Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh ASM officially released a commercial version

In order to better meet the growing needs of enterprises for large-scale use of service grid products, multilingual interoperability of services, and refined service governance, from April 1, 2022, Alibaba Cloud's service grid product ASM has officially released a commercial version. Enterprises implement large-scale service grid capabilities in production environments to provide service guarantees such as performance, security, high availability, and high reliability.

Service mesh technology has entered the stage of large-scale implementation

Since the concept of Service Mesh was proposed in early 2017, it has received extensive attention in the industry. As the next-generation development architecture of microservices, it has rapidly fermented in the community, and has incubated cloud-oriented platforms such as Istio, which have attracted wide attention from the industry. Native (Cloud Native) microservice architecture.

The idea of service mesh is to sink the service governance capability into the infrastructure, so that the business can focus more on business logic. As the business gradually migrates to the cloud, due to the variety of cloud migration paths and the transition from the existing architecture to the cloud-native architecture, the facilities for deploying applications are flexible and mutated, and the microservices on the cloud also show a trend of diversification. Cross-language, cross-vendor, and cross-environment calls will inevitably lead to unified protocols and frameworks based on open standards to meet the needs of interoperability. These scenarios are the areas that service grids are good at, and they are also important for service grids in enterprise production environments. Scale landings provide soil for growth.

However, the real production environment varies greatly due to different enterprises and different business forms, and the service grid will also encounter various challenges during the implementation process. For example, in terms of traffic management, the most concerned is Traffic Splitting, which is often used for grayscale publishing or A/B testing. Istio's functional design is very simple, but it cannot implement full-link traffic management by default. If custom headers or labels are not transparently transmitted in all microservice topology nodes, correlated service traffic segmentation is completely impossible. Another example is security capabilities. It is almost an Impossible Mission to use traditional means to perform TLS authentication for a large number of microservices, while the mTLS encryption provided by Envoy can easily complete encrypted communication between services, or zero-trust security.

Alibaba Cloud Service Grid ASM solves the problem of enterprise service governance

Alibaba Cloud began to research and practice ServiceMesh technology very early. By summarizing the experience of business scenarios, it continued to drive technology development, accumulated a series of service mesh core technologies, and precipitated them into the industry's first Istio-compatible managed service mesh. The platform ASM (Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh, ASM for short) empowers users on the cloud.

ASM adopts a non-intrusive, cloud-native Sidecar-based design model, focusing on the connection, control, security and observability of services under a distributed application architecture, simplifying enterprise service governance in an all-round way, and providing services running on heterogeneous computing systems. The services on the infrastructure provide unified management capabilities and are suitable for Kubernetes clusters, Serverless Kubernetes clusters, ECS virtual machines, and self-built clusters.

ASM is infrastructure-oriented, allowing application services to easily communicate with each other across many types of computing infrastructure. In other words, service mesh ASM builds managed and unified cloud-native application communication infrastructure capabilities for core scenarios such as hybrid cloud multi-cloud, cross-region multi-Kubernetes cluster, and non-container application migration. ASM can be used with ACK clusters (including dedicated clusters, managed clusters, and ACK on ECI) running on Alibaba Cloud, ASK Serverless Kubernetes clusters, ECS virtual machines, and externally registered Kubernetes clusters to better support large-scale application services.

• From an architectural point of view, the service mesh ASM product focuses on the Adaptive Service Mesh flexible architecture, supports multi-version customization of the control plane and data plane, and has good scalability;

• From the perspective of heterogeneous computing environment support, service mesh ASM products mainly focus on Anywhere Service Mesh, which realizes unified support for heterogeneous computing infrastructure, and supports any Kubernetes application, non-containerized application, and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud scenarios;

• From the perspective of high performance and large scale, service mesh ASM products rely on the advantages of Alibaba's economic scenarios to accumulate large-scale and performance optimization capabilities in multiple fields;

• From the perspective of the service grid's own capabilities, ASM, as a managed service grid product, transforms and hosts the core components of the control plane on the hosting side, and is responsible for the lifecycle management of the entire control plane and data plane components. In terms of product capabilities, ASM has enhanced the security of mesh instances in terms of Mesh CA and security audit; it has formed diagnostic rules for problems in customer scenarios, and users can run diagnostic analysis by themselves. In addition to the construction of the core hosting side, ASM has optimized and integrated multiple products and services of Alibaba Cloud. In terms of observability, it integrates link tracking services, ARMS monitoring services, log services, etc.; in terms of cross-vpc network connectivity, it integrates cloud enterprise networks to achieve multi-cluster interconnection; in terms of traffic control, it integrates the limitations of AHAS. streaming service. In terms of elastic scaling, service mesh ASM can help users easily obtain application indicator data at the grid level and agent level without needing to understand the application logic, and use these indicator data to automatically scale Kubernetes in the service mesh. workload.

Alibaba Cloud Service Grid ASM products have been successively launched in 17 regions in domestic and international stations, serving hundreds of domestic and foreign customers such as Dongfeng Nissan, Vocational Excellence, Sunmi Technology, and Deep Blue Insurance, covering a wide range of e-commerce, logistics, Supply chain, games, Internet of Vehicles, IoT and other industries. In May 2021, Alibaba Cloud Service Grid ASM was named "Cloud Native Technology Innovation Product of the Year" by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology; in July of the same year, it obtained the first batch of advanced certifications for the "Trusted Cloud Service Grid Special Project" of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

ASM Business Edition, escorting the landing performance of large-scale service grids for enterprises

From April 1, 2022, Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh ASM will be divided into Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition. The "Standard Edition" is the free edition, and the Enterprise Edition and the Ultimate Edition are paid commercial editions. On the basis of the standard version, the commercial version enhances multi-protocol support and dynamic expansion capabilities, provides refined service governance, improves the zero-trust security system, and continuously improves performance and large-scale cluster support capabilities, reducing the need to implement service grids in production environments. threshold.

The commercial version is suitable for scenarios with multi-language interoperability, fine-grained service governance requirements, and large-scale use of service grids in production environments. From now on, you can choose the desired version based on the following function comparisons, and you are welcome to go to the ASM product console to activate the experience!

Click here to access the ASM product detail page.