Lead:
On April 11, the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit was held as scheduled. For a long time, Alibaba Cloud has actively integrated into the new wave of digital native innovation and development of enterprises, and is a solid supporter for small and medium-sized enterprises to go digital native. Alibaba Cloud insists on being driven by data and intelligence, and works with partners and enterprise customers to focus on technological innovation, grow together, and embrace new opportunities and new futures for innovation and development on the digital cloud.
We firmly believe in the broad future of industrial digitalization, and cloud computing will always serve as a digital economic infrastructure to serve the real economy, industry development, and enterprise innovation.
Li Guoqiang, product manager of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud-native application platform, gave a wonderful speech on issues related to cloud-native services for digital-native enterprises at this summit. This article is a compilation of the contents of the speech.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is a great honor to have this opportunity to share with you some topics related to the cloud-native field. I am Li Guoqiang from the cloud-native team of Alibaba Cloud.
First of all, I will share with you what is cloud native and its core trends, and secondly, I will share with you how to implement cloud native application? and its value to the business.
Cloud native and its core trends
The word cloud native is believed to be familiar to everyone. Pivotal was the first company to propose the concept of cloud native, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF is the cloud native computing foundation that really carried forward cloud native and is recognized by everyone. Its official website uses Chinese and English give the definition of cloud native, which is also a definition recognized by the industry.
First of all, cloud-native technology helps enterprises build and run elastically scalable applications in various cloud forms such as public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. This is also the most important requirement for enterprises using cloud today: application elasticity. Second, cloud-native representative technologies include containers, service grids, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs. The core value that cloud native brings to enterprises is to build a loosely coupled system that is fault-tolerant, easy to manage, and easy to observe. Combined with reliable automation, engineers can easily make frequent and predictable major changes to the system. In essence, cloud native helps users build a robust system that can be released and launched at any time when the business needs it, without any impact on stability. This is also the goal we hope to achieve today when we face the rapid changes in the market. From the perspective of trends, 68% of organizations have used containers in production environments, and 80% of users have used or plan to use microservices. Containers and microservices, as typical representatives of cloud-native technologies, are relatively mature today and have been adopted by a large number of enterprises. There is also a trend that by 2025, 50% of enterprises will use serverless architecture, that is, Serverless. The serverless trend is growing very fast, and more and more enterprises have built serverless architectures. In summary, the core values that cloud native brings to enterprises are as follows: 1. Cloud native can help enterprises improve application agile delivery capabilities , including improving the efficiency of the entire application development through micro-services, and a standardized delivery chain centered on containers road to improve application delivery efficiency. 2. Cloud-native core technology can improve system stability. Designing for the final state will improve the self-healing ability of the system, and the elastic architecture will also make the system more robust in the face of unpredictable requests. 3. Cloud native technology improves resource supply efficiency. First, containers and K8s can greatly improve resource utilization and make deployment capabilities higher. Second, the elastic use of the cloud will also reduce resource acquisition costs.
In addition to the above three points, it is also very important that cloud native is built entirely based on open source and standardized methods. Standardized technology can greatly reduce the cost of IT management for enterprises, including the cost of talent and technology acquisition .
Apply Cloud Native
How to truly use cloud-native technology inside the enterprise to make applications cloud-native? Today, cloud-native application is a Re-Platform pattern.
The serverless infrastructure on the cloud includes capabilities in all aspects of system operation. For example, when applications are running, Alibaba Cloud provides services such as the serverless application engine SAE, serverless container service ASK, and function computing FC to help enterprises run their businesses quickly. Of course, the process will rely on various back-end services, such as middleware, database, storage, observability and other capabilities. Today, these infrastructures on the cloud have also completed serverless.
So what are the benefits of the serverless form? In my opinion, there are three main aspects: one is to pay by usage , and users do not need to pay for idle resources. Idle resources are a waste. Serverless allows users to pay according to the actual usage. The second is self-adaptive elasticity . For many entrepreneurial and innovative enterprises, there are few development and operation and maintenance personnel, and the challenge of planning elastic capacity is very great. After adopting the serverless architecture, self-adaptive elasticity can be fully realized, and users do not need to do capacity planning. Finally, it is out-of-the-box and free of operation and maintenance, which is also a more intuitive feeling for the entire serverless product system. Traditional types of applications can run directly on SAE; the new function-type operation and maintenance architecture can run on Function Compute FC; if you want to embrace the container ecology more, your business can run on the serverless container service ASK. Around the entire application, microservices, big data, storage, artificial intelligence, etc. are further integrated to lower the threshold for customers to build infrastructure.
