Author | Shutong
Source | Alibaba Cloud Native Official Account
Today, digitalization has become the core competitiveness of enterprises, and all industries are embracing cloud computing and cloud native. We believe that 2020 is the first year of cloud native, and then 2021 will be a key node for cloud native to accelerate digital innovation in enterprises. At the Alibaba Cloud Computing Summit on March 29, Alibaba researcher and head of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud native application platform Ding Yu (shutong) delivered a keynote speech on "Cloud Native, the Shortest Path to Enterprise Digital Innovation", comprehensively reviewing Alibaba Baba’s 15 years of cloud native practice, and focused on interpreting how companies can realize application cloudification through cloud native in the context of the digital economy, give full play to the value of cloud, and quickly activate digital innovation capabilities.
The following is the content collation.
Alibaba Cloud's assertion on cloud native
A Gartner report pointed out that by 2022, 75% of global enterprises will use cloud-native containerized applications in production. With the trend of enterprises going to the cloud, we are seeing more and more enterprises and developers begin to evolve their businesses and technologies to cloud native.
Alibaba Cloud made three assertions about cloud native:
First of all, container+K8s will become the new interface of cloud computing . Containers have completely changed the way the cloud is used. The importance of containers cannot be overstated. While it solves many problems, it also creates new architectural possibilities. Containerization is the key to building cloud native. If cloud native is a high-rise building, then containerization is the base of this building. The container supports multiple workloads and distributed architecture upwards, encapsulates the infrastructure downwards, shields the differences between the underlying architecture and heterogeneous environments, and can form application packaging image distribution and delivery standards. Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK encapsulates 30 cloud products downwards, forming a new interface for the interaction between the entire automated operation and maintenance and the cloud platform, thereby improving the flexibility and automated operation and maintenance capabilities of the system. At the same time, containers have also promoted the upgrade of software and hardware integration, such as the Shenlong bare metal server.
Second, for developers, cloud native is reshaping the entire software life cycle . We see the downward extension of cloud native to promote the integration of software and hardware, the upward extension to promote the modernization of the architecture, and the horizontal extension to solve the challenges of the entire life cycle of R&D and operation and maintenance, including code development, DevOps, CICD process, operation and maintenance monitoring, and observability. Cloud native is closely related to the entire development process of developers, and is an important help that developers cannot ignore.
Finally, for enterprises, cloud native is the shortest path for enterprise digital innovation . The value of cloud native for the evolution of enterprise technology is that it can realize cloudification of infrastructure, Internetization of core technologies, modernization of application architecture, and business intelligence. The most intuitive business value that these features bring to the enterprise is resource flexibility, system stability, agile application, business intelligence, and credible security.
Alibaba's 15 years of cloud native practice
Alibaba has 15 years of cloud native practical experience. During these 15 years, we often face some key decision points. Every step of the decision on these decision points will have an important impact on Alibaba's cloud native process. Why do we fully embrace cloud native, and how do we think behind every decision?
We started to explore the distributed architecture of the Internet in 2006, and now I think of it as a starting point for Alibaba's cloud native. The reason for the Internet distributed architecture is that Taobao encountered some difficulties during its rapid development. 300 people developed 3 systems, which would bring about some release conflicts and code merging conflicts, which in turn led to a decline in R&D efficiency and business development. The advancement is not agile. Because of these pain points, we propose to do a service-oriented split, that is, a distributed system. In 2008, Taobao's entire service-oriented split has been completed, forming three core middlewares and opening up the industry.
In 2011, we began to promote the implementation of containerization. Why do you want to be containerized? You know, in 2011, there were only a handful of companies in the world that did containerization transformation. At that time, we began to focus on the issue of resource utilization. From the aspect of resource supply, there were several forms in the past, such as using pure physical machines, which meant that the deployment density was relatively coarse, so the utilization rate was not high. If virtualization is used for isolation, a certain amount of resource consumption will occur. In 2011, Alibaba started to transform the containerization technology-T4 project. Containers solve three core problems, one is deployment density, the other is efficient operation and maintenance, and the third is resource isolation. With the emergence of Docker, its ability to standardize container images has greatly promoted automatic operation and maintenance, ensuring that containers can achieve standardized delivery. Based on this, Alibaba integrated Docker to promote more standardized cloud native technology.
