Heavy Release | Serverless Application Center: Serverless Application Full Lifecycle Management Platform

Author: Jiang Yu｜Alibaba Cloud Serverless Product Manager

Participate in the reward experience activity at the end of the article to quickly get started with the Serverless Application Center.

With the continuous popularization and application of serverless architecture, problems such as lack of serverless tool chain system, complicated update/deployment process, scattered resources, and difficult management are also revealed. Although in November 2020, the open source of Serverless Devs developer tools has solved some problems caused by the lack of tool chain system to a certain extent, but in actual work, developers focus on the application and carry out the overall operation of the Serverless architecture. Maintenance operations and overall management of resources are still facing challenges. Therefore, it is particularly important to build an application management platform that can help developers play a role in the full life cycle of serverless applications.

On May 9, 2022, after 10 months of polishing and testing, the Serverless Application Center was officially launched.

This is the Serverless Application Platform

The Serverless Application Center is the full lifecycle management platform of Alibaba Cloud's serverless applications. Through the serverless application center, users can quickly deploy and manage applications without additional cloning, building, packaging, and publishing operations before deploying applications. The Serverless Application Center helps users quickly link upstream and downstream services on the cloud and easily accumulate best practices.

The release of the Serverless Application Center, on the one hand, hopes to further realize and improve the full life cycle management capabilities of Serverless applications through the linkage with the Serverless Devs tool chain, and on the other hand, hopes that the Serverless Application Center can help developers to experience the Serverless architecture more quickly , it is easier to get started and use serverless architecture, and manage serverless applications more scientifically and intuitively.

At the same time, the Serverless Application Center will be an attempt of "Serverless On Serverless", which will not only provide developers with more support and convenience as a new capability, but will also become a platform to support massive users using the Serverless architecture and deploying massive Serverless applications. , based on the best practices of serverless architecture.

Serverless application center open address:

https://fcnext.console.aliyun.com/applications/

Goals of the Serverless App Center

Serverless Application Center, as a full life cycle management platform for Serverless applications, bears several important responsibilities to a certain extent:

• Allow developers to experience and get started with serverless applications in a simpler, more convenient and faster way through the white screen operation;
• Let serverless applications develop, create, update, operate, maintain, and iterate in a more scientific, secure and stable way;
• Aggregating and managing traditional resources in the application dimension allows developers to truly focus on business and applications, instead of resources scattered on different product pages;

Therefore, the initial goal of the Serverless Application Center has become simpler and purer: easy to use and easy to use .

Start your serverless journey in one step

The Serverless Application Center will greatly reduce the complexity of getting started in the serverless application OnBoarding process. Through the white screen operation, developers can quickly create relatively complex application cases through simple configuration, and these application cases will serve as An important reference for secondary development, learning and experience.

https://developer.aliyun.com/live/249101

As shown in the video, users only need to find a suitable application on the application page and click the create button to quickly create an application. After the application is created, there will be a relevant test domain name for experience.

At present, the application center has provided a quick experience of more than 20 popular applications in nearly 5 categories, including mall cases, audio and video processing, and web frameworks, whether it is the one-click deployment of traditional frameworks such as Django, Express, Flask, and SpringBoot, or Zblog , Wordpress and other blogs, the rapid creation and use of content management systems, or CDN backup source, one-click creation of network disk / cloud desktop, video transcoding / slicing / compression, the serverless application center can help developers. Start your serverless journey in one step.

1 to n combined with tools

In addition to quickly creating template applications, developers can also choose to create projects through code repositories such as Github.

https://developer.aliyun.com/live/249102

As shown in the video, when a developer chooses to create a project through the Github code repository, the Serverless Application Center will not only create the application itself, but also put the application code in the specified code repository, so that the developer can use this case/ Templates, secondary development of the project, etc.

It is worth mentioning that:

• All applications created based on the Serverless Application Center are applications that conform to the Serverless Devs specification, that is, developers can use the Serverless Devs developer tools to develop, debug, deploy and other related operations of the application;

For example, the developer clones the application placed in the designated warehouse, and conducts development and multi-mode debugging locally (local debugging, end-cloud joint debugging, cloud debugging, etc.), after completion, you can push the code to the code warehouse or create a Release to achieve business continuity. renew.

