According to news on March 25, the authoritative consulting agency Forrester recently released the evaluation report on the FaaS platform (Function-As-A-Service Platforms) for the first quarter of 2021. Alibaba Cloud stands out by virtue of being the world’s number one product capability. Among the eight evaluation dimensions Get the highest score and become a global FaaS leader comparable to Amazon. This is the first time that a domestic technology company has entered the FaaS Leaders Quadrant.
The Forrester Wave™ is upgraded for the first time, and the evaluation standards are more stringent. As one of the industry’s most stringent evaluation models for vendor comprehensive capabilities, the Forrester Wave report is highly recognized worldwide. This release of "The Forrester Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2021" is a brand new upgrade of last year’s "The Forrester New WaveTM: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020", with a richer evaluation dimension , The standard is more stringent. Starting from 40 evaluation criteria including developer experience, product features, technology leadership, strategic layout, and market size, the report lasted half a year to evaluate the nine most influential cloud vendors in the world. In the end, Alibaba Cloud became the only domestic technology company that was selected as the highest-ranking-leader quadrant.
Forrester regards Alibaba Cloud Function Computing as a leader in the FaaS market, and puts forward: “In 2020, we believe Alibaba Cloud Function Computing is a platform with strong strength. In 2021, function computing will have an impact on the container ecosystem, OpenTracing, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, The support of open source standards such as Jaeger has further improved its capabilities. Function computing supports popular web frameworks, content-based workloads, 1 millisecond billing granularity, and investment in runtime. Now, we regard Alibaba Cloud Function Computing as a FaaS market Leader ."
As one of the important trends of cloud computing in the next ten years, Serverless has already demonstrated great potential. Forrester believes that the rise of serverless computing has made FaaS (Function As A Service) a new way to provide cloud computing capabilities after IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It is expected that in 2021, a large number of core applications of mainstream enterprises will migrate from the original mainframe architecture to Serverless.
Although the serverless technology was first proposed by AWS, Chinese cloud computing companies got ahead of schedule in the development of serverless and quickly became the first movers. Alibaba Cloud is the first domestic cloud vendor to provide serverless computing services. As early as 2017, it launched the first FaaS product in China with millisecond-level elastic scaling capabilities—Function Compute. It continued to improve its functions and was the first in the industry. The prepaid model reduces the unit price by 70%, making it easier to manage resources, and the cost will be lower when the load is stable.
At present, Alibaba Cloud Function Computing has integrated 30 cloud products, supporting reserved instances, single instance and multiple concurrency, and also provides product capabilities such as container mirroring, performance instances, link tracking, and asynchronous configuration. Alibaba Cloud has the most complete serverless product matrix among cloud vendors, and has obtained the Trusted Cloud Function-as-a-Service certification with all full marks, which can help developers quickly build stable and automatically scalable online applications or small programs. In October last year, Alibaba open sourced the first serverless developer platform Serverless Devs, which is also the industry's first cloud-native full lifecycle management platform that supports mainstream serverless services/frameworks.
In addition, Function Computing FC and Serverless Devs have been fully integrated with Alibaba Cloud Cloud. Developers can automatically deploy applications to Function Computing FC, Serverless Application Engine SAE, Serverless Kubernetes Service ASK through the cloud-effect continuous delivery pipeline, and can also be used in the cloud. Build an end-to-end serverless application R&D operation and maintenance system from "Requirements -> Development -> Testing -> Release -> Operation and Maintenance -> Operations".
Serverless has a wide range of application scenarios, and small programs are just the tip of the iceberg of serverless landing scenarios. Many developers mistakenly think that "small programs = Serverless", but they are not. In addition to small programs, Serverless also has a wider range of application scenarios.
At present, Taobao, Alipay, Dingding, etc. have already applied Serverless to their production business. The Serverless product on Alibaba Cloud has helped tens of thousands of enterprise customers successfully implement Serverless, covering industries or scenarios such as front-end full-stack, small programs, new retail, game mutual entertainment, and online education.
For example, Century Lianhua fully migrated to Function Computing 2.0, which withstood more than 230% of the business peak last year, improved R&D efficiency and delivery by more than 30%, and reduced flexible resource costs by more than 40%; Pocket Monster is based on function computing and uses single instance multiple instances. Concurrency and reserved instance optimization saves 40% of IT investment costs and greatly improves resource utilization.
In September last year, Alibaba established the Cloud Native Technology Committee to fully embrace cloud native, focusing on container, serverless, service grid and other technologies to build applications and services that are more suitable for cloud architecture. During the 2020 Double 11 period, the core system of Alibaba’s e-commerce is fully cloud-native, and the upgrade of the underlying hard-core technology has brought surging power and extreme efficiency: IT costs per 10,000 peak transactions have dropped by 80% compared with four years ago. The efficiency of large-scale application delivery has doubled, which is also the world's largest cloud-native practice.
After more than 10 years of technical practice, Alibaba Cloud has the largest cloud-native product family and open source ecosystem in China, providing more than 100 innovative products such as cloud-native bare metal servers, cloud-native databases, container services, and microservices. In the 2020 Public Cloud Container Report released by Gartner, Alibaba Cloud ranked first in the world.