In 2015, when our technology and products matured, we began to promote the full commercialization of product technologies and fully embrace cloud-native standards . During this process, Alibaba's own business development has also begun to fully enjoy the dividends of cloud computing. For example, how to use the cloud platform for peak services such as Double 11 and Double 12 to solve the extreme flexibility brought by resource pooling. Therefore, starting in 2015, Alibaba Cloud began to fully support Alibaba Double 11. At the same time, we began to implement unified scheduling of containers and the unification of underlying resource pools. In addition, we have also carried out a variety of tasks, such as hybrid deployment, to achieve the unification of technology stacks and data, which greatly reduces resource costs, improves operation and maintenance efficiency, and better promotes business intelligence.
It can be imagined that if a company has 10,000 engineers, if the R&D efficiency can be increased by 10%, 1,000 engineers can be saved, which greatly releases our productivity. Furthermore, if we can have some more efficient platforms, more advanced methods and processes, and integrate them into the technical system, it will bring a huge leap in the productivity of technical personnel.
2019 is of great significance to Alibaba Cloud. In 2019, Alibaba Cloud supported 100% of Alibaba's double 11 core system to go to the cloud. The scale of online business containers was nearly 2 million, 100% adopted Shenlong flexible bare metal servers, and the cost of computing was increased by 20%. Immediately after 2020, we completed the full cloud nativeization of the core system, and cloud native products began to fully support the group's big promotion, becoming the new base for the world's largest cloud native practice. The driving force behind this is to use cloud-native platforms, products, and tools to realize application cloud growth and cloud growth.
In the cloud-native era, what is the core competitiveness of cloud products? In my opinion, the foundation of cloud products is to continue to be a representative of advanced productivity. This requires cloud products to have hard-core technical capabilities and achieve rapid iteration . For any company, it is difficult for its own system to have such tenacious vitality and competitiveness, and the same is true for Alibaba. Therefore, in 2020, Alibaba will switch to cloud-native products to support the big promotion. One is to recognize the trend of cloud native technology, and the other is to improve Alibaba's internal R&D efficiency and resource utilization based on cloud products.
Alibaba Cloud is the leader and best practitioner of cloud native. Alibaba Cloud has the richest cloud-native product family in China, with more than 300 products and nearly a thousand technical solutions, including cloud-native DevOps, aPaaS & microservices, messaging and event-driven, application tools, serverless architecture, etc., as well as cloud Native database, big data/AI, application delivery and security capabilities, etc. It can be said that a company was born in the cloud-native era and can build its own IT system based on the cloud, in which Alibaba Cloud can provide the most complete technical solutions and product system.
Alibaba Cloud has the most comprehensive cloud-native open source contribution in China. Today, the total number of Alibaba open source projects has exceeded 1,000, covering big data, cloud computing, AI, middleware, containers, serverless and other fields. Among them, some open source projects have also become de facto standards in this field. For example, Dubbo has become the most influential and widely used open source microservice framework in China; RocketMQ is the country's first Internet middleware Apache top-level project, and it is also the number one open source middleware project in China. In addition, we also have the application management engine KubeVela, Alibaba’s first edge computing project OpenYurt, which was just open sourced last year, and the first serverless developer platform Serverless Devs. It is also the industry’s first cloud-native full life supporting mainstream serverless services/frameworks. A platform for cycle management.
By investing a lot of open source and establishing more technical standards, we can help more developers use more advanced cloud-native technologies, so that a very good connection between the community ecology and the cloud will be established, helping enterprises and the cloud to work together quickly development of.
