**"DNSPod Ten Questions"** is an in-depth talk column launched by Tencent Cloud Enterprise Center. Through each issue, ten questions are asked to the guests, leading readers to stand on the shoulders of elites in the industrial Internet and technology fields, overlooking Development trends and cutting-edge technological innovations of major industries.
Liu Yi, CEO of Tencent Cloud Coding, General Manager of Tencent Cloud Developer Products. Mainly responsible for Tencent Cloud developer ecology and developer tools and platform product management, leading the team to output and empower Tencent's internal project collaboration and R&D efficiency improvement process, large-scale application of tools and platforms and related excellent practices to all walks of life Industry partners to help complete digital transformation and upgrade. He joined Tencent in 2011 and has created social product QQ Zone and office collaboration product Tencent Docs.
Tian Chao, general manager of Tencent Cloud Enterprise Center and general manager of audio and video application platform, is responsible for Tencent Cloud user growth, DNSPod business and enterprise application related products. At the same time, he is also a senior user growth expert and big data technology expert. He used to be the general manager of Yongyingbao growth platform and the vice president of Mobike technology. Long-term commitment to research on enterprise digitalization.
1
**Tian Chao: **Bati is considered an Internet veteran. He joined Tencent in 2011 and has created social product QQ zone and office collaboration product Tencent Document. , I believe that many stories happened during the development process. Was there any memorable experience at that time?
Liu Yi : When I first joined Tencent, it was catching up with the tide of the mobile Internet, and many products were in the exploration stage. It was indeed a very big challenge to create a mobile social application QZone with a volume of 100 million users . We have put a lot of effort into building the infrastructure on the mobile platform from zero, to the intensive cultivation of product experience, and to the operation of a large number of users.
There were two more challenging things at the time:
1. **How to ensure the reliability and stability of the communication link under the 2G network? **Especially in the transition stage from 2G to 3G, and in the case of being hijacked by the network, we have done a lot of exploration and experiments to ensure the normal operation of QZone.
2. The whitening and beautifying real-time filters that are commonplace in China were originally launched from QZone products .
It is also very challenging to do Tencent documents later. When we move the office software model to the cloud, we need to start research on the underlying multi-person collaboration conflict algorithm, and the number of people collaborating at the same time ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands, and then to millions of people. There are a lot of core technologies , Building and upgrading a large number of operations, operation and maintenance and engineering capabilities .
The most impressive thing is not only that Tencent Documents has become a well-known online collaborative office product, but also provided timely support and assistance to tens of thousands of people in social emergencies. value.
2
**Tian Chao:**Your past experience is more To C, so now you come to Tencent Cloud, which specializes in To B, and are responsible for developer tools and platform product management. How do you adapt to this change? Is there anything you can learn from your previous experience for your current work?
**Liu Yi:** To C products are very focused on user experience, "user value, user-oriented" has always been our creed. To C emphasizes the deep digging of user value, the grasp of user scenarios, and the polishing of product experience. These experiences can also be reused in To B.
It just so happens that the developer tool products and the developer ecological platform that I am in charge of need to pay close attention to the C-end user experience . Starting from the daily scenarios of developers, pay attention to the experience of all Tencent Cloud products used by them, and help Tencent Cloud continuously optimize product user reputation. The meaning is very important.
Of course, there are differences in doing To B. We also need to pay attention to the essential laws of the operation of various industries , deeply understand the real needs of customers to increase revenue and improve efficiency, design solutions in a targeted manner, and take into account the needs of different groups of buyers and users. appeal.
Finally, there is a change in personal mentality. The transformation from the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet, and from fiction to reality is the general trend of Chinese social development , so I started to make adjustments in professional ability and industrial vision very early.
3
**Tian Chao: **CODING is a one-stop software R&D management platform under Tencent. It has been running for 8 years since 2014, and has accumulated more than 3 million developer users, ranking TOP in the field of domestic R&D tools. What do you think is the core advantage of CODING compared with competitors? How does CODING become an industry champion in the midst of numerous competitors?
**Liu Yi:**First of all, CODING's one-stop DevOps experience can be said to be industry-leading . Most of the DevOps solutions in the industry focus on providing tools, which tend to focus on solving problems in a specific link, and cannot provide customers with statistics and analysis of performance data in the entire process of R&D and operation integration.
