Author | Cheng Pu
What is Spring Cloud Alibaba?
1 Introduction
Spring Cloud Alibaba is open sourced by Alibaba (hereinafter referred to as: Alibaba) middleware team in July 2018, and provides a set of one-stop microservice construction solutions for the industry based on Alibaba's internal distributed technology. Based on the Spring Cloud microservice framework standard, for core modules such as service registration and discovery, distributed messaging, service current limiting and downgrading, and distributed transactions in the microservice architecture, it provides corresponding mature solutions for the industry. The relationship between them is shown in the following figure:
Relying on Spring Cloud Alibaba, users only need to add some annotations and a small amount of configuration to connect Spring Cloud applications to the Alibaba microservice solution, and quickly build a stable and reliable distributed application system through Alibaba middleware.
2. Main functions
Among the many implementation solutions of Spring Cloud, Spring Cloud Alibaba has played an important role in the Spring Cloud ecological family by virtue of its support of the most components and the most complete solutions. The comparison diagram between Spring Cloud Alibaba and other solutions in the Spring Cloud ecosystem is as follows:
A set of microservice system construction solution components provided by Spring Cloud Alibaba are as follows: • Nacos: Alibaba's open source platform for dynamic service discovery, configuration management and service management that is easy to build cloud native applications. • Sentinel: A current limiting and downgrading product open sourced by Alibaba, which uses traffic as an entry point to protect the stability of services from multiple dimensions such as flow control, circuit breaker downgrade, and system load protection. • RocketMQ: A distributed messaging product donated by Alibaba to the Apache Foundation. It is a Java-based high-performance, high-throughput distributed messaging and stream computing platform. • Dubbo: A high-performance Java RPC framework donated by Alibaba to the Apache Foundation. • Seata: A set of easy-to-use, high-performance microservice distributed transaction solutions open sourced by Alibaba. • Alibaba Cloud OSS: Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) is a massive, secure, low-cost, and highly reliable cloud storage service provided by Alibaba Cloud. You can store and access any type of data in any application, anytime, anywhere. • Alibaba Cloud SchedulerX: A distributed task scheduling product developed by the Alibaba middleware team, which supports periodic tasks and triggering tasks at fixed time points. • Alibaba Cloud SMS: SMS services covering the world, friendly, efficient and intelligent interconnected communication capabilities, help enterprises to quickly build customer contact channels.
3. Get started quickly
In order to let the majority of developers learn and get started quickly. In December 2020, the project maintenance team and Alibaba Cloud Zhixing Lab launched the Spring Cloud Alibaba introductory series courses and Java engineering scaffolding tools, which are convenient for the majority of development students to quickly understand and build the Spring Cloud Alibaba project. The Spring Cloud Alibaba introductory series courses are available on the homepage of Zhixing Lab:
Based on Alibaba Cloud's Java scaffolding, developers can say goodbye to complex dependency management. By selecting the required dependencies through the scaffolding tool, a project template containing relevant dependencies can be generated for developers to download and use. The related project construction process is shown in the following figure:
New version feature preview
After the introduction of Spring Cloud Alibaba, the 2.2.7 version of Spring Cloud Alibaba released this time has made major upgrades to many components including the registration configuration center, distributed messages, etc.:
• Nacos: Upgrade the Nacos client to version 2.0. The registration and discovery process supports gRPC long links, which can significantly reduce resource overhead, improve system throughput, and greatly improve performance. See the Nacos 2.0 introduction material for more details. • RocketMQ: The separate branch of RocketMQ in the previous project is integrated into the main branch of the project, and it is released and iterated along with the major version, so that users can directly use the new batch messages, asynchronous message callback processing, and Push mode supported by RocketMQ in the latest Spring Cloud Alibaba. Numerous new features such as the specified consumption start bit. • Spring Boot: Upgrading the Spring Boot version to 2.3.12, compared to the previous 2.3.2, not only upgraded the dependencies of a large number of underlying components and added some new features, but also fixed many legacy problems and improved the stability of the framework. • Spring Cloud: Upgrade the Spring Cloud version to Hoxton.SR12, which has further improved the stability of the basic components compared to the previous Hoxton.SR9.
In addition to component upgrades, many problems existing in previous versions have also been fixed, further improving the stability and robustness of Spring Cloud Alibaba. More information can be found in the release announcement. For the correspondence between Spring Cloud Alibaba and the current versions of Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, please refer to the official website Wiki version description.
Retrospect and Outlook
After more than three years of rapid development, as of now, Spring Cloud Alibaba has released a total of 26 versions, the cumulative number of stars on GitHub has exceeded 2W, the number of followers has reached 6.4k, and the number of users has reached 19.4k. This key data is far ahead of similar open source microservice projects launched by major cloud vendors at home and abroad.
In addition to supporting the daily complex microservice application scenarios of the Alibaba economy, Spring Cloud Alibaba is also widely used in production scenarios by thousands of external enterprise users.
In the future, Spring Cloud Alibaba will continue to align with the development and evolution of the mainstream versions of Spring Cloud. In the near future, it will support the iteration of Spring Cloud Alibaba 2021.X and 2.2.X versions corresponding to the two current mainstream versions of Spring Cloud 2020.0.X and Hoxton. The community's preliminary planning in the future will continue to make continuous efforts to improve the stability of the currently supported components such as Nacos, RocketMQ and Spring Cloud Dubbo and to enrich the functions supported by the components. (You are also welcome to submit an issue to tell the community the specific direction you think the project is worthy of evolution:)
Finally, as a well-known open source project in the industry, the future development needs to continue to rely on the joint efforts of everyone in the community, and new students are very welcome to join! As long as you can contribute 3~5 times of valuable Pull requests recognized by the community, you can have the opportunity to be invited to become a community Collaborator and jointly lead the future community development and construction!
Spring Cloud Alibaba Enterprise Edition
In addition to the open source Spring Cloud Alibaba, the Alibaba Cloud Microservices Engine (MSE) launched by the Alibaba Cloud middleware team provides full-link grayscale, lossless online and offline services for the complex and heavy-duty microservice governance demands of enterprise users. A large number of enterprise-level microservice governance functions, including service preheating, outlier instance removal, etc., allow users to connect applications to MSE without changing a line of code, and have enterprise-level microservice governance capabilities at a convenient and low cost. In addition to microservice governance, MSE also provides enterprise-level Nacos registration configuration center and enterprise-level cloud native gateway and many other products to help enterprise users quickly embrace cloud native microservices.
Click to learn more about Spring Cloud Alibaba Enterprise Edition: https://www.aliyun.com/product/aliware/mse