Alibaba Cloud Ding Yu: Activating a New Paradigm of Application Construction with Leading Cloud Native Technology

On August 11, the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Apsara Technology Summit was held in Shenzhen. At the meeting, Alibaba Cloud proposed three paradigms for cloud-native activation application construction, and released the latest products and solutions. Based on the distributed cloud container platform ACK One, it realizes the consistent management of multi-regional distributed systems; released the ACK FinOps solution, allowing enterprises to achieve digital cost management and cloud-native cost optimization. At the same time, it was announced at the summit that the message queue RocketMQ5.0 was fully commercialized, with the advantages of better cost, ultra-large-scale flexibility, light weight and easy integration, and full-link observability, helping enterprises build a stable message system.

Ding Yu, Alibaba researcher and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform, delivered a speech at the main forum. The following is organized according to the content of the speech.

Ding Yu at the summit

Today, enterprise application construction still faces great challenges. How to use resources on demand to reduce costs and increase efficiency? How to fully guarantee business stability and continuity under the complex system architecture, and how to achieve agility in applications and intelligence in business? And a very important point, how to ensure the credibility and security of the system?

Enterprises urgently need to fully tap the technical dividends of cloud computing to help business development and create more business value. Cloud native can activate the application building paradigm to solve the challenges faced by enterprises in the new era.

Fully containerized . Containers bring standardization of operation and maintenance. Today, containers have become a new interface for cloud computing and enterprise interaction, and bring about the improvement of elasticity and scalability, helping enterprises to meet the rigid needs of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. At the same time, we also see a trend of full load containerization. Today's containerization is not only about microservices, but also new applications such as AI and big data are fully containerized, which makes container deployment ubiquitous.

Internet-based core technologies . Internetization can support the agile iteration of business, and at the same time build an elastic architecture, so that applications can calmly cope with traffic peaks, and achieve high availability and high reliability to ensure business continuity.

Application serverless. Serverless greatly improves the efficiency of enterprise development, operation and maintenance. And because of full hosting, it brings more extreme flexibility, covering all scenarios, making it easier for applications to migrate to the cloud.

IDC predicts that by 2024, the share of new production-grade cloud-native applications will increase from 10% in 2020 to 60% due to the adoption of technologies such as microservices, containers, dynamic orchestration, and DevOps .

What cloud-native products and solutions does Alibaba Cloud provide for building new paradigms for the three major applications?

First let's look at container services. Since the release of Alibaba Cloud's container product for seven years, it has developed into a new interface for enterprise customers to interact with Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Apsara Cloud operating system. Compared with the open source solution, Alibaba Cloud Container Service achieves a 20% improvement in computing-intensive application performance, a 50% reduction in container network latency, a 100% increase in heterogeneous resource utilization, and full-link observability. At present, the container service ACK has been fully upgraded to ACK Anywhere, providing unified container infrastructure capabilities wherever the enterprise needs cloud.

Distributed cloud container platform ACK One: Consistent management of multi-region distributed systems

It is predicted that by 2025, 50% of large enterprises will promote business innovation through distributed cloud. To this end, Alibaba Cloud has launched ACK One, an enterprise-level multi-region/multi-cluster container management platform, which greatly simplifies the cluster management interface and provides consistent management. , delivery, operation and maintenance experience. Whether it is based on public cloud, private cloud, own IDC or edge node, users can use ACK One for unified container cluster management, resource scheduling, data disaster recovery and application delivery.

Genetron Health is a leading cancer precision medicine company in China. It supports cancer genetic testing data processing based on ACK container technology, and makes full use of the elasticity of the cloud. The daily processing capacity has increased by 10 times in the past three years, and the processing cost of a single sample is compared to 60% cost savings under the cloud.

Vivo is a well-known smartphone manufacturer in China. Its AI computing platform meets computing power needs in a timely manner through ACK One, which greatly shortens the resource delivery cycle from months to days. For temporary short-term computing power requirements, using public cloud resources through hybrid cloud can reduce costs by more than 90%.

ACK Cloud Native AI Suite: Heterogeneous Computing Power, Acceleration and Efficiency

The goal of cloud-native AI is to use cloud-native technology and ecology to help users systematically, conveniently and efficiently build an AI engineering platform that meets their own needs, and to open up the production line of AI capabilities. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud has created the ACK cloud-native AI suite, which can improve the utilization of computing resources when running AI tasks and accelerate the speed of task execution. It is especially suitable for two scenarios of heterogeneous computing and deep learning. It can accelerate AI data access by 35%, accelerate distributed training by 20%, and increase GPU resource utilization by 100%.

Anymen (social product soul) is based on Alibaba Cloud's ACK cloud-native AI suite, builds an AI platform from 0 to 1, unifies the operation and maintenance, elasticity, and scheduling of heterogeneous resources, efficiently manages AI development, training, and inference tasks, and improves model iteration efficiency 2~5 times, the GPU utilization rate is increased by 44%, and the cost is saved by 52%.

