The open source night chat column is on the air: talk about the story behind the new CNCF project sealer

Open Source Night Chat is a dialogue column planned and initiated by the Alibaba Cloud cloud native team. It focuses on open source projects in the cloud native field. Through the interpretation of the guests, let us see the stories behind each open source project.

On April 26, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) voted at the TOC regular meeting, and unanimously passed the sealer open source project to become the CNCF official sandbox project. The sealer project was born in Alibaba Cloud and aims to solve the standardization of the packaging, distribution and operation of distributed software.

In May last year, Alibaba Cloud engineers chose to open source the sealer project. After one year, sealer has been favored by the majority of users in the independent software vendor (ISV) market. It is also its innovative ideas and the rapid growth of the user base in a short period of time that enable sealer to apply for and join CNCF smoothly.

Series of articles:

sealer becomes a CNCF Sandbox project, aiming to build a new standard for distributed application delivery

The first in-depth dialogue with the ACK release of Alibaba Cloud Container Service: How to use sealer to achieve rapid construction & deployment

Sealer - Docker with Kubernetes as an OS cluster dimension

Zhengcaiyun's privatized business delivery practice based on sealer

May 26th (Thursday) 19:00-20:00 pm, the founder of sealer Zhongyi, the technical director of Zhengcaiyun delivery technology Majie, and the product leader of ADP-online Lu Mo were guests [Open Source Night Chat], and had a chat with developers. Let's chat about the unforgettable story behind sealer.

Follow the video account of "Alibaba Cloud Native" and make an appointment for the live broadcast now!

What is sealer?

As an open source solution of Alibaba that helps distributed applications to quickly package, deliver and run, sealer can solve the delivery problem of complex applications by packaging distributed applications and their dependencies such as database middleware together.

The product built by sealer is called a cluster image. A complete set of Kubernetes + containers is embedded in the cluster image. They work together to solve the delivery consistency problem of distributed applications.

Its core principle can refer to the following figure:

Docker can build a single operating system (rootfs) and a single-machine application (docker build) into a container image and run it quickly on a single machine (docker run), while sealer regards Kubernetes as the operating system of the entire cluster (cloud rootfs), And build a cluster image with the distributed application deployed on it (sealer build), and run it quickly on the cluster (sealer run). At the same time, cluster images can also be pushed to public image repositories (such as DockerHub, Alibaba Cloud Container Image Service, etc.) and shared with other users.

For proprietary cloud delivery companies, sealer can ultimately help you achieve large-scale delivery, expand revenue, reduce costs, and increase profits. Companies using sealer technology can win at scale, lower the price per product delivered, and create a core price advantage.

Judging from the current status of delivery projects, almost all start from hundreds of thousands or millions, which almost limits the customer group to top customers, but the demand for small and medium-sized enterprises is real, due to the high delivery cost. There is a need and no market. If the price can be reduced to thousands or tens of thousands, new markets will be fully opened up.

The same is true for Party A. It takes several months from purchasing a set of software to landing, and the entire link between sales communication, POC, delivery, etc. is very long. Because the delivery cost of Party B becomes lower, the corresponding procurement cost of Party A will also decrease. Before the emergence of sealer, it was almost impossible for most enterprises to deliver 10,000 sets of complex software offline in one year, and delivery at the hour level was even more whimsical, but sealer can realize self-service, and the scale of delivery is no longer limited by the technical level. Limits, but also achieve fast one-click delivery.

For example, the privatized delivery customers of Zhengcaiyun are government and enterprise scenarios, and the scale of business to be delivered is relatively large: 300+ business components, 20+ middleware, the delivery target infrastructure is different and uncontrollable, the network restrictions are strict, some In sensitive scenarios or even completely isolated networks, in this context, the biggest pain point in business delivery is the processing of deployment dependencies and delivery consistency. Although business unification is delivered based on Kubernetes to achieve the consistency of the operating environment, how to solve a series of problems such as all the images relied on in the deployment process, the unified processing of various packages, and the consistency of the delivery system itself, need to be solved urgently.

However, the delivery of a complex business itself is a huge engineering problem. Take the Zhengcaiyun scenario as an example: the deployment and configuration of various resource objects such as various helm charts, RBAC, istio gateway, cni, middleware, etc. Coupled with the delivery of more than 300 business components, each privatization delivery brings a lot of labor and time cost.

Zhengcaiyun is in a period of rapid business development. The demand for privatized deployment projects is constantly increasing, and the high-cost delivery method is more and more difficult to support the actual needs. How to reduce the delivery cost and ensure the consistency of delivery is the operation and maintenance team. The most pressing problem to be solved.

Occasionally, Capricorn, the delivery technology leader of Zhengcai Cloud, found sealer and contacted the sealer sponsor Zhongyi at the first time. At the same time, he invited community partners to come to the company for communication. Using sealer, we redefine the delivery process and use Kubefile to integrate business components. , the delivery of containerized middleware, the delivery of components such as image cache, etc. are directly completed by sealer. Using the sealer lite build mode, the parsing and caching of dependent images are automatically completed.

The use of sealer shields the complex process logic and dependency processing logic of a large number of application delivery, which greatly simplifies the implementation difficulty. Continued simplification of implementation logic enables delivery at scale. In our practical scenario, using the new delivery system, the delivery cycle was shortened from 15 days/person to 2 days/person, and the successful delivery of a 2000G+ memory 800+ core CPU scale cluster including 20G service mirror cache was achieved. In the next step, we plan to continuously simplify the delivery process, so that a novice only needs simple training to complete the delivery of the entire project.

sealer has completed the setting of "Docker in the cluster dimension". In the future, it will increase more investment in ecological development, create more and better official images, establish more partners, and truly connect software providers with Users connect and collaborate efficiently. Sealer is still a new project. It has experienced many "strikes" in the first few months of open source. Capricorn said: "We have great expectations and confidence in the design pattern of sealer, and we have chosen to collaborate with the community to develop Build and grow together.”

For more stories behind open source projects, welcome to book the open source night chat live room on the evening of May 26th.