operation and maintenance cost is greatly reduced.

Actively advocate open source projects to introduce students' engineering practice ability training link

Over the years, Alibaba Cloud has contributed more than 2,700 open source projects to the world's top foundations, covering fields such as big data, cloud computing, AI, middleware, containers, and serverless. Ranked the top of the Chinese enterprise open source community GitHub contribution list.

Some open source projects have become de facto standards in this field. For example, Dubbo has become the most influential and widely used open source microservice framework in China; RocketMQ is the first Apache top-level project for Internet middleware in China, and it ranks first in China all the year round. Open source middleware project. These open source projects are an excellent shortcut for teachers and students to resonate with industrial technology at the same frequency. They are very suitable for being introduced into teaching to exercise students' engineering practice ability.

Last year, Ali Pingtou open sourced the Xuantie RISC-V series processors, and opened up a series of tools and system software, as well as the dragon lizard operating system and the cloud-native database PolarDB. The open source projects of these communities are very valuable for cultivating high-level talents in integrated circuits, operating systems and databases.

From an industry perspective, in the cloud-native era, new requirements have also been placed on the skills of computer talents. Developers should focus on cloud-native technologies that represent innovative trends in the cloud computing field, based on the cloud-native technology capability sub-model including the following six dimensions.

• Technical architecture design capabilities: Compared with the requirements of traditional architecture design for developers, "cloudification", that is, architecture design based on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, is the key difference in technical architecture design capabilities, and is also a key difference in the developers' full-cloud practice. The core of capability improvement in the dimension of technical architecture design.

• Technology stack coverage capability: On the basis of cloud-based technology architecture, the presentation form of technology stack capabilities will be service-oriented.

• Ability to use platform frameworks: In the process of practicing on the cloud, developers will encounter various types of frameworks, whether it is cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, middleware, or storage, database or other emerging technology platforms. Reinvent the wheel and speed up the development process.

• Life cycle management capability: The software and hardware development lifecycle management on the cloud not only involves the collaboration of the development environment and the management of development elements including various development resources, but also requires the management of all aspects of the process, various tools, various operations and Effective empowerment of various environments, while organically adapting to different technical scenarios and business scenarios.

• Ability to use development languages: With the deepening of practice on the cloud, developers will have more and more opportunities to work in different technical fields, and the ability to use different development languages that meet the requirements of relevant fields, including traditional general-purpose programming Languages, emerging general-purpose programming languages, and specialized languages in specific fields will also become developers' advantages and even necessary skills. Therefore, "diversification" will become the most important point for developers to grasp in the dimension of development language use.

• Technical field support capability: The collaborative support of cloud native for different emerging technology fields lays the foundation for the cloud platform's technology-driven platform innovation in different business fields. Speed also has different requirements.

Strengthen industry-university-research cooperation to jointly cultivate talents in the digital age

It is precisely because there are higher requirements for talent skills that it is very important to strengthen industry-university-research cooperation. At present, the epidemic has accelerated the digitalization process of the whole society. In the future, more companies will migrate to the cloud and use big data and artificial intelligence technologies to achieve digital transformation and upgrading. This requires a large number of talents in the fields of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation and upgrading.

The fields of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence involve many disciplines, including virtualization, networking, efficient operation and maintenance, data science, data processing, data security, artificial intelligence, neural networks and other technologies. Accumulating technologies also requires Only technical talents can deeply understand industries, such as new retail, new manufacturing, new finance, Internet of Things, etc., so as to turn cutting-edge technologies into productivity and better empower the industry. Only through the deep integration of industry, academia and research can it be possible to achieve technological empowerment. Alibaba Cloud benefits from the dividends of talents of the era. We hope to continue to strengthen industry-university-research cooperation with colleges and universities to jointly cultivate outstanding talents in the digital age.

The generation gap between computer education in colleges and universities and industry-university-research. After investigation, we found that computer education and personnel training in colleges and universities are out of touch with the development of industrial technology.

On the one hand, the iteration speed of information technology in the Internet era has been greatly accelerated. College teachers are relatively far away from industrial practice. It is difficult to integrate new technologies in a short period of time, and precipitate them into new teaching courseware.