And CODING provides a complete set of solutions from requirements, development, testing, release, and deployment. It can clearly see the entire software development process in one system, without jumping between systems, and without permission accounts. Open up, the data will be better precipitated, and it will also provide comprehensive measurement management to facilitate the realization of continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous operation and maintenance, continuous feedback, continuous operation of the whole process management, and focus on value transfer.
In terms of practice, Tencent Cloud CODING DevOps has a R&D team of hundreds of people . The products are independently designed and developed based on the industry's agile project management and DevOps system methods, combined with Tencent's product R&D features. It has the best user experience in the field of one-stop DevOps platform , and is suitable for R&D teams of different sizes and types.
It is worth mentioning that CODING provides a complete private deployment solution and high-quality delivery , provides open API and supports customized development. At the same time, according to the needs of enterprises, it can also provide integrated DevOps transformation consulting services for R&D and operations to meet the needs of enterprises of different industries and sizes.
In addition, CODING is very supportive of cloud native and provides a large number of cloud native development tools, such as Cloud Studio and Nocalhost, a cloud native environment management tool, which have entered the CNCF foundation. We have also developed a one-stop cloud-native application lifecycle management tool, Orbit, etc., leading the market in terms of product matrix.
CODING product panorama
4
**Tian Chao: **CODING started out as code hosting, and later developed tools such as CI/CD, project management, and product library, and then gradually grew into a leading one-stop DevOps platform in China. DevOps is a very popular concept, but I believe many readers don't know much about it. Can you take this opportunity to explain to you what DevOps is? Why do you think DevOps can become popular?
**Liu Yi:** Let me first answer why DevOps can become popular? I think it's also because people have some urgent problems that need to be solved.
With the continuous expansion of enterprise business, the system architecture is gradually enlarged, and the business scenarios are becoming more and more diverse and complex, and the concept of microservice architecture design was born from this . Each microservice is loosely coupled, and each service can be upgraded, deployed, expanded, and restarted independently, so that frequent updates can be achieved without impacting end users.
However, microservices also bring some disadvantages: on the one hand, we have more and more system modules, and the complexity of operation and maintenance management of these modules will also increase ; The frequency will have an obvious appeal , but this also has an obvious contradiction with the strict quality control required by the operation and maintenance personnel for the system. DevOps is to solve the contradiction between Development (development) and Operations (operation and maintenance).
So what is DevOps? Conceptually speaking, DevOps is a process-based and tool-based process . Tools are used to solidify the process, and the rapid feedback of the R&D process is used to continuously improve the quality of operation and maintenance releases and R&D, while reducing faults caused by misoperations that are prone to manual actions. Thereby improving the efficiency of the whole research and development.
In the past, the contradiction between different teams was that development seeks change, while operation and maintenance seeks stability. The concept of DevOps is to break the gap between R&D and operation and maintenance , reduce operation and maintenance costs and improve efficiency through automated processes, and discover and deal with problems in a timely manner with the help of monitoring tools to ensure product quality.
To use a metaphor, Dev (developer) is like a farmer who grows fruit, and more and more modern farms have begun to introduce automated irrigation systems and drones to spray pesticides, so that they can take care of more fruit trees with less manpower; while Ops ( Operation and maintenance personnel) are only responsible for maintaining and upgrading automation equipment and service facilities.
So back to CODING, the code hosting at the beginning, and the tools such as CI/CD, project management, and product library later, are actually part of the DevOps tool chain. The development cycle increases the frequency of deployment while ensuring the quality of the release.
CODING one-stop DevOps platform
5
**Tian Chao:**Although DevOps can greatly improve the work efficiency of the development team and make the update speed of the version faster, many people will question whether the cost and risk will increase if the update speed becomes faster. big? How would you respond to such a point of view?
Liu Yi: In order to cope with increasingly fierce market competition, many companies are eager to complete as many business iterations and project delivery as possible in the shortest possible time, but only focus on fast delivery instead of high-quality continuous delivery, which often leads to Fall into the pit of quality and risk .
Waterfall development, agile development, DevOps comparison chart
**Increased in both speed and quality, which is the most important value proposition of DevOps. **However, it is not easy to achieve this. It requires the cooperation of operation and maintenance and developers. In the quality assurance process, automated testing, infrastructure management and monitoring, grayscale release and rollback strategy, it is necessary to respect the basic principles of DevOps practice and invest heavily Capacity building is the only way to achieve a win-win situation of quality and speed.