On March 25, the authoritative consulting agency Forrester released the evaluation report on the FaaS platform (Function-As-A-Service Platforms) for the first quarter of 2021. Alibaba Cloud Function-As-A-Service Platforms stood out by virtue of being the world’s number one product capability. Among the eight evaluation dimensions Get the highest score. Alibaba Cloud has become a global FaaS leader comparable to Amazon. This is the first time that a domestic technology company has entered the FaaS Leader Quadrant .
The data in the 2020 Cloud Native User Survey Report by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology also confirms this point. According to the report, Alibaba Cloud's serverless products, relying on technical training and rich application practices during Double Eleven, accounted for 66% of domestic serverless users, far exceeding the sum of other cloud vendors, and are considered to be the first choice of domestic serverless users. .
Not only that, but Alibaba Cloud's native product capabilities have been certified by the world's top evaluation agencies. In March last year, Gartner released the 2020 Public Cloud Container Report. Alibaba Cloud became the only Chinese company to be selected for two consecutive years. It has further improved its product richness, ranking alongside AWS as the most comprehensive cloud service provider for container products in the world, covering 9 This product capability leads companies such as Google, Microsoft and IBM.
Below we will explain from three directions how Alibaba Cloud cloud-native products and solutions can empower enterprises' digital innovation.
Container services help companies improve resource elasticity and significantly reduce computing costs
Today, cloud native has developed into a standardized technology. What is the difference between the products provided by the cloud platform and the open source version? This is a concern of many companies and developers. Alibaba Cloud Container Service provides a large number of enterprise-level features, including security governance capabilities, observable capabilities, multi-cloud hybrid cloud management capabilities, heterogeneous computing power, scheduling capabilities, and intelligent operation and maintenance capabilities. On top of containers, it supports a variety of workloads, including microservices, stateful applications, big data, smart applications, and innovative applications such as blockchain and IoT.
Based on the container product family, we provide a complete container solution externally. Last year, cloud-native AI solutions attracted much attention from enterprises. The Baijia Cloud team's exploration of agile architecture allows them to plan for high-concurrency scenarios. Prior to this battle, Baijia Cloud has optimized its container cluster architecture and planning with the help of the Alibaba Cloud team. Through the core solution of Alibaba Cloud container service ACK and elastic bare metal (Shenlong) instances, it can calmly achieve dynamic expansion and efficiency. Control.
In the face of massive business data, the problem facing ZhongAn Technology is the substantial increase in IT costs, and the pressure of operation and maintenance and data security have become core pain points. Based on the container service ACK, ZhongAn Technology's hardware investment has been reduced by 10%, the operation and maintenance pressure has been greatly reduced, and the manpower has been reduced by more than 50%. In 2020, Shentong quickly realized full containerization, which not only improved the stability of Shentong system, but also shortened the troubleshooting time. The elasticity of the cloud is particularly suitable for big promotion scenarios. Cloud resources can be paid according to the amount. Shentong will release resources after the big promotion ends, saving Shentong millions of computing costs every year. Compared with offline self-built computer rooms and standing machines, cloud resource operations are more convenient and management costs are lower. At the same time, the cloud-native transformation has also promoted the innovation of Shentong's internal technical system. For example, the Shentong express operation and maintenance team used to package and deploy manually or scripted in IDC. After full cloudification, it uses containerization and cloud The native technology successfully transformed into DevOps, which improved the efficiency of R&D and operation and maintenance.
Cloud native middleware escorts system stability
Cloud-native technologies and products can help users easily evolve from the original IT architecture to the modern application architecture. From the perspective of the underlying application hosting platform, Alibaba Cloud provides the container service ACK/ASK. At the application PaaS layer, Alibaba Cloud provides three products: SAE, EDAS, and Web+. At the upper level, Alibaba Cloud provides functional FaaS services to meet different business needs. Not only that, Alibaba Cloud also provides a variety of middleware services, including the industry’s most complete and rich message queue service, covering all common messaging protocols, such as the well-known open source messaging middleware RocketMQ in China, the industry’s popular Kafka, Both RabbitMQ and MQTT message queues can find corresponding commercial services on Alibaba Cloud. In other middleware areas, such as microservice engine MSE, service grid ASM, cloud service bus CSB, and GTS for transaction services, it can help enterprise users quickly build modern application architectures.
