Prologue: The Origin of China and Taiwan
game company supercell
In 2015, Jack Ma visited supercell. In this company, 10 employees can form an independent development team called a cell. The small team decides what kind of product to make, and then launches it on the market to observe market feedback; games with poor feedback will be cut off without hesitation. This kind of development model has made the games developed by Supercell a great success, and behind all this success is the support of Supercell's powerful middle platform.
After Ma Yun visited Supercell, he implemented the strategy of "small front desk, big middle desk" in Ali Group.
Like the name of this company, each project team in Supercell maintains a size of about 10 people, and this team is called a cell (cell). Each team can decide for itself what kind of game to develop and ultimately whether to release it to the market. Games that have survived the prototype stage by chance will first land in Canada and other individual countries for testing, and then based on data performance and player feedback, decide whether to take it off the shelves or shut down the server, or continue to promote it to the global market after verifying that the gameplay is feasible.
——"Small team, independence is the key to our game development" Jim Supercell, General Manager of Greater China
What supports supercell's rapid innovation and rapid trial and error?
Based on the "Super" platform, advance the work in a small "cell" team;
U.S. military combat model
Frontline squad + China-Taiwan artillery fire group, the US military is the ancestor of practicing the "China-Taiwan" theory in a broad sense
On the front-line battlefield, the U.S. military usually organizes military operations in squads. This extremely small team is agile and easy to capture fighters. Once the enemy is discovered, it will call for powerful artillery and air support through the command system to inflict heavy damage on the enemy. This battlefield organization formation of the U.S. military is consistent with the idea of the Chinese-Taiwan structure. The combat team is the "small front desk", and the powerful artillery group and air power are the "big middle desk". With the strong support of the powerful middle office, the front-end will become very efficient and flexible when conducting business operations and innovations. Enterprises can make various attempts and adjustments according to the latest market trends. Once new market opportunities are discovered and verified, they can It can mobilize the powerful capabilities of the central platform to quickly follow up and seize the market.
1. Ali business platform BU development history
Chimney Architecture -> Central Stage
Pain points of chimney architecture
- Repeated construction, repeated wheel creation, waste of labor costs
- It is difficult to communicate data between systems
- The time and cost of business innovation is high, and all business infrastructure has to be built from scratch. Inability to quickly respond to market needs
In view of the above problems, in 2009, Ali established the Sharing Business Unit (now renamed Business Platform BU) to solve these pain points.
platform stage
Post-merger pain points
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Coupling of business and business, a large number of if else, and the flood of dog skin plaster codes (TP trading platform supported 50+ businesses in 2016)
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Business and platform coupling, business and platform you have me in me I have you
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The entry threshold of the platform is high, and small businesses and light businesses have to go through all the processes. New small businesses cannot quickly occupy the market by trial and error, and cannot quickly and efficiently support new businesses
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Fine-grained business is not precipitated and cannot be reused
Birth of business architecture -> middle office stage
Introduce business architecture to solve the pain points in the platform stage, and business architecture frameworks such as TMF and GPF were born inside BU
Foreground: a system that can directly reach users
Middle office: reusable business system
The cornerstone of the second business platform: business architecture
Design goals
- The business is isolated from the business, the modification of A business cannot affect the business of B, and the modification of a business returns to the whole network
- The business is isolated from the platform, and there is no need to modify the platform code when developing business requirements, but to use the extensibility points exposed by the platform
- Componentization of business capabilities
- Business process can be orchestrated and configurable
technology at the time of implementation
- business identity
- microkernel architecture
- Extension point based on spi technology
- The idea of Spring IOC
How to achieve flexible and easy-to-access centralization products/platforms and business isolation
It is not enough to achieve the decoupling of business codes. The product release system needs to be a mid-to-platform product. It is one of our goals to be able to quickly support new business access, and let new business co-build and even new business students independently access their business on the XPF framework. To achieve high scalability and fast access to new services, the "microkernel + plug-in" technology has to be mentioned here.
Microkernel technology:
A microkernel is a reduced form of the kernel. The system service layer that is usually integrated with the kernel is separated, and plug-ins can be added according to requirements, which can provide better scalability and a more effective application environment. Using the microkernel design, to upgrade the system, just replace the old modules with new ones, without changing the entire operating system.
Microkernel technology originated from the operating system, but under the wave of "China-Taiwanization" of Internet products, this technology has been widely used due to its high scalability.
The GPF microkernel exposes a series of SPI (Service Provider Interface) interfaces, and different services implement these plug-in interfaces as needed. When the system starts, the program scans out all plug-ins that implement the SPI interface, and integrates them into the system to provide external services. When a new service needs to be accessed, define a service identity and implement the required SPI interface at the same time to complete the service access and achieve service isolation.
How to achieve business isolation
We create a model for each business identity and assign it a business id. The business model includes the components, extension points, and process configurations to be used by this business. All business identities form a list of business identities. Each business model has a business identification logic - whether the current user request hits the business. When a user request comes in, they will go through this routing algorithm to determine the unique business identity.
Inter-service isolation scheme
From the above, it can be found that the common extension points and components of the platform are code reused! It did not meet the previous code isolation requirements. The solution is also simple: when the system is initialized, each business identity id will create a new copy of common components and extension points, and merge its own custom components and extension points. Therefore, in memory, each business identity id will have a set of independent and complete components and extension points at runtime. When the system is actually running, what is obtained is the object of the component and the extension point, not the code. In this way, code reuse and business data isolation. This is the most reasonable solution.
Disadvantages of Business Architecture
- The cost of learning is high, and you need to understand the mechanism of the entire architecture to get started
- The requirements for maintenance engineers are high, and ordinary engineers are not competent. Especially for engineers who have written MVC architecture style code for many years, it is difficult to understand the operating principle of the plug-in architecture.
Applicable scene
It is not applicable if a system supports a small amount of business at the same time. There is no silver bullet, no one-size-fits-all architecture, each architecture has its own advantages . In the case of few business scenarios, the maintenance cost of writing if else is lower.