Core Product Introduction
**Serverless Application Engine SAE**
For digital native enterprises, today I will focus on two products. The core problem that the serverless application engine SAE solves is that if there is a business that has been developed offline, if it wants to run in the cloud, how can it run at the lowest cost? I want to use technologies such as containers, but I don’t have technical support. The serverless-based application PaaS platform SAE can help users to launch, release, operate and manage applications throughout the life cycle, and existing applications can run seamlessly. SAE can achieve zero-threshold containerization. The first threshold for many enterprises to embrace cloud native is how to package the application into a container image and run it; through SAE, users do not need to operate and maintain K8s clusters, which can solve the problem that many enterprises want to embrace cloud native technology but do not have Pain points that are adequately supported by technical staff. SAE has built-in capabilities such as microservices, observability, and monitoring, and pays on demand to help enterprises minimize costs.
Microservice Engine MSE
The microservice engine MSE can help users build the entire microservice system. Today, many companies have realized that microservices are a good architecture, but if they want to turn applications into microservices systems, they need to be divided into two parts: one is to refactor and disassemble the enterprise application architecture, which often requires The enterprise completes it by itself, because only the enterprise itself knows best what the application architecture looks like. However, to make microservices really run, a lot of peripheral systems are needed to support them. These systems are often not the areas that customers focus on today when doing microservices. Therefore, cloud vendors are required to better help enterprise customers to improve. For example, the core supporting components after the microservices are running, such as how to operate and manage the configuration center; after the microservices go online, how the service governance capabilities can make the system stable, these things are the key points in the process of cloud vendors helping enterprises to do microservices things to focus on.
Customer case: Pumpkin Movie fully serverless in 7 days
Since its inception, the overall application architecture of Pumpkin Films has been built on Alibaba Cloud, and it is a typical enterprise "born in the cloud and growing in the cloud". However, with the continuous development of business, the operation and maintenance architecture based on ECS has gradually exposed many problems, such as elastic expansion is too slow, and when traffic peaks, it is necessary to temporarily purchase new machines and deploy them one by one, which is very time-consuming and unstable; in addition, the Internet Frequent releases are the norm, but every time hundreds of servers are deployed one by one, the release is very slow, and errors will occur if you are not careful. In terms of manpower, the early pumpkin movies did not have full-time operation and maintenance personnel, which consumed a lot of energy of developers for operation and maintenance; in terms of resource utilization, for the streaming media industry, the peak period is generally at noon or evening, and access at other times is relatively low , In the past, servers were kept fixed for a long time according to the peak value, which caused a lot of waste of resources.
Because of a popular movie, Pumpkin Movie added 1 million users within an hour, which is more than five times the usual peak value. The traffic surge caused the website service to be interrupted for a while, and the temporary cloud expansion could not meet the huge traffic in time. It took 7 days from Pumpkin Movie to understand Alibaba Cloud's serverless application engine SAE product to the overall launch. The core application API gateway was launched in 3 days, 100% of the traffic was sent to SAE after the verification was completed on the 5th day, and the remaining more than 30 systems were quickly migrated to SAE on the 6th to 7th day. The whole process was very smooth. After using SAE, the operation and maintenance efficiency is increased by 70%, the cost is reduced by more than 40%, and the expansion efficiency is increased by more than 10 times.
Cloud native has become the best platform for application construction. The core technologies include microservices, containers, and serverless, which greatly enhance the ability of agile delivery of applications. The elastic self-healing architecture can improve system stability; the containerized elastic cloud can improve resource supply efficiency, enabling start-up companies to enjoy the same technical dividends as Alibaba Cloud's mature technical teams. Related Downloads: Open Download丨Excellent Case Collection of Cloud Native Architecture Containers & Microservices