Cloud native middleware is fully compatible with open source and open standards, supports ultra-large-scale and complex scenarios, has enterprise-level features, and can achieve highly reliable SLAs. On top of cloud-native middleware products, we also provide enterprises with comprehensive solutions, such as multiple activities in different places, full-link stress testing, enterprise high availability, resource mixing, etc. For companies that want to do cloud-native upgrades, Alibaba Cloud provides comprehensive solutions, from microservice governance to cloud migration, architecture upgrades, and business mid-offices to help companies evolve to a modern architecture.
The only domestic company to enter the Forrester FaaS leader quadrant, and Alibaba Cloud Serverless leads the world
Because it shields the various operation and maintenance complexity of the server, Serverless allows developers to devote more energy to the design and implementation of business logic, and has gradually become one of the mainstream cloud native technologies. The advantage of Serverless is that it removes homogeneous and burdensome server-based infrastructure development and operation and maintenance from application development, allowing users to focus on business innovation. Compared with the traditional development model, the serverless model builds applications based on a large number of mature cloud service capabilities, with fewer decision points for users and lower implementation complexity.
Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud vendor to provide serverless computing services in China . In 2017, Alibaba Cloud first released the first domestic FaaS product with millisecond-level elastic scalability-Function Computing FC; in 2018, Function Computing FC was the first in the industry to support NAS file systems; in 2019, Function Computing FC was upgraded to Function Computing FC 2.0, it provides the first domestic product capabilities such as reserved instance, single instance multiple concurrency, custom runtime, monthly subscription, etc. It eliminates the delay glitch caused by cold start, and well supports the delay-sensitive business. Its excellence The single-function instance has multiple concurrent capabilities and is still the only one in China. Not only that, functional computing FC is also the industry's first serverless service that supports prepaid. Compared with postpaid, the unit price is reduced by 70%. It is easier to manage financial budgets, and the cost will be lower when the load is stable.
In addition to functional computing FC, Alibaba Cloud also provides the first application-oriented serverless application engine SAE, container orchestration-oriented ASK, and container instance-oriented ECI, forming the most complete serverless product matrix among all cloud vendors.
For microservice applications, the serverless application engine SAE can achieve zero-code transformation.
- Free operation and maintenance : Help users shield the details of the underlying IaaS and K8s, and focus on business development;
- Zero transformation : seamless migration of microservice applications, no containerized transformation of war/jar applications;
- Ultimate efficiency : Provides second-level elastic efficiency and ultimate Java application startup efficiency;
- One-stop experience : Seamless integration of basic services and microservice ecology, richer functions, and high integration with other cloud products.
For containers, serverless container ASK can greatly improve the agility and elasticity of container application deployment, reduce computing costs; allow users to focus on business applications instead of underlying infrastructure management, and greatly improve application development efficiency. The carrier of the ASK application is a container image, which is flexible and can support various types of applications with the scheduling system, such as stateless applications, stateful applications, and computing task applications. Since the ASK/ECI public test in May 2018, the value of serverless containers has been widely recognized by users. During the epidemic, multiple online education platforms used ASK/ECI's super elastic capabilities to support online business expansion. 500 application instances can be rapidly expanded within 30s, and it can easily cope with expected and unexpected sudden traffic.
Major product upgrades to create a comprehensive capability system
Today, we released major upgrades to cloud-native products in three major areas.