As you said, in the traditional concept, it is believed that the "fast" pursued by Dev and the "stable" pursued by Ops are in conflict. However, from a global perspective, the goals of Dev and Ops are the same That is, they are all "making changes in business requirements available online at any time" .
To achieve this goal, DevOps takes the form of small steps. On the one hand, through agile development and other practices, products can be delivered to users faster , thereby helping the team to collect user feedback faster and respond faster; on the other hand, through process design and strategy, Changes between iterative versions are controlled at a relatively small granularity to reduce risks and reduce repair costs even if problems occur.
Of course, we will discover the fact that it will not always be a straight line from development to launch, and launch is not the end. There will always be setbacks and mistakes in the process. But for teams, view setbacks as learning opportunities to optimize processes and improve strategies.
With the passage of time and the accumulation of experience, each team can continuously adjust to meet the changing needs, and finally improve its DevOps practice to adapt to each team's own business scenarios . We value speed and stability, and focus more on providing value to end users through smooth delivery.
6
**Tian Chao: **In the report "IDC MarketScape: China DevOps Platform Market Vendor Assessment, 2022" released in September this year, Tencent Cloud CODING was successfully selected as a leader, leading the country in terms of strategy and capabilities. What do you think makes CODING a DevOps "leader"? What are the main efforts of your team behind this?
**Liu Yi: **When IDC evaluates the DevOps platform in the Chinese market, it will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of products, services, capabilities and strategies, as well as current and future market success factors.
I think the factors that determine whether a company can become a "leader" are not only hard indicators such as the number of customers and market share, but also soft indicators such as the manufacturer's strategic deployment, technological leadership, and innovation capabilities. This time, Tencent Cloud CODING has made breakthrough progress and jumped into the leader quadrant, thanks to the team's deep investment in products and active strategic thinking .
CODING has always had a clear product development roadmap and technological innovation investment plan. In recent years, it has continuously spawned new products, integrated and applied leading concepts and emerging technologies .
For example, in-depth cooperation with Tencent Security Keen Lab and the third security department, access to professional vulnerability libraries and binary analysis capabilities, and jointly launched the DevSecOps solution , providing a security development management and control platform and full-process security tools to solve security defects in the software development process and vulnerability issues; the self-developed one-stop cloud-native application lifecycle management tool - Application Center (Orbit) , provides enterprises with the triple value of lowering the threshold of application cloud-native, improving application delivery efficiency and reliability, and efficient self-service operation and maintenance.
DevSecOps Code Quality Solutions
On the other hand, CODING announced a new strategic upgrade as early as last year . Based on the background of two-way improvement in team efficiency and single-point efficiency, and promotion of standardization in the cloud-native era, it has been upgraded from the original "DevOps tool leader" to "cloud-native era R&D Tool Leader".
In addition, CODING has also established a comprehensive DevOps business ecological construction system , including product ecology, delivery ecology, consulting ecology, and sales ecology. Partners include Upfon, Anchang, Thoughtworks, etc. In addition to sharing Tencent's years of accumulation with customers, CODING also selected cooperative companies with first-class product capabilities and customer reputation in the industry to meet the needs of more complex scenarios.
On the recent Techo Day Tencent Technology Open Day, Tencent announced to upgrade its cloud-native strategic layout, saying that it will continue to increase investment in cloud-native technology research , promote the implementation of cloud-native technology in enterprises, and help enterprises deepen their digital transformation. CODING, as a part of Tencent's cloud-native strategic deployment matrix, clearly conveyed clear strategic plans not only to IDC, but also to other authoritative consulting organizations such as Forrester and Gartner.
7
**Tian Chao: **As you said, CODING has changed its strategic direction, upgrading from "DevOps tool leader" to "Cloud Native R&D tool leader", and is no longer limited to DevOps. In addition to conforming to Tencent's overall layout, what is the opportunity for this strategic change? From the perspective of developers, what benefits will cloud-native research and development bring to them?
**Liu Yi: **CODING has been in the field of software research and development for many years, and we have discovered a phenomenon that may cause waste of social resources : each company often has its own development tool team, and the work it does is basically some off-the-shelf The single-point tools are connected in series, plus some upper-level customized development.