On the other hand, colleges and universities generally lack cloud computing experimental environments and experimental cases for big data in the Internet scenario, and the construction of such experimental environments and cases specifically for teaching requires large-scale investment, even if teachers use open source software to build Such an environment is quite different from the real cloud computing and big data commercial environment, so that students often complete credit tasks, but still feel confused about new industrial technologies.

In the cloud-native era, computer education needs to change because of the cloud

Alibaba Cloud calls on computer education to change because of the cloud. The Ministry of Education launched a new engineering construction plan in 2017. I think its essence is to make talent training adapt to the digital transformation of the modern technology industry as soon as possible, and cultivate high-quality talents with digital skills for the development of the digital economy. Therefore, recognizing the technical support system behind the digital economy and grasping the talent skills requirements for the development of the digital economy are the keys to the success or failure of the current education reform.

In this sense, with the increasingly prominent role of the cloud in the information technology revolution and the wave of the digital economy, and with the evolution of a new computing system centered on the cloud, the knowledge system of computer education in colleges and universities should also expand with the cloud. The training mode of engineering practice ability of computer talents should also change due to the cloud.

Therefore, we call and suggest that cloud computing be incorporated into the core knowledge system of new engineering majors, and cloud distributed architecture and cloud native architecture should be introduced into computer and software professional courses to replace the traditional "single computer principle and application". "The main line of the curriculum system allows students to establish an "operating system" level understanding of the cloud, and at the same time fully carry out cloud practice, from the junior stage to experience the cloud, to the senior stage to learn to use the cloud, and then to the graduate level to learn and To practice how to build a cloud system, the whole process can use various cloud resources provided by enterprises like Alibaba Cloud, or make full use of open source projects in open source communities to comprehensively improve students' engineering literacy for the cloud era.

Join hands with college teachers to build a demonstration course for the integration of production and education

In fact, in the past two years, under the guidance of the Ministry of Education, Alibaba Cloud has established a Ministry of Education-Alibaba Cloud Industry-University Cooperation Collaborative Education Project, and cooperated with college teachers to build a number of demonstration courses for the integration of industry and education, trying to integrate cloud computing. , Cloud-native knowledge is extended to existing courses, and Alibaba Cloud also provides free resources for many product lines to support teaching practice. The construction results of all these demonstration courses are open to all colleges and universities in the form of open source sharing. In order to better support teaching reform and talent cultivation, Alibaba Cloud shares and promotes 20 years of technical insights in the form of white papers, books, and textbooks. We also actively seek cooperation with colleges and universities to support teachers in writing courses for different student audiences. supporting textbooks.

Escort the high-quality training of computer talents

In terms of cloud resources, we leveraged the technical advantages of our own cloud platform and invested 3 billion ECS free computing power through the Feitian Acceleration Program. Many college teachers and students received their own first cloud server for free. Doing teaching and research, doing experiments, doing papers, etc., 100,000 students from more than 2,200 colleges and universities have benefited from this project.

Alibaba Cloud's developer community has also specially provided three cloud labs that can support different computer courses. We have also opened many experience halls of different technologies through the cloud lab and shared many industry practice cases. Because behind the cloud lab is Alibaba Cloud's industrial-grade cloud base, students can immerse themselves in the same cloud environment as future enterprise production, experience the elasticity, stability, high availability, security and other features of the cloud, and temper cloud-based engineering practices capabilities, so that a seamless and smooth transition can be achieved in the future, and you can be competent for the job faster.

Digitization is the biggest certainty in the next 10 years. The modern world will run on software, which requires very high developers. The times call for better developers.

Today, Alibaba Cloud officially released the cloud native talent training cooperation plan. We will train 100,000 new student developers for the society within three years by cooperating with 200 colleges and universities, launching industry-university cooperative education projects, holding developer salons, teacher training, programming competitions, etc., so that students can fully experience The technological dividends in the cloud native era can better create value and serve the society.

Image credit: Cloud Native Programming Challenge 2021