Cloud native × actual combat school: Focus on business, the best choice in the era of digital innovation

Three-tier evolution of cloud native

Today, cloud native is with a strong development trend, pointing to the next decade of cloud computing.

In terms of technology, the popularity of cloud native key technologies such as containers, microservices, and service grids continues to rise. According to the "China Cloud Native User Survey Report" by the Cloud Native Industry Alliance, in 2021, the construction investment and cluster scale in the field of cloud native technology will increase. Continue to rise, user applications and software releases are more frequent. In the production environment of users, the adoption rate of container technology is nearly 70%, and serverless technology continues to heat up, with nearly 40% of application users.

At present, a new computing architecture with cloud as the core is taking shape, and the system evolves from three levels: cloud native 1.0 is the cloud nativeization of the infrastructure layer , and the cloud defines the bottom layers such as hardware, self-developed chips, servers, and operating systems. technology, to build a cloud-centric hardware system; cloud native 2.0 is the cloud nativeization of industry applications , the core software is reconstructed based on the cloud, the open source community has become an innovation center, and new development methods such as low-code are spawned, making the cloud easier to use, Make the cost of innovation lower; cloud native 3.0 is the synchronous development of cloud, network and terminal . At the application layer, with the development of 5G network in the future, computing and data will be migrated to the cloud at an accelerated rate, giving birth to new species such as cloud computing, metaverse, and autonomous driving. .

Let enterprises focus on business, Alibaba Cloud provides "one-stop" cloud-native capabilities

For enterprises, cloud native is the shortest path to enterprise digital innovation. Take Alibaba as an example. Alibaba, as the earliest company in China to deploy cloud-native technology on a large scale, has started cloud-native practice since it independently developed Internet middleware in 2006. In 2011, Alibaba deployed a containerized infrastructure on a group scale, creating a precedent for Chinese technology companies to apply cloud native technology on a large scale. In 2015, containers and middleware were productized, and cloud-native technologies were fully commercialized; in 2019, 100% of Alibaba's core systems were on the cloud, and millions of containers supported Double Eleven; in 2020, Alibaba's core application systems were fully cloud-native ; In 2021, Alibaba Cloud will fully enter the cloud-native era.

As the technical base for millions of customers in the cloud-native era, Alibaba Cloud has a rich family of cloud-native products, covering the underlying infrastructure, data intelligence, distributed applications and other full-stack technology capabilities, serving more than 80% of Chinese technology companies, covering 197 needs of different industry scenarios.

Last year, Alibaba Cloud released a number of technology and product upgrades in the cloud-native field. For example, Alibaba Cloud's container service was fully upgraded to ACK Anywhere; it proposed the concept of All on Serverless, released the industry's first cloud-native technology mid-platform CNStack, and open sourced the industry's first application Multi-active items AppActive and so on. Provide cloud native technology base for one-stop digital innovation of many enterprises.

More than that!

In April of this year, Koordinator, a co-location system that was born out of Alibaba and has been polished for years on Double 11, saves the company billions of dollars every year, was officially open sourced. Through open source, the co-location and scheduling capabilities are opened to the entire industry, helping more enterprise customers to improve the efficiency, stability and computing cost of cloud-native workload operation, and realize low-carbon computing and green computing.

Alibaba's cloud-native hybrid system Koordinator is officially open source

In addition, in response to the fragmentation and inability to communicate with each other in terms of microservice governance concepts in different frameworks and languages in the field of microservices, Alibaba Cloud, together with bilibili, Byte and other companies, discussed how to standardize and popularize service governance, and jointly initiated and open sourced the OpenSergo project. OpenSergo is committed to reaching consensus among different microservice frameworks and communication protocols to form service governance specifications.

OpenSergo is officially open source, and multiple vendors jointly build microservice governance specifications and implementations

Continuous exploration: Cloud native implementation requires strategies and references

For enterprises, the entire process of migrating to the cloud should be done according to the situation and mode of the enterprise. The industry will divide the cloud migration into several stages. First of all, the easiest way is to rehosting, that is, to move the original offline computer room to the cloud. It turned out that the offline is a virtual machine, and the cloud is also a virtual machine. This often brings financial changes to the enterprise. What used to be assets has now become a cloud service. This is a translation for enterprises. The overall value is slightly lower, but the cost is also the lowest. Basically, there is no need to transform the business, and the operation and maintenance model does not need to be changed. All enterprises can do it.

The second stage is Replatform. This is related to some concepts of cloud native, such as turning the original virtual machine into a containerized mode. The typical feature of Replatform is that enterprises do not need to transform applications, but only need to change the system operation and maintenance mode. In many cases, the cost and cost of transforming applications are relatively high, and containerization generally does not require transforming enterprise applications. . The other is to change from self-built open source tools to using products of cloud manufacturers, such as the original self-built MySQL, and become the RDS of cloud manufacturers. Enterprises can really see the cost reduction and efficiency gains brought by cloud native.

The last stage, which many companies are doing, is Refactor, that is, reconstruction. The entire application architecture of an enterprise often undergoes some changes, including serverless and microservices. This stage will involve application transformation, but it is also the time when the application side can really take advantage of the cloud. Enterprises can choose to gradually go cloud-native according to their own characteristics.

In addition, the company also depends on its type of business. Now there is a concept called "two-state IT", which is about steady state and sensitive state. Steady state is a business that does not change a lot within the enterprise. For this kind of business, it is recommended to only do Replatform, because its iteration speed is not so fast, and the business changes are not very big, but it needs to be enhanced through containerization and other modes. Sex and flexibility, etc. The agile business still has rapid iterations. At this time, it may be recommended to do Refactor, such as microservices, etc., which can improve the overall R&D efficiency.

As mentioned above, enterprises should comprehensively choose a suitable cloud-native approach according to their own business types and technical reserves. On the one hand, if the enterprise is business-driven, it will have enough resources to invest. On the other hand, enterprises can also have enough practice when doing technology selection and implementation.

Cloud native determines the outcome of an enterprise's digital transformation. As digital transformation enters the deep waters, enterprises can fully release the dividends of the cloud through cloud-native architecture and deployment, while reducing costs and carbon emissions to achieve sustainable development . Cloud native helps enterprises to realize cloud-based infrastructure, Internet-based core technologies, modern application architecture, and business intelligence. The most intuitive business value these features bring to enterprises are resource elasticity, system stability, application agility, business intelligence, and trustworthy security!

Based on this, Alibaba Cloud released the "Cloud Native Practical Case Collection" , which provides reference and reference for enterprise practice and implementation of cloud native through technology outlook, industry analysis, and practical case interpretation. A single person is fast, and a group of people is far away. An enterprise is quick to implement cloud-native, but only by enabling the entire industry to implement cloud-native can future enterprises go further.

Pay attention to the "Alibaba Cloud Native" official account, reply to the keyword " practical case " in the background, and download the case immediately.