• The Serverless Application Center can not only quickly create template applications for reference and secondary development through case applications, but also directly import existing applications that conform to the Serverless Devs specification, and host the existing applications in the Application Center to experience serverless applications. related functions of the center.

Resource management in the application dimension

As we all know, serverless applications often involve many products, such as database resources, message middleware resources, object storage, log services and other resources. In other words, a complete serverless application is usually FaaS products and many BaaS products. Organically combined, therefore, serverless users often face the problem of managing many resources, and these managed resources are often on different product pages, which brings great inconvenience to later management, operation and maintenance, etc. get complexity.

As shown in the figure below, the serverless application center will display and manage resources in the application dimension:

Through operations such as creation and update in the application dimension, and resource display and management in the application dimension, the Serverless Application Center further abstracts the originally scattered resources. Through the application dimension, developers can more clearly and intuitively implement their own applications. Operation and maintenance, management, etc.

accomplish

As the so-called dare to try yourself, it is possible to serve more developers. In Alibaba, although a large number of businesses have adopted the serverless architecture, it is still not "typical" in our eyes. How to "Serverless On Serverless" The serverless architecture can not only have a large number of internal applications and serve other industries/businesses, but also allow the serverless architecture to create more value for the team itself. Therefore, the serverless application center has become a serverless architecture that was born in the serverless architecture and grew up in the serverless architecture. cloud-native applications.

The Serverless Application Center, based on the extreme elasticity of the Serverless architecture itself, through the organic combination of FaaS products and BaaS products, spends very little time and cost, and builds a set of high availability, low cost, high cost performance and high availability. background service.

As shown in the figure above, through HTTP triggers (API gateways), basic business functions will receive requests initiated by users on the client side and WebSockets notifications sent by code repositories such as Github, and perform basic processing on this information (including but not limited to Authorization authentication, identity authentication and other related operations), and then through the message middleware (some events do not pass through the message middleware), different events are sent to different business functions, and business processing is performed. and other deployment-related events, it will be further sent to the deployment function for business deployment. During the whole process, metadata, cached data, log information, etc. will continue to be stored in the corresponding BaaS products through the Proxy module. .

During the entire project construction process, business students only need to design the overall architecture and develop and deploy related business functions. The operation and maintenance of BaaS products and the flexibility of FaaS products in the project are all implemented and responsible by the platform. , on the one hand, it can allow developers to devote more energy to more valuable business logic, on the other hand, it can greatly improve the R&D efficiency of the business, speed up the efficiency of business innovation iteration, and shorten the project launch cycle.

Of course, regarding the Serverless Application Center, how to implement the "Serverless On Serverless" part, we will share in more detail in the technical sharing and articles in the future.

Roadmap

Although the Serverless Application Center has released the Beta version, there are still some deficiencies. At present, the relevant R&D students are also constantly improving and optimizing. Of course, we still have a lot of functions, waiting to be updated and further improved, including but not limited to:

App creation:

• • 1. Support more code repositories:
  • Gitee
  • Gitlab
  • Codeup
• • 2. Support more triggering schemes:
  • Github Action triggered
  • Cloud effect trigger
  • Jenkins trigger

Application management:

1. App delete ability

2. Application dimension monitoring and alerting capabilities

3. Resource editing capabilities of application dimensions

4. Online application editing ability

5. Serverless Devs developer tools and application center linkage ability

In addition, for students who are experiencing or have already experienced the application center, you are also welcome to give us more comments and opinions in a timely manner. You can contact us further by leaving a message or filling in our survey questionnaire . We believe that projects that everyone participates in can better serve everyone, because everyone is the owner of the tool and the owner of the serverless application center.

(Mobile phone identification to participate in the survey)

Summarize

The serverless architecture is constantly developing, and the tools and platforms from the developer's point of view are gradually enriched. As a serverless application full life cycle management platform, the Serverless Application Center adopts the "Serverless On Serverless" approach. To help developers quickly experience the serverless architecture, deploy their own applications to the serverless architecture from 0 to 1 to n, and hope that developers can manage serverless-related resources and operate serverless applications from the application dimension in a whole sense.

As a serverless application full life cycle management platform, the Serverless Application Center is also working together with the majority of business teams and developers to build a serverless application management platform "from users, for users, and serving users".

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