Good news! Alibaba Cloud is the first to pass the "advanced level" capability assessment of application multi-activity

On April 26, 2022, the "Stability Plan"-the First Cloud System Stability Conference" hosted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (hereinafter referred to as "CAICT") was held in Beijing. At the meeting, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology announced the Alibaba Cloud became the first enterprise to pass the “advanced level” capability evaluation of applying multi-active architecture, and was evaluated by Wei Liang, vice president of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. Director He Baohong issued a certificate to Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud and applications are more active

"Multi-active application" is an advanced form of "application disaster recovery" technology, which refers to the establishment of a production system corresponding to part or all of the local production system in the same city or remote computer room, and all applications in the computer room provide services to the outside world at the same time. When a disaster occurs, the multi-active system can switch business traffic within minutes, and users cannot even feel the disaster.

Alibaba began to explore the multi-active architecture capability for applications in the same city in 2007. In 2013, it began to build the multi-active architecture capability for long-distance applications and gradually upgraded to multi-data centers and multi-unit applications. In 2019, in order to serve the group's cloud applications and external customers, Alibaba officially commercialized the application multi-active capability to the outside world. The Alibaba Cloud application multi-active platform was incubated and became a member of the Alibaba Cloud high-availability commercialization family of products.

Alibaba Cloud application multi-active platform MSHA

Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform MSHA (Multi-Site High Availability) is the earliest application multi-active platform in the industry . Based on the experience of serving millions of application nodes of the Group, the application multi-active architecture is optimized and upgraded from multiple dimensions. In application multi-active scenarios, standardized product component capabilities help enterprises have high-reliability multi-site multi-active capabilities at low cost. As a product with more than ten years of experience in application multi-active construction, Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform serves customers in more than ten different fields such as digital government, logistics, energy, communications, and the Internet, with product richness and capabilities leading the industry.

Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform includes sub-components such as the disaster recovery multi-active console, disaster recovery gateway, and application plug-ins, covering business scenarios such as ingress traffic, microservices, messages, and databases. The secondary enhancement implants the multi-active feature of the application to reduce the access cost of the business system.

The core advantages of Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform:

• stability

As Alibaba's official data center switching platform on the day of Double Eleven, it supports the smooth switching of Alibaba's transactions, and has undergone severe tests of high availability and high reliability for several years. As an application multi-active platform, the platform puts forward higher requirements for its own stability than business applications to ensure that the platform is available in disaster scenarios. The platform is stabilized around scenarios such as network disconnection, power failure, system failure, database failure, and upstream and downstream dependency failure The construction of freshness preservation platform relies on normalized drills for disaster tolerance capabilities of the preservation platform.

• Rich disaster recovery architecture

From single region to multi-region, from unit to multi-cloud, from active/standby to multi-active, Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform provides hierarchical application multi-active capabilities for customers at different development stages. Enterprises choose the most suitable disaster recovery architecture based on the actual physical environment, business scale, disaster recovery requirements, and disaster recovery costs. With the development of enterprise business, Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform provides smooth architecture evolution and upgrade capabilities, avoiding cost waste caused by architecture upgrades.

• One-stop disaster recovery management and control

Enterprises build an application multi-activity system, involving application, middleware, infrastructure and other multi-system collaboration. Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform provides complete business architecture lifecycle management. Based on the platform, enterprises can complete the process of online, operation and maintenance, drills, and upgrades of the business disaster recovery architecture in one stop. The platform covers the complete path of business traffic to ensure full traffic management and control of enterprise applications, including traffic access, service-based invocation, asynchronous messages, and data storage.

• Minute-level disaster recovery switchover

Based on the deterministic disaster recovery switching process orchestration and unified rule control features, when a disaster occurs, enterprises can perform unified disaster recovery switching on the managed complex services and components on the Alibaba Cloud application multi-active platform, avoiding manual collaboration and operation processes. Risk of failure recovery due to irregularities. In actual production practice, the platform reaches the highest second-level and the lowest minute-level RTO indicator requirements.

Relying on the core features of Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform, many companies from all walks of life around the world have accumulated many common usage scenarios. E.g:

• IDC cloud migration scenario: Based on the hybrid cloud active-active solution provided by Alibaba Cloud's application multi-active platform, it ensures that enterprises can enjoy the cloud-native convenience while utilizing the old infrastructure, and provides a stable and reliable way for the subsequent whole-site cloud migration ;
• Remote fault emergency scenario: The enterprise was originally troubled by the resource bottleneck problem and the switching success rate in the disaster recovery plan. With MSHA's long-distance remote application and multi-active product capability, the enterprise completed the architecture upgrade in 3 months, and the RTO of the fault scenario was completed. Production practice is controlled within 1 minute;
• Scenarios where business runs quickly and new technologies are introduced to solve problems but frequent failures: Alibaba Cloud applies the logical data center closure and rapid escape capabilities of the multi-active platform, enabling enterprises to build new technology logical data centers for pilot verification of small steps and fast running to control failures If the explosion radius is large, the online service will be cut off immediately when a fault occurs, ensuring that the service evolves quickly, stably and rapidly.

With the advent of the cloud-native era, the cloud has become a mainstream IT infrastructure, and fault recovery is a challenge for leading enterprises in the industry to small and medium-sized enterprises. The application of multi-active technology as the core and effective technology in the field of disaster recovery has also changed from a pioneer enterprise to a must-have for mainstream enterprises. At present, the development of cloud-native applications within enterprises is uneven, and standardized guidance and construction are required. This application multi-active certification is a further improvement of the application multi-active disaster recovery industry by CAICT. Alibaba Cloud has always been committed to promoting the popularization and implementation of cloud native in China, and will work with CAICT to promote the standardized and standardized development of China's cloud native application multi-active market.

About Application Multi-Active Architecture Capability Assessment

The current cloud-native distributed architecture is complex, various services depend on each other, and the speed of architecture change is accelerating. The stability of business systems puts forward higher requirements for disaster tolerance. Application multi-active is an application-centric cloud-native disaster recovery architecture, which ensures that when a disaster occurs, business traffic can be switched in a short period of time, minimize the losses caused by disasters, and effectively ensure the continuous and stable operation of business systems.

The "Application Multi-active Architecture Capability Requirements" standard is led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and the preparation of the standard includes dozens of companies such as Alibaba Cloud. The writing process of this standard has received great attention from the industry, and has also received strong support from many enterprise experts. Based on the current development status and pain points of the stability of distributed systems, Trusted Cloud (Trusted Cloud is a cloud computing service evaluation brand under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and an authoritative evaluation system for cloud computing services in China) has launched an application multi-active architecture . Capability evaluation standards help enterprises to enhance the continuity of core business and the ability to resist risks, and ensure the stable and continuous operation of core business.

Click here to go to the Multi-Live Disaster Recovery MSHA official website for more details!