Author | Yu Hongtao
"We hope to allow users to do less and gain more. Through serverless, enterprises can use cloud services as easily as using electricity." Serverless is becoming a new software development paradigm, and Alibaba Cloud will firmly promote the comprehensive serverless of core products , to help customers better achieve agile innovation.
Recently, the world is accelerating the serverless process of cloud computing. As a revolutionary technology, the value of serverless is not only reflected in the technical level and developer level, but also brings value to the business innovation of enterprises and promotes the transformation of business models to obtain stronger market competitiveness.
Alibaba Cloud Senior Technical Expert and Head of Serverless R&D * Yang Haoran* , in an interview with the "Technology Business" media, introduced three major trends that Serverless will bring: comprehensive serverless cloud products, serverless application architecture, assembled R&D, and comprehensive Introduces the product layout and core value of Alibaba Cloud Serverless.
Hand over the tedious basic work
The "Amap" , which has been upgraded to the "open service platform for a better life" , has added more user usage scenarios, and the business system has become more complex. This makes the peaks and troughs of the system more obvious, making it difficult to maintain system stability; and if the business logic is to be placed on the APP, it will also cause the APP to be too large and require frequent upgrades.
Through in-depth thinking on the system architecture, AutoNavi decided to embrace Serverless in an all-round way, using Alibaba Cloud's Serverless Devs development platform, and introducing function computing services to process business logic. The advantages of serverless, such as free operation and maintenance and high flexibility, not only reduce the difficulty of development and operation and maintenance, but also enable its business logic to be implemented in the backend, reducing the burden on the front-end APP.
After using Serverless, the development and operation and maintenance of AutoNavi Maps become easier, and the business support capability is stronger. This is exactly the value brought by Serverless. Alibaba Cloud Native Alibaba Cloud Serverless R&D Director Yang Haoran said that technology is just a means, the purpose is to help customers solve problems and facilitate business success. The essence of serverless is to hand over the tedious basic work that is irrelevant to customer business innovation in the process of large-scale and complex software development to cloud service providers.
For example, in order to develop applications, enterprises need to build a development environment and do a lot of resource management work. With Serverless, these tasks can be done by cloud service providers. The latter has stronger technical capabilities, and enterprises only need to enjoy its technological dividends.
Making cloud services as simple as using water and electricity is a dream that existed when the public cloud was born. Until now, it has been gradually implemented through Serverless, because it requires long-term technical accumulation of cloud service providers. Today, Alibaba Cloud's function computing granularity has been reduced to 0.01 cores and 128M memory, and real-time scaling can be completed within 200-300 milliseconds.
Since the launch of the first serverless service Function Compute in 2017, Alibaba Cloud now has more than 20 Serverless products, including Function Compute, Serverless Application Engine SAE, Elastic Container ECI, and Serverless Kubernetes ASK. Among them, the function calculation with the highest utilization rate has exceeded 20 billion calls per day. 
In the database field, Alibaba Cloud's core database products such as PolarDB for MySQL, RDS MySQL, AnalyticDB MySQL, and AnalyticDB PostgreSQL are also fully serverless. More areas such as middleware and big data will follow up later.
Let IT keep up with the business logic of the enterprise
A hit, the daily registered users of " Pumpkin Movie " exceeded 800,000. In the traditional server usage mode, capacity expansion needs to go through the process of buying ECS, uploading scripts to the server, running scripts, and expanding the database, which takes 4 hours. This is obviously unable to cope with the challenge of soaring traffic, not only the stability of the service is challenged, but also the loss of business. With the help of Alibaba Cloud's serverless application engine SAE, Pumpkin Movie was fully serverless within 7 days, embraced K8s with zero threshold, and easily handled the sudden traffic of popular movies. Compared with the traditional server operation and maintenance mode, its development and deployment efficiency has increased by 70%, the cost has decreased by 40%, and the expansion efficiency has increased by more than 10 times.
We all know that elastic scaling, pay-as-you-go, and simplified O&M are the three core values of Severless.
Elastic scaling means that there is no need to deploy underlying infrastructure resources such as servers. When the business grows rapidly, resources can be popped up without the user's perception. Pay-as-you-go means paying according to actual usage, instead of paying for idle resources. Simplified operation and maintenance can save users the trouble of resource management.
Obviously, compared with traditional cloud computing, Severless is closer to the business logic of the enterprise. For example, it can simplify the budget formulation work of the enterprise, because it can pay as much as the business, and the cost accounting is very simple and convenient.
In addition to the 40% direct cost reduction like the Pumpkin Movie, Yang Haoran said that Serverless can also reduce the low-level repetitive work of the enterprise IT team. The same number of developers can now do more things, which is also a cost savings.
The development process from physical machines to virtual machines to serverless is like going from buying a car to renting a car and then to online car-hailing. A physical machine is like buying a private car, and you have to drive and maintain the car yourself; a virtual machine is like car rental, and you can host your business on the cloud; when it comes to online car-hailing, you don’t need to care about the condition of the car at all, and you can pay on demand by calling a car , On-demand elasticity. 
Twenty years ago, a large number of companies still purchased their own cars and employed their own drivers. Now this concept has been completely changed. The process of serverless may be completed in less than 20 years. Gartner predicts that by 2025, more than 50% of global enterprises will adopt the serverless architecture.
