Xu Jiahang, Architect of China Merchants Bank: Co-growth of Financial Cloud Native and Open Source Standards

Author: Xi Yang, Xu Jiahang

The technical value of cloud native means that it is the future, and joining an open source community with sustainable vitality can help us get there faster.

*——Xu Jiahang, KubeVela Maintainer, from the cloud platform and operation and maintenance platform development team of China Merchants Bank Infrastructure R&D Center.

Xu Jiahang from China Merchants Bank Infrastructure R&D Center is a new maintainer in the KubeVela open source community. He is currently working on the cloud platform and operation and maintenance platform development team, engaged in the construction of enterprise-level cloud-native application management systems.

According to Xu Jiahang, now 15 members of his team are participating in the contribution of the KubeVela community. Before he became a Maintainer, three other classmates had been promoted to Reviewer.

Friends who have some knowledge of KubeVela know that KubeVela is a modern software delivery platform in essence. It makes your application delivery simpler, more efficient, and more reliable in today's popular hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Behind the KubeVela deployment workflow is the open application model OAM, which helps developers to orchestrate once and run anywhere. In the field of cloud native, KubeVela is one of the most eye-catching open source projects in the past two years.

However, KubeVela, who has only developed for more than 2 years, has to say that he is still very young. Companies in the financial industry like China Merchants Bank have strict requirements on the stability and reliability of their business architecture, and they are also very cautious in the selection and implementation of technologies. With so much effort put into KubeVela, what are their needs and considerations? What is your attitude towards open source technology? What role did KubeVela play in China Merchants Bank's cloud-native process?

In a recent conversation with Xu Jiahang, he answered our "curiosity".

"The changes that application management is going through in my eyes"

This year is Xu Jiahang's 13th year of IT research and development. Before joining China Merchants Bank, he was mainly responsible for product research and development in the field of data communication. During this period, he worked on wireless communication protocols and embedded automotive wireless interconnection. There was a period of more than 3 years. Entrepreneurial experience in cloud storage.

The accumulation of technical depth and experience has enabled him to establish his own "prediction model" for the future development of technology. In recent years, he began to pay close attention to cloud-native technologies, such as cloud-native application DevOps, observability, distributed file system, API gateway, etc. He is especially interested in open source technologies at the basic software layer. Because he observed that after the cloudification of infrastructure, the work of application R&D and operation and maintenance needs to solve some new challenges, such as:

• After the cloudification of infrastructure, application R&D, operation and maintenance are exposed to more and more diverse runtimes. If the separation of concerns is not carried out, the cost of cognition and mastery of application development and operation and maintenance roles in the new environment will be high;
• The degree of application microservices is deepened, and the architecture is highly distributed, which makes deployment and operation and maintenance work more complicated;
• In the context of increasingly complex IT systems, application observability based on logs, links, and indicators has become a rigid requirement in order to ensure the continuous stability of applications and services.

If you look at the CNCF panorama, community groups, and fast-growing projects in Github, you can also find that the above three points are also the direction of the community and the industry's key efforts and active practices.

(Image from CNCF Landscape: https://landscape.cncf.io/ )\

In addition, being in the financial industry also gave him a stronger sense of changes in application R&D and operation and maintenance: "In the financial industry, it is not a small challenge to manage applications well. For example, the complexity of infrastructure and application runtimes Diversity is more prominent, such as mainframe, bare mental, hypervisor, container, faas may all exist at the same time; at the same time, there are higher requirements for business continuity, availability, and security, so there is a strong demand for application observability (SLO). "

These experiences also made him more clearly see the unique advantages of the "application-centric" cloud-native architecture in helping businesses improve efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. He believes that the upgrade of software architecture in the financial industry to cloud-native is inevitable Row.

"Technological innovation is the process of solving problems, and it is also the mission of technicians"

It is not easy to promote technological innovations such as technological architecture evolution and productization of open source technologies in enterprises, especially in the financial industry. However, the realized value and the sense of achievement it brings drive Xu Jiahang and his team to enjoy this process of "killing monsters and breaking through the barriers", he said: "After enterprises migrate to the cloud, application development and operation and maintenance are both In the cloud, how to solve the new challenges faced by application management is a very valuable thing. On the other hand, based on our value analysis of cloud native technology, we know that the future is there, we hope to achieve and achieve, and we continue to gain in this process. A sense of achievement is an important driving force for us.”

Of course, while ensuring the provision of value and solving problems, it is also necessary to control the risks brought by new technologies and architectures to the normal operation of the business. It is necessary to be compatible with reality and integrate with the existing tool chain in the industry to ensure smooth evolution. Xu Jiahang likened this : "The evolution process is like a moving car, which is fully loaded with the business applications of China Merchants Bank. What we need to do is to change the application platform from 'fuel' to 'gas-electric hybrid', or even 'pure electric', so that this car can get Lower fuel consumption, more power and faster acceleration."

Xu Jiahang shared some experiences on how to make the evolution of the application platform smoother during the transition between "traditional fuel" and "new energy" so as not to affect the normal operation of this fully loaded car:

• Must be compatible with reality and integrate with in-house tools such as application onboarding and migration
• Can better solve previous problems, such as application dependency management, VMService
• Provide high value-added capabilities such as application observability
• The most efficient way to promote a new technology is to put the best practices of the technology into the tool (system) platform (after internalization), so that users can solve their problems quickly with a low cognitive threshold, which is more efficient than simply preaching. efficient

The evolution of automobile fuel from fuel oil to new energy is a process to solve problems such as cost, performance, and efficiency, and it is also the use of automobiles to allow people to enjoy a better living environment. The same is true of technological evolution.

