Text / Xiao Wei, China Unicom Software Research Institute
On December 8, 2020, the CentOS community announced that CentOS 8 will stop maintenance at the end of 2021, and CentOS 7 will stop maintenance on June 30, 2024, and a stable CentOS system will not be provided in the future. Currently, China Unicom's intensive business system CentOS accounts for more than 90%. Once the stable version maintenance is stopped, it will have a serious impact on the safe production and operation of the enterprise's IT system in the future. In order to deal with the security risks caused by the suspension of CentOS in advance, realize the independent and controllable basic software, and implement the strategic requirements of the national network power, China Unicom Software Research Institute , based on the dragon lizard community technology , has joined hands with Tongxin Software to actively carry out the operation of the stock system. System replacement verification work, and took the lead in completing the pilot replacement of the autonomous controllable operating system of the core production business system in China .
The five major scenarios based on the migration and replacement of the dragon lizard technology are China Unicom's intensive IT core business system, covering production, management, service and other fields. Thanks to the perfect support of the multi-CPU architecture of the Dragon Lizard community technology , the stability after large-scale deployment practice , good compatibility , perfect application ecology and leading cloud native technology , it is supported by China Unicom Software Research Institute, Tongxin Software and the community. A number of technical experts set up a working group to formulate a variety of backup plans to ensure the normal progress of the migration work, overcoming difficulties and making special breakthroughs. The first batch of business pilot replacement work was completed in just over a month, and the operation status of the replacement system was basically stable. There is no significant difference in performance.
Difficulties in this migration
1. The five major scenarios in the implementation of migration and replacement are China Unicom's intensive IT core business systems , and the scale of each migration pilot business system is huge , including:
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China Unicom's cloud platform is the "digital agile base" in China Unicom's comprehensive digital transformation, providing operational support for nearly 300 business applications of China Unicom Group and 41 subsidiaries.
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The billing and billing system carries the entire business support of 31 provinces across the country, with over 400 million billing users.
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cBSS is China Unicom's centralized business support system, with a daily service call volume exceeding 3 billion.
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5G SA Zhihui Messaging has supported 60 million+ users, with an average daily message volume of 9.6 billion+.
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The new customer service outbound call center is built on the Unicom cloud platform. It is a national centralized customer service system. Currently, it supports 25 provinces across the country and provides outbound call capabilities for Unicom customer service agents across the country.
2. The migration business is the core business of online operation, and 100% stable operation of the business must be guaranteed .
3. The migration work involves more than 100 technical components , including cloud computing, database, big data, middleware, AI, virtualization, and various specialized business components, and the configuration, deployment mode, and version of each component are also different. Different, there are many scenarios.
4. The time is tight and the tasks are heavy . The pilot application will be selected from the beginning of August for the pilot replacement work. It is planned to complete the first batch of business pilot replacement work in September.
Migrating Alternative Practices
In the specific implementation process, China Unicom adopted the implementation of in-situ migration according to the predetermined operation plan and rollback plan during the business trough period. Including: data backup/system backup, business migration, in-situ operating system replacement, restarting the host (mainly kernel reinstallation or upgrade), reloading business load, business verification and other steps. Finally, the pilot migration was completed in mid-September, and a set of migration experience was accumulated, which provided the best practices for the digital construction of various government and enterprise units and various industries facing the same problem.
1. In the overall migration work, China Unicom cloud platform, cBSS microservices, billing, outbound customer service calls, 5G SA messages, and mobile office Suiwoxing all adopted cloud-based high-availability architecture, using microservice containers or multi-process replicas. Mode deployment reduces the strong dependence on the host state.
2. Unicom's new IT architecture of "platform + application" effectively reduces the risk of overall system unavailability caused by migration failures and unknown failures.
3. Adhere to the "two-step" approach to further ensure the stability of production and the smooth progress of this pilot migration.
In the first step, the special working group conducts tests on the basic functions, hardware compatibility, and performance of the system, improves the standardized migration test plan and prepares the business pre-test environment, and conducts application adaptation by the pilot business, which mainly includes basic functions, performance and performance of the application. Compatibility verification, etc.
In the second step, the joint pilot application team sorts out the detailed migration plan and risk assessment of production substitution, and implements production substitution according to batch classification.
Summary and Outlook
The successful completion of this migration has once again verified that solutions based on domestic operating systems can replace mainstream foreign products in the core scenarios of operators, and have a good demonstration and accumulation of experience. In the example of China Unicom, China Unicom Software Research Institute has demonstrated its strong technical strength. On the one hand, it is reflected in the advanced technical structure of Unicom's digital agile base construction, and on the other hand, it has a relatively large technology in autonomous and controllable work. accumulation. China Unicom Software Research Institute, as a member of the board of directors of the dragon lizard community , actively participates in and contributes to the construction of the dragon lizard community, and tests the latest technical version in advance, opens up the technical links of cloud platform, operating system, and chip, realizes sharing, co-governance, and jointly promotes The development and application of domestic operating systems actively meet the challenges brought about by the discontinuation of CentOS, which is an important goal and mission of the Dragon Lizard community.
The replacement of the stock CentOS is difficult and lengthy. It not only requires technical support from domestic operating system manufacturers and communities, but also requires user-end technical strength. It is the result of multi-party cooperation and collaboration. In addition to realizing the migration of the CentOS operating system, China Unicom will further consider the technical evolution goals such as operating system version upgrade and kernel version Lacy, gradually converge the version, follow the development trend of mainstream technology in the community, and solve the problem of operating the operating system as the underlying software update.
About China Unicom Software Research Institute
China Unicom Software Research Institute is a secondary research and development institution directly under China Unicom Group, dedicated to self-reliance in technology and independent research and development of core IT systems. Responsible for China Unicom's business support domain (BSS), management support domain (MSS), data domain (DSS), information security R&D and operation, as well as the research and development of China Unicom's entire group IT technology middle platform (Tiangong, Tianti, Tianqing, Tianyan) , production and operation, the whole industry takes the lead in "de-IOE", which is the backbone of China Unicom's implementation of the digital transformation of central enterprises and the realization of high-quality development.
About the Dragon Lizard Community
OpenAnolis is a non-profit open source community composed of enterprises, institutions, institutions of higher learning, scientific research units, non-profit organizations, individuals , etc. on the basis of voluntary, equality, open source, and collaboration. The Dragon Lizard Community was established in September 2020 to build an open source, neutral and open Linux upstream distribution community and innovation platform.
The short-term goal is to develop Anolis OS as an alternative to CentOS and rebuild a distribution compatible with mainstream international Linux manufacturers. The medium and long-term goal is to explore and build a future-oriented operating system, establish a unified open source operating system ecosystem, incubate innovative open source projects, and prosper the open source ecosystem.
Longli OS 8.4 has been released, supports x86_64, ARM64, LoongArch architecture, and is fully compatible with Intel, Feiteng, Haiguang, Zhaoxin, Kunpeng, Loongson and other chips,and provides full-stack national secret support.
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