Bridging the technical gap of traditional enterprises
" Century Lianhua " is a traditional retailer with more than 200 shopping malls, supermarkets and convenience stores under its umbrella. It is common for retail enterprises to engage in sales promotion, and it is necessary for business. Previously, there were big promotions and explosive traffic, which led to problems in payment and other links. Now, Century Lianhua migrates membership system, transaction system, payment system, etc. to Alibaba Cloud Function Computing. Century Lianhua's technical team no longer needs to manage infrastructure such as servers, as long as the code is written and uploaded, Function Compute will prepare computing resources. Its sales promotion preparation time has been shortened from weeks to hours, the efficiency of R&D, operation and maintenance has been improved by 30%, and the cost has been reduced by 40%, which has truly turned promotion activities into the norm.
With the widespread application of digital technology, the pace of digital transformation of traditional enterprises is also getting faster and faster, and it goes deep into the core business level. Compared with Internet companies, traditional companies often cannot enjoy the dividends of technology due to the lack of technical talents.
The emergence of serverless is narrowing the technical capability gap between traditional enterprises and Internet enterprises, and even bridging the gap between them. Also because of online early warning, traffic observation and other tools, the burden of operation and maintenance is eliminated, and application development becomes simpler, without excessive technical capabilities and excessive technical teams. This has greatly improved the IT capabilities of traditional enterprises like Century Lianhua.
"With Serverless, a small R&D team of 2 people can also enjoy the technical dividends of a large enterprise R&D team of 2,000 people," Yang Haoran said.
In application scenarios such as small programs, e-commerce promotions, audio and video transcoding, AI algorithm services, game application package distribution, real-time file processing, IoT data processing, and microservices, Serverless is playing a huge role. At the same time, Serverless is continuing to integrate with containers, microservices and other ecosystems, lowering the threshold for developers to use Serverless technology and promoting the cloud-nativeization of traditional applications.
Revolutionize the software development model
" wolai " is a future-oriented cloud information collaboration platform. Its R&D engineer team has only 10 people, and it is difficult to devote a lot of energy to the operation and maintenance server because it is busy with development and operation.
At the beginning of making this product, wolai hoped to completely put the architecture on Serverless. By using function computing, wolai's front-end engineers can be responsible for a whole set of development process from front to back, and a small team can guarantee R&D and realize high-speed iteration. Compared with the traditional architecture, the use of function computing can save 50% of the computing cost, and the human input can be reduced by half or more.
With the support of serverless technology, more and more enterprises can no longer pay attention to basic IT resources, but instead focus on how to provide better services to customers. This will revolutionize the traditional software development model. Startups like wolai have embraced the future-oriented Serverless from the very beginning.
Yang Haoran said that the comprehensive serverlessization of cloud computing has experienced three major trends: serverlessization of the product system, serverlessization of the application architecture, and serverlessization of the R&D model. Relying on the serverless architecture, the research and development method on the cloud is undergoing fundamental changes, moving towards the direction of assembly development.
In the past few decades, enterprise-level application development has gone through the traditional centralized architecture, the distributed architecture of the Internet, and then to today's and future Serverless architecture. Assembled R&D on the cloud realizes service-oriented, modular, orchestratable, and assembleable software R&D. The IT architecture built on the basis of Serverless can be self-adaptive and scalable, with peak-level automatic expansion in seconds and peak-valley automatic shrinkage, laying the foundation for enterprise business innovation. Cloud-native development is currently a hot topic, and container technology has attracted much attention. Serverless is undoubtedly an advanced stage of cloud-native development. Yang Haoran believes that traditional applications of enterprises can be platformized with the help of containers; while emerging applications can be considered to move directly to Serverless.
Yang Haoran introduced that FaaS+Serverless BaaS, as the core form of Serverless, bears the concept of assembly research and development, which is the future of Serverless. In this system, the serverlessization of containers is a means to help cloud products and enterprises realize serverless BaaS, so the serverlessization of containers and FaaS are a good combination. 
Specifically, the core value of FaaS lies in making the entire cloud product system and its ecology form an organic whole, rather than simply providing elastic resources. This is the fundamental difference between FaaS and Serverless Containers. When a cloud product becomes serverless, it no longer simply provides resources, but becomes an element of building applications.
In the future, the entire cloud product system will be fully serverless, and after these products are deeply integrated through event-driven methods, users can combine other cloud services through FaaS to quickly realize elastic and highly available applications.
Therefore, Alibaba Cloud recognizes the Serverless=FaaS+BaaS advocated by Berkeley. Serverless container is essentially a BaaS service that helps users realize serverless more easily, and the two can be used together. Alibaba Cloud believes that Serverless (FaaS+BaaS) will become the key to solving large-scale and complex software development challenges in the future, which is the most important value for the future development of the cloud.
The development and application of serverless technology is still in its early stages. But serverless is not the future, it is already in progress . At present, Alibaba Cloud is vigorously promoting the serverless of the entire cloud product system, and providing high-efficiency R&D platform tools to carry the upgrade of the development model. Alibaba Cloud also adheres to the open route in the serverless field, and builds a prosperous ecosystem through open source and other means. This is also a valuable exploration.
For more content, pay attention to the Serverless WeChat public account (ID: serverlessdevs), which brings together the most complete content of Serverless technology, regularly holds Serverless activities, live broadcasts, and user best practices.