Through this phenomenon, we see an opportunity to optimize the efficiency of the entire industry, but the ceiling of building a DevOps platform is limited. Only by embracing cloud native , we can obtain more flexibility, lower cost, more conveniently obtained resources, and higher quality monitoring metrics , Easier operation and maintenance can bring greater value to customers and enterprises , especially improve team efficiency.
CODING cloud factory
So why there is an opportunity to realize it now is because the infrastructure has undergone great changes- cloud native brings the possibility of infrastructure unification .
When building an application in the past, a lot of infrastructure was built by each enterprise team. Whether it is self-developed or built with open source tools, there are obvious non-standards. In the cloud era, cloud vendors including Tencent Cloud provide very standardized and high-performance infrastructure tools , including gateways and databases.
As a cloud user, enterprises do not need to repeat the construction of these tools when developing applications, so the underlying infrastructure may be unified. The unification of the infrastructure brings the unification of the architecture, which may bring about the unification of the entire development tool chain and development model.
On the other hand, the informatization and digital transformation of the entire society has driven the development of the industrial Internet, and the demand for software development has grown rapidly, which has also catalyzed the process of software engineering. Software engineering will definitely put forward higher requirements for standardized tools , which is also the demand of the entire industry.
From the developer's point of view, cloud native has changed the traditional localized programming, moved the development environment to the cloud, reduced the environmental limitations, and also lowered the development threshold and resource management costs, liberated the developer's productivity , and made Developers can devote more energy to the understanding of creative business logic and business scenarios.
8
**Tian Chao: **In order to empower cloud-native R&D management, CODING released a series of products, including cloud-native application release management tool Orbit, completed the cloud coding environment Cloud Studio, and one-stop R&D data visualization analysis solution R&D metrics . What are the main differences between these cloud-native products and previous products? What is the most difficult thing in the process of upgrading your products to cloud native?
Liu Yi: Cloud native is a relatively broad topic. It can be understood that from the first line of code to deployment, the life cycle of the application is in the cloud environment .
Then there is an internal logic between these products, and our ultimate goal is to build a bridge between developers and cloud products through the digital base engine of CODING DevOps .
For example, users can collaborate on development and coding through Cloud Studio , the code can be stored in the code warehouse, and can be deployed on the cloud using CODING CI/CD. This is a cloud-native scenario that we envision will become popular in the future.
Cloud Studio multi-person collaboration
Another example is from the perspective of application management of cloud-native architecture. Compared with traditional deployment tools, Orbit not only solves deployment, but also pays more attention to cloud-native application modeling, K8S infrastructure management and encapsulation at the command level, and uses GitOps to integrate complex Cloud-native application changes become automated and focus on application observability, that is, how to implement cloud-native applications in DevOps from a development perspective.
Orbit product introduction
As for measurement products, we believe that the topic of measurement-driven improvement in the cloud-native era will receive more and more attention . "You can't measure it, you can't manage it" is a cliché, but it's also true.
Since users put all the R&D process and data on our platform, users also have the prerequisites for comprehensive measurement. This is a very difficult task, and one-stop DevOps provides such a soil . Through a series of measurements such as project progress, project energy efficiency, and product quality, it is possible to effectively feed back problems in the R&D process, drive value to flow smoothly, and form an engineering culture of continuous improvement.
In the process of cloud-native product upgrades, in addition to researching the principles and methodologies of the deep-water area and putting them into product practice, a large investment is required, and it is also necessary to help users understand and help customers import and use them as smoothly as possible, but this itself It is the only way for PMF . Leading the trend and catering to the market will make the two minds converge, and there is a long way to go.
The PMF (Product Market Fit) pyramid model refers to the best fit point between the product and the market, and the products provided just meet the needs of the market and satisfy customers.
9
**Tian Chao: **The R&D level of small and medium-sized enterprises is often relatively low, and the R&D team does not have too many people. Therefore, they are always hesitant to invest in R&D collaboration, and tend to spend the funds for digital transformation on marketing. In your opinion, is R&D collaboration of SMEs a waste of resources? If you want to encourage SMEs to improve their R&D management, what advice would you give?
Liu Yi: In terms of method cognition, according to our observations, leading or large-scale enterprises have a relatively strong awareness of how to improve efficiency in digital transformation, and are willing to invest in and explore with us how to implement solutions and plans through tools. In fact, some people of insight among small and medium-sized enterprises have also begun to realize this aspect , but they suffer from slow decision-making and low investment priority, so they return to busy with current business after initial learning and understanding. This phenomenon is common.