- Heavy upgrade of container service: release of cloud-native AI suite
Gartner predicts that 70% of AI applications will be on the cloud. Enterprises will also find in practice that there are more and more demand scenarios for AI containerization. In the past few years, through the container service ACK, we have provided a variety of tools and solutions in heterogeneous computing resource management, AI task lifecycle management, AI task scheduling and acceleration, AI training data acceleration, etc., to help companies improve AI production The engineering efficiency, the utilization rate of computing resources, the speed of AI platform construction, etc.
Based on the container service ACK, we integrate the bottom-level computing resource optimization, AI task management, to the upper-level AI engine acceleration and full-stack optimization capabilities of domain algorithm applications. The capabilities of each layer can be selected and used individually or in combination to achieve an overall optimization effect. Cloud-native AI is for AI service producers, including data scientists, AI algorithm engineers, AI platform builders and operators, who can choose to build their own AI platform on top of K8s. Based on cloud-native technology, it helps users quickly build AI platforms. GPU utilization is increased by 100%, AI engineering efficiency is increased by 50%, and AI training speed is increased by 20%.
- Application real-time monitoring service ARMS heavy upgrade: release cloud dial test function
With the vigorous development of the digital economy, more and more companies are vigorously developing online business. For companies, how to pre-evaluate whether their business applications have reached the target service quality and user experience? How to accurately locate the faults and root causes encountered by end users in accessing applications? How to effectively measure the performance and experience gap between oneself and competing products is the pain point of enterprise operation and maintenance in the digital economy era.
This heavy release of Alibaba Cloud Dial Test is a SaaS-based product that cooperates with Borui Data , which can monitor the application performance and user experience of Internet applications (Web pages, network links, etc.) without embedding. To provide cloud users with an out-of-the-box enterprise-level active dial test application monitoring solution, which is an operation and maintenance tool for enterprises to improve application performance and improve user satisfaction.
- Serverless heavy upgrade: release full link acceleration
Under the serverless architecture, container images and Java applications are two very common carriers when developers deploy applications on the cloud. Among them, container mirroring has become the de facto standard for application deployment formats in the cloud-native era due to its subversive innovations. However, container mirroring needs to download and decompress data remotely through the network. For GB-level mirrors, the pull time may be as high as minutes, which is objective. The above amplifies the cold start side effect and hinders the serverless evolution of real-time applications. Java's outstanding performance in terms of performance is unique, but behind the high performance, the poor startup performance of Java applications is also impressive, which also affects the performance of Java applications under the serverless architecture.
This time, Function Computing released a heavy release of container image acceleration technology, and the container startup delay was shortened by 50%-80%. The burden of mirroring optimization that originally belonged to developers is transferred to function computing to further help developers improve production efficiency and focus on business innovation. This technology originated from the ultra-large scale and highly complex container environment of Alibaba Group. It has deep accumulation of image storage and acceleration technology, and has outstandingly undertaken the strict seckill scenarios of double eleven, double twelve, and Spring Festival in three years. Harsh challenge. Serverless Application Engine (SAE) has released the Java application startup acceleration function, and for the first time the cold-start acceleration technology of Alibaba Dragonwell (Alibaba Cloud's open source Open JDK long-term support version), multi-threaded operation acceleration technology and SAE's own in-situ upgrade strategy , The combination of mirror preheating strategy has realized the end-to-end startup speed of Java applications increased by 45%, the fastest time is only 15s, and the multi-threading performance has increased by 30%.
Alibaba Cloud cloud native is the shortest path for enterprise digital innovation
As enterprises go to the cloud to become a trend in the industry, the era of fully using open source technologies and cloud products to build software services has arrived. How to better embrace cloud computing, embrace cloud native, and accelerate innovation with technology will become the key to successful digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises.
In the future, every company in the world will become a digital software company. There may not be a unified path for digital transformation, but it has been proven in practice that cloud native is the shortest path for companies to achieve digital innovation. Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native is committed to providing enterprises with five core values: resource flexibility, system stability, application agility, business intelligence, trustworthiness and security, so that enterprises can use the cloud with confidence and make good use of the cloud.