"Vibrant open source community allows us to reach the other side faster"

Xu Jiahang's team and organization actively embrace open source, and encourage members to participate in open source community contributions: "After all, today, the evolution of enterprises and technologies is inseparable from the open source community. On the premise of ensuring security compliance, according to their own It is necessary to choose appropriate open source projects and actively participate in the community, which can achieve win-win cooperation.”

When judging the value of an open source project, Xu Jiahang shared a core principle: "We are very concerned about the vitality and continuity of an open source project and its community. The technical value of cloud native means that it is the future. An open source community of sexual vitality that can help us get there faster.”

(OAM/KubeVela schematic diagram)

He told us that in 2020, he and his team began to explore the use of application standard model OAM to solve application development, deployment and operation and maintenance problems. At the same time, they are also continuing to pay attention to the field of cloud-native applications, open source communities (Operator, Crossplane, OAM, KubeVela) and public cloud products (DigitalOcean App Platform): Management issues', but the product form is different. Among them, OAM has a design concept and gives the application Spec paradigm; KubeVela also has a landing, as its standard implementation, we pay more attention to the development of this community."

(China Merchants Bank's KubeVela-based application integration pipeline)

In terms of specific capabilities, KubeVela provides a declarative application model AppFile, a unified application control plane for standard workloads with separation of concerns, an open architecture based on addon, the ability to orchestrate application deployment based on workflow, multi-cluster management, etc., which are the most attractive to Xu Jiahang. And the team, "We mainly use KubeVela to implement the enterprise-level cloud-native application management platform to solve the problem of full-cycle management of applications after going to the cloud in the industry. The above capabilities are in line with our demands, especially v1.2 and later versions are more Mature".

"There are no open source projects that land smoothly"

As a newly developed open source project, KubeVela's implementation in specific business scenarios of China Merchants Bank is difficult to achieve "out-of-the-box" level, so it also needs certain customization and transformation to make up for the community version's ability challenges in enterprise-level scenarios. Xu Jiahang also shared the core implementation strategy with you.

KubeVela mainly has 4 core parts, namely Vela-UX, Vela-APIServer, Vela-Core and Addons. This achieves a balance between enterprise customized version and community version. China Merchants Bank Infrastructure R&D Center mainly maintains Core and customizes UX. , transforming Vela-APIServer, extending Addons four aspects of work.

(China Merchants Bank Application Management Platform Architecture and Community Collaborative Relationship)

During the above transformation process, Xu Jiahang and his teammates also fed back this ability to KubeVela, focusing on the following aspects to participate in community building:

• Vela-Core: appRevison GC strategy, application release workflow and policy, CRD effective scope, etc.
• Addons: crontask, mysql, flink, application observable SLO, etc.
• Implementation practice sharing: China Merchants Bank enterprise-level application management practice, offline installation, etc.
• Custom UX and Vela-Backend revamps are planned to contribute

"Hope to see more diverse KubeVela community members"

2022 is the third year that OAM is officially open source, and it is also the second year that KubeVela is open source. In the community, we can see more and more companies paying attention to, practicing and contributing to OAM and KubeVela. "Open, efficient and dynamic" is the most direct feeling of the KubeVela community and Xu Jiahang:

"We can see that in the last year, the community has ushered in a wave of rapid development. I still remember that the first time I communicated with Tianyuan (Sun Jianbo, KubeVela community leader, Alibaba Cloud technical expert), we communicated for two hours. We had an in-depth chat about the thoughts of the CMB Infrastructure R&D Center team on OAM and KubeVela. It was very rare. Soon we started the joint construction, synchronized regularly, and maintained the continuity of personnel input and contribution. During this process Special thanks to KubeVela community members for their assistance, such as Yinda, Yueda, Chuyue, Wuwu and other colleagues, who are very professional and enthusiastic, which have benefited us a lot in some engineering practices in the community.”

After becoming a KubeVela Maintainer, what Xu Jiahang looks forward to most is to see the diversity of community participants, and to give KubeVela continuous vitality through everyone's contributions. At the same time, he is also helping more developers to join KubeVela through the promotion of the following plans:

• Continue to contribute to China Merchants Bank's corporate practice, help Vela to be more usable at the enterprise level, and drive more companies to use, contribute and share practice in this way
• Prepare more Vela high-quality content to spread to foreign technology forums
• Participate in the organization of offline Meetup (Chengdu Station, also the city where Jiahang is located)

"At the KubeCon North America summit at the end of this year, I will share KubeVela's corporate practice in China Merchants Bank with the students in the community. I hope to share excellent open source projects and real landing experience with global developers, so that more KubeVela companies can accelerate the development of KubeVela. The process of cloud-native transformation”. At the end of this chat, Xu Jiahang shared this little easter egg with us, let's look forward to it together!

(way to participate in the KubeVela community)

You can learn more details about KubeVela and the OAM project through the following materials:

• Project code base: github.com/oam-dev/kubevela Welcome to Star/Watch/Fork!
• The official homepage and documentation of the project: kubevela.io, since version 1.1, Chinese and English documents have been provided, and developers are welcome to translate more language documents.
• Project DingTalk Group: 23310022; Slack: CNCF #kubevela Channel
• Join WeChat group: Please add the following maintainer WeChat account to indicate that you have entered the KubeVela user group:

Click here : Check out the official website of the KubeVela project! !