Mimozhixing is an artificial intelligence company dedicated to autonomous driving. Its AI platform is based on the cloud-native AI suite Fluid and EMR JindoFS for data set caching acceleration, which effectively solves the performance bottleneck of the storage-computing separation architecture and significantly improves the efficiency of training and inference on the cloud. The training speed can be increased by up to about 300%. The multi-machine and multi-card training efficiency is increased by 70%, and the overall TCO is reduced by 20%.

ACK FinOps Solution: Digital Cost Governance, Cloud Native Cost Optimization

With the deepening of cloud use by enterprises, enterprises are faced with the new problem of difficulty in cloud cost management, and cloud cost optimization capability has become the primary requirement for enterprise cloud management. Alibaba Cloud combines business-finance integration practices and FinOps concepts, and applies artificial intelligence technology to provide cloud cost optimization tools, and launches the ACK FinOps solution to help enterprises quickly realize full-link enterprise financial operation management on the cloud, and easily do pre-budgeting and business affairs. Early warning and prediction of key indicators, post-event multi-dimensional cost analysis and optimization suggestions.

In May this year, CAICT released the standard of "Trusted Cloud • Cloud Cost Optimization Tool Capability" and the first batch of evaluation results. With its product capabilities in cloud cost management, Alibaba Cloud passed all 33 capability indicators with full marks, becoming the first cloud service provider in China to pass the cloud cost optimization standard of the Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

TCL is a representative of the domestic intelligent manufacturing industry. Through cloud-native IT cost management solutions, it can easily realize cost allocation for departments and teams. The "same frequency of strategy" of the business and financial teams saved the Group's IT cost by 30% throughout the year.

As a leader in the domestic Internet finance industry, China Insurance has taken into account the stability of the architecture, resource cost efficiency, and data security in the process of cloud-native migration to the cloud, and through the inspection of idle resources provided by the cloud-native IT cost management solution, Tenant-level cost allocation, flexibility and co-location, etc., shorten the enterprise IT cost management cycle from quarter to day level, and reduce resource idle rate from 30% to less than 10%.

Observability Suite ACOS: Ensuring Efficient Operation of Digital Business

Next we look at Internet middleware. Cloud native not only reshapes enterprise IT architecture, but also changes operation and maintenance systems and processes. The concept of "observable" came into being and became an important standard for measuring the level of enterprise IT governance. From problem location and risk identification to cost management, business continuity governance and even business growth, observable technologies and data are relied upon.

Alibaba Cloud Observability Suite ACOS is built around the Prometheus service, Grafana service, and link tracking service to form an observable data layer for indicator storage analysis, link storage analysis, and integration of heterogeneous data sources. At the same time, it provides data through standard PromQL and SQL. Large-scale display, alarm and data exploration capabilities.

Chanjet is a small and micro enterprise finance and management company under UFIDA. Based on the Alibaba Cloud observable suite, the fault location time is reduced by 50% and the O&M workload is reduced by 30%; Aifulu uses the observable suite ACOS, which reduces the number of faults by 30% , the mean failure response time was reduced from 3 hours to 30 minutes, and the user satisfaction increased by 15%.

Message queue RocketMQ5.0 officially commercialized

Today, the message queue RocketMQ5.0 is officially commercialized. This upgrade reduces the price by 50% compared to the previous generation. The commercial version of RocketMQ 5.0 provides a new generation of sales instances. First, in terms of ultra-large-scale elasticity, it can achieve ultra-large scale scaling of 0 to 1 million TPS; secondly, in terms of observability, it supports full-link call chain integration and custom monitoring indicator integration; Finally, in terms of integration, it fully supports native Java/C++/C#/Go SDK, which is more stable.

The last is application serverless. Serverless has become the core technology of cloud computing so far, and mainstream scenarios are using serverless to solve problems, and Alibaba Cloud provides a complete tool chain, allowing enterprises to build applications on the cloud more easily through the serverless architecture and fully enjoy the benefits of serverless. dividends to come.

Serverless Application Center released

With the popularization and use of serverless architecture, problems such as lack of serverless tool chain system, complicated update/deployment process, scattered resources, and difficult governance have also emerged. Alibaba Cloud has released the Serverless Application Center: a large number of scene-based templates, making the management of the full life cycle of serverless applications easier. Through the serverless application center, users can quickly deploy and manage applications without performing additional cloning, building, packaging, and publishing operations before deploying applications, helping users quickly link upstream and downstream services on the cloud, and easily accumulate best practices.

In the future, it is hoped that more enterprises will use cloud-native product technology to activate the paradigm of enterprise application construction, fully release productivity, and realize digital innovation and upgrading.