Recently, Gartner released the 2020 public cloud container report. According to the report, Alibaba Cloud and AWS have the richest product layout, covering 9 product capabilities, and ranking first.
According to Gartner analysts' comments, Alibaba Cloud has a rich container product form and a strong performance in the Chinese market. It has good technology development strategies in 9 product areas, including serverless containers, service grids, security sandbox containers, hybrid cloud and edge.
Alibaba Cloud has been the only Chinese company selected for two consecutive years. Today, Alibaba Cloud Containers is available in 19 public cloud availability zones around the world. The scale of service growth has exceeded 400% for many consecutive years, supporting tens of thousands of clusters and having millions of containers.
What is the so-called technological evolution of Alibaba Cloud, one of the earliest companies in the country to deploy container technology in the past? In this regard, the author interviewed Yi Li, Director of R & D of Alibaba Cloud Container Service, to reveal the development path of Alibaba Cloud container technology in the era of cloud computing and analyze the new trends of industry development.
Yi Li, Director of Alibaba Cloud Container Service R & D
1. The evolution of Alibaba Cloud container technology
Today, the performance of Alibaba Cloud containers is dazzling, but behind it is Alibaba's ten years of investment and experience:
As early as 2011, when Docker technology has not yet appeared, Ali has begun to apply container technology on a large scale;
In December 2015, Alibaba Cloud officially provided container services to the outside world;
In 2016, Ali's core business links on Double Eleven were fully containerized. Container technology supported the overall trading system of Double Eleven, with a peak transaction volume of 175,000 transactions per second.
In October 2017, Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes) 1.0 was officially released, which was the world's first batch of products that passed Kubernetes conformity certification.
In March 2019, Alibaba Cloud became the only domestic company selected for Gartner's public cloud container service report.
In September 2019, ACK2.0 was fully upgraded, including a series of important product capabilities such as security sandbox, edge computing, and hybrid cloud, and the Alibaba Cloud Cloud Market Partner Program was released.
2. "Containers set off cloud-native changes"
Containers are representative of cloud-native technologies. As early as 2004, Google started to use container technology. In 2006, it released process containers to introduce container virtualization infrastructure to the Linux kernel. In 2013, Docker was officially released as a phenomenon-level open source project. In the same year, the concept of "cloud native" was proposed; in 2014, Kubernetes was officially released.
Yi Li said that container technology has revolutionized cloud native. Container technology promotes the standardization of cloud computing construction (for example, Docker images have become the standard for application distribution and delivery); and has become the standard for resource scheduling and orchestration, thereby shielding the differences in the underlying infrastructure and helping applications be deployed in different cloud infrastructure on.
Yi Li said that only standardization can promote economies of scale, and it can fit the essence of cloud computing, which is an important contribution of container technology. The standards it builds can encourage the upper layer to establish a series of value-added capabilities to help enterprises and developers better build elastically scalable and easy-to-manage systems on the cloud. This is an important essence of cloud native.
In addition to container technology, cloud native generally believes that there are three major elements of continuous delivery, DevOps, and microservices. In the eyes of Yi Li, these four are inevitable results driven by both technology and business.
In terms of business, with the rapid development of the Internet and the digital economy, enterprises are facing more and more uncertainties and rapid development. For example, in early 2020, we faced an unexpected epidemic, and industries such as education and public health need to quickly online business, in order to better meet the rapid growth of business development needs.
This is a huge challenge for enterprises. Enterprises need to have good adaptability in order to quickly adapt and maintain high-speed growth before they can survive in a highly dynamic commercial environment. The cloud-native technology is to help improve business agility.
In this way, all aspects of technology are involved: such as Severless, continuous delivery can provide an agile development process, and containers as a standardized software delivery method can promote efficient collaboration of organizations to accelerate enterprise innovation. Microservices are agile application architectures. Containers can help large-scale distributed application distribution, deployment, delivery, operation and maintenance, improve the level of automation and intelligence, and under these technologies, support enterprise architectures to adapt and quickly iterate at any time.
Yi Li said that cloud native is an inevitable trend of cloud computing and an inevitable result of the development of the Internet and the digital economy. Because cloud native is inseparable from cloud computing, cloud computing can help scale and save IT resources, reduce computing costs and improve efficiency, and provide IT capabilities and service methods, ready to use, which is to build a digital economic infrastructure. Cloud native is the shortest way to unlock the value of cloud and help companies make better use of cloud capabilities.
3. Cloud native in the past and present life of Alibaba Cloud
In 2008, Ali began to evolve from centralized monolithic applications to distributed microservices, and technologies such as HSF and Dubbo were widely used. When the large-scale distributed architecture is introduced internally, the overall deployment and maintenance of the enterprise is more complicated, and the overall resource utilization rate is not high.
In 2011, Alibaba's T4 container began to go online, using container technology to run as a containerized virtual machine, which opened up Alibaba's exploration of cloud native.