However, when the business develops to a certain level, the cost of collaboration gradually increases, the delivery efficiency becomes a bottleneck, and technical debt begins to be realized, the improvement of R&D collaboration will be brought up for discussion again. Although it is not too late, but if we can take precautions to consider measures such as multi-department collaboration, agile R&D management, left-shift quality and safety, and standardization of assembly line automation, and solidify them into internal engineering culture and working methods, short-term investment will have long-term impact . Positive impact will not hinder the business on the way of development .
In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises among CODING's customers who are promoting R&D collaboration. When the organizational structure is not overblown, the staff size is not large, and the business complexity is controllable, it is a time-saving and labor-saving way to put into practice R&D collaboration as soon as possible . decide .
Moreover, the CODING Standard Edition function currently supports free use , and there is no limit to the number of members and projects, encouraging small and medium-sized enterprises to explore business coordination and R&D efficiency improvement with a low threshold.
10
**Tian Chao:** In addition to CODING, you are also responsible for the entire Tencent Cloud developer business. What do you think a healthy cloud developer ecosystem should look like? Tencent Cloud has now gathered millions of active developers. What do you think will eventually attract and retain developers?
**Liu Yi:** In the past year, the competition among cloud vendors for the developer ecology has become fierce, and Tencent Cloud is also with software developers. A great way to reach developer users is through developer tools.
For example, the tool with the largest common divisor in the developer user group is IDE. When it comes to IDE, it is easy for everyone to think of Microsoft's open source VS Code. The reason why Microsoft invested a lot of manpower in developing this tool is to build its developer ecosystem.
**Another aspect is the tools for the development process. **For example, code is the core product of the entire development process flow. Based on code hosting and continuous integration, code is turned into assets and deployed on the cloud.
In the past, we saw that many developers were active on the cloud and benefited from the IaaS layer, but from the perspective of the software application life cycle, we still have a lot of conveniences that can be provided to developers, such as remote collaborative development of code and products in DevOps tools through WebIDE Management of data assets, as well as quality control, supply chain security control, performance improvement, and support for scenarios such as microservices, low-code, and mobile development during deployment to the cloud.
When developers and teams enjoy this seamless and convenient self-service experience, the stickiness between the cloud and developers will be greatly improved, and the distance between developers and the cloud base will be narrowed. Regardless of customer value or technical value, I think the developer ecosystem is the winner of the future cloud.
11
**Tian Chao:**Finally, let’s look forward to the future. After nearly 60 years of development in software engineering, digitalization has brought huge development needs, from waterfall development, to agile development, DevOps, and then to cloud native Management collaboration tools are also constantly iterating. As a leader in this industry, in what direction do you think R&D management collaboration tools will develop in the future?
Liu Yi: First of all, it is mainly to deepen around user scenarios, management/engineering principles, and cloud-native related technologies , and as these concepts are gradually standardized and systematically implemented in China, the scenarios will become more obvious, and the product form will gradually become standard and Mature.
Some new technology applications are also under discussion, such as how to use AIOps to promote measurement observation, quality monitoring, etc., as well as software supply chain security , which puts forward specific requirements for authentication and authorization, vulnerability repair, activity monitoring, etc., as well as BizOps, ChatOps is an evolutionary direction that has been determined.
Secondly, I think R&D collaborative management tools will vigorously develop from a DevOps tool platform to a platform-based project . DevOps takes the integration of research and operation as the starting point, reshape the boundaries of R&D and operation and maintenance functions, and reconstructs the software R&D process, supplemented by CICD automation tools to improve efficiency. From the perspective of R&D collaborative management, it seems to be a better solution, but this It brings additional software engineering cognition and efficiency tool learning costs to research and development.
In multiple research reports in 2022, R&D personnel's satisfaction with DevOps is very low, so R&D management collaboration will derive a new function - platform engineer , responsible for building an integrated software R&D collaboration platform, allowing R&D personnel Return to the business value itself and lower the threshold for applying DevOps.
Therefore, Tencent Cloud is also actively thinking about and laying out platform engineering . CODING has gathered a large number of Tencent internal platform engineers to provide enterprises with more comprehensive platform products, allowing enterprises to meet today's highly heterogeneous environment with better organizational structures and technical solutions. The determined market environment is more strategic in riding the wind and waves.
Image source: CODING, CSDN