In 2015, container and cloud-native technologies were applied on Alibaba on a large scale, which can be reflected from two points: technically, Alibaba began to use cloud resources to achieve cost-saving goals during the Double 11 of the year, because containers have good Portability, thus contributing to the goal of the cloud. In terms of organization, Ali fully embraced the DevOps culture, merged the operation and maintenance and R & D teams, and accelerated the practice and landing of DevOps through container technology.
With the rapid development of Alibaba's business, whether it is an online business such as Tmall, a shopping cart, or an offline business such as data analysis, it places higher requirements on the use of resources. In this development process, the use of container technology can be effective Save and unify in order to improve resource utilization and reduce costs.
At the end of 2018, Ali decided to go to the cloud. At that time, it was decided to use the cloud-native method to upload the cloud instead of using the cloud space. In this way, by fully releasing the ability of the cloud on the cloud, it helps Ali to better use the value of the cloud and accelerate the cloud A large-scale application process native to Ali.
"This also gives users more confidence, because Alibaba is using its own delivery system to polish Alibaba Cloud's core capabilities, just like flying with an enterprise customer," Yi Li quipped.
4. The three-dimensional technical architecture guarantees the application security on the cloud in all directions
According to reports, security is the company's biggest concern for cloud-native technologies. So what technical guarantee does Alibaba Cloud have in this regard?
For this problem, Yi Li first sold a pass and asked: What is the difference between security in the cloud native era and traditional security?
First, cloud-native applications are highly dynamic and dense.
In the past, only one application was deployed on a machine, but now a machine can deploy hundreds of applications. In this way, the density will increase. And the container is a dynamically deployed application, the first second is the A application running, the next second may be the B application running, this dynamic and high density is a security challenge that has not been encountered before.
The second is the agile and rapid iteration of the R & D process in the cloud native era. After adopting microservices and DevOps, developers frequently release applications, and the release frequency has increased more than five times than traditional application deployment. The traditional security method is based on process control: review first, go online after review, and solve the problem according to a very strict process after online problems, which will lead to a slower overall software development process. But the cloud-native era is both fast and secure.
The third is the extensive use of open source technology. In the cloud-native era, many enterprise applications rely on third-party open source software, which may bring uncertain security risks to enterprises.
Faced with the challenges of these cloud-native eras, in order to increase security, Alibaba Cloud uses a three-dimensional, end-to-end security architecture, from infrastructure security, to a secure software supply chain, to application security, to create a three-dimensional Protection.
First of all, as a public infrastructure, the cloud's security capabilities are higher than users' self-built data centers.
The second is the secure software supply chain. We need to integrate security concepts into the entire software life cycle, and move the security protection capabilities to the development and delivery stages. Evolution from DevOps to DevSecOps. In this regard, Alibaba Cloud provides product capabilities such as container image scanning and signing. These also have a good landing within Ali, and businesses such as Ali e-commerce and Alipay have higher security requirements.
In addition, there is a need to guarantee runtime safety, because security risks are everywhere. In this regard, Alibaba Cloud supports security sandbox containers, even untrusted applications cannot destroy the container platform; Alibaba Cloud Security Center can scan and monitor the security risks of container applications in real time, and block new vulnerabilities, helping enterprise users create a Cloud native platform.
5. Five advantages of Alibaba Cloud
In addition to security, Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native technology has five advantages:
1. Optimize and integrate Alibaba Cloud capabilities
Alibaba has many independent original and world-leading cloud capabilities such as Feitian Cloud operating system, Shenlong architecture, and light-containing chips. Alibaba Cloud's container products are deeply integrated with them. For example, the combination of the performance container and the Shenlong architecture has the advantage of zero loss, and the performance is 20% better than the physical machine. With the elasticity of Alibaba Cloud, it can realize the expansion of the second meter of the application architecture and the expansion of thousands of nodes in minutes.
2. Ali large-scale production practice
From containerization in 2011 to the present, Ali has experienced a lot of real practice in the production environment for nearly ten years. In 2019, Alibaba is completely based on cloud-native technology, and began to go to the cloud on a large scale.
3. Large-scale user applications
Alibaba Cloud container products are now available in 19 public cloud availability zones around the world, supporting Siemens, Schneider, Olympic Organizing Committee and many other global enterprise applications to build on the Alibaba Cloud container platform.
It is worth mentioning that during the outbreak, in the face of soaring user traffic in online education, Alibaba Cloud Containers helped expand capacity. For example, Onion Academy co-founder & CTO Li Nuo said: During the outbreak, Onion Academy served as the head K12 online education company. Free access to all core curriculum resources of the platform for teachers and students across the country, more than 7 million students self-study on the Onion Academy App, the number of daily study visits continued to soar during this period. After using cloud containers, the system has improved resource utilization by about 60%, and can be quickly isolated after problems occur. When faced with a rapidly increasing business volume, it can also be expanded in a short time for business support.
4. Alibaba's key strategic investment in cloud native
Alibaba Cloud CEO Zhang Jianfeng has repeatedly emphasized the need to invest heavily in cloud native. Because of the company's strategic investment, Alibaba Cloud continues to increase product innovation and jointly create more valuable new products. In 2019, the Edge Container (ACK @ Edge) was launched, aiming to achieve a new container product with cloud-edge-end integration and collaboration, and expand the boundaries of cloud native.
5. Cloud native open source contribution
In the field of domestic open source, Ali has a greater influence. We see that in the technical supervision committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the top open source community in the world, Alibaba Cloud senior technical expert Li Xiang was selected. In addition, Alibaba Cloud contributed Dragoncloud, the cloud-native image distribution system, to CNCF, and it will enter an incubation state this year. At present, Alibaba Group and Ant Financial have invested heavily in the field of security sandboxes. Not only do they apply security sandbox containers to their products, but they will also give back their relevant capabilities to the open source community.
6. In the AI era, new trends in cloud native development
With the development of open source and AI technologies, Yi Li believes that cloud native may have new growth points in the following areas:
One is the direction of AI. According to Gartner's prediction, 70% of AI applications will be developed based on containers and serverless technologies by 2023. Now that cloud-native ML tool KubeFlow can provide users with AI processes that can be assembled, reproduced, and ported, Yi Li's team has contributed Arena, a deep learning accelerator, to the KubeFlow community.
The second is that Kubernetes has a good tendency to develop in the field of application delivery. Because Kubernetes is positioned for the operation and maintenance of enterprise automation, today everyone has a high level of attention in the field of application delivery, so more and more standards are emerging. Now the OAM (Open Application Model) jointly promoted by Ali and Microsoft is to further simplify Kubernetes, organize and divide the development and operation and maintenance effectively, and make the entire team collaboration more efficient.
The third is the secure sandbox container. Now we see that Ali, Google and other container technologies such as Kata Containers, Docker, and gVisor are exploring safe and efficient container technologies to support the rapid development of upper-layer cloud native applications.
7. Demystifying the future "container" layout
Talking about the future, Yi Li introduced Alibaba Cloud's container layout:
1. In container technology, the goal is to build a new foundation, new computing power, and a new ecology.
Yi Li emphasized that cloud native technology is the shortest path to release cloud value, which can help enterprises better support hybrid cloud, cloud-side integrated distributed architecture and global application delivery.
According to Gartner analysis, more than 80% of enterprises will adopt a hybrid cloud architecture, and creating a hybrid cloud and cloud-edge integrated solution is also the direction that Alibaba Cloud is more concerned about. Yi Li believes that the future cloud architecture is a dynamic and hybrid architecture-the cloud side is integrated, the public cloud capabilities are expanded to the edge device side, and computing power and AI need to be pushed to the edge. The container provides a consistent way to the cloud side Perform unified application deployment and delivery.
Based on the innovative technology of cloud native software and hardware integration, Alibaba Cloud provides powerful computing power to accelerate the intelligent upgrade of enterprises: container service combined with Shenlong architecture to exert performance and flexibility, support scheduling and sharing of optical 800 chips, and optimize deep learning Scene efficiency and cost.
Second, Serverless, because Serverless is the next important direction for the development of cloud-native computing, the combination of serverless AI and data capabilities will release greater power and make enterprise IT architecture more flexible.
3. Service Mesh (Service Mesh), which can help enterprises optimize the microservice application architecture. It sinks service governance capabilities to the infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on their business logic, which can greatly improve R & D efficiency and The speed of technological iteration. At present, Ali economies have invested heavily in the service grid.
8. Ecological construction plan
In September 2019, Alibaba Cloud officially launched the container market, helping enterprise users to easily obtain commercial and high-quality container applications certified by Alibaba Cloud.
Today, well-known enterprises such as Intel have entered the cloud market, covering products such as container security and commercial applications. In addition, Alibaba Cloud and SAP's Cloud Platform and other enterprise platforms cooperate with the global technology partner ecological plan.
Finally, Yi Li concluded that with the rapid development of the digital economy, more and more enterprises will use cloud native technology to accelerate the Internetization of their architecture. Cloud native technology can help enterprise IT architecture have better flexibility and autonomy, and improve business agility.
Enterprises should use cloud-native technology to help their digital and intelligent upgrades, because the integration of cloud-native technology and heterogeneous computing, big data and AI can release huge power and help companies turn data assets into core competitiveness.
As technologies such as 5G and IoT mature, the new national infrastructure policy will bring new opportunities for enterprises. Cloud native technology can help enterprises accelerate the cloud-side application integration system and build the next-generation dynamic large-scale borderless cloud application architecture.
If cloud native is a must for cloud computing in the next decade, then the container is the most critical battle. This Gartner container report can be called the manifestation of the comprehensive strength of various cloud vendors. Obviously, Alibaba Cloud has Win the most critical battle of cloud native!