On July 31, Ding Yu, head of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud-native application platform, announced that the serverless application engine SAE2.0 will be launched in public beta on August 7, and the open source version will be released on September 30. This upgrade focuses on the three major advantages of minimalist experience, open standards, and extreme flexibility. The application cold start is fully improved, and the scaling down to 0 is supported, and the application cost is reduced by more than 40%.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud has also brought new upgrades to products such as container service serverless version, function computing, the eighth-generation high-frequency computing instance, and office security platform SASE, which further lowers the threshold for enterprises to use the cloud and makes application development easier.
"Cost is one of the core concerns of enterprises going to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud will further release technological dividends and provide enterprises and developers with easy-to-use and affordable cloud products ." Ding Yu said at the press conference that Alibaba Cloud will continue to promote the full stack The product is serverless, using technology and innovation to benefit more small and medium-sized enterprises and developers, and reducing the cost of innovation.
Serverless application engine SAE2.0 will be tested online
Serverless Application Engine SAE is an application hosting platform with zero-code modification, extremely easy-to-use, and self-adaptive flexibility. Users no longer need to care about complex infrastructure. They only need to upload code or container images, and SAE will automatically run and provide network, Supporting capabilities such as load balancing and monitoring.
In this upgrade, SAE2.0 brings three major capability upgrades:
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First, the product is easier to use. The application is launched with zero transformation, zero learning cost, and the creation and release of the application is completed in seconds. At the same time, the payment is made according to the actual usage, and the application cost is reduced by more than 40%.
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Second, standards are more open. It is built based on container standards, and its core capabilities are open-source, dispelling users' concerns about platform binding; it also provides a wealth of platform engineering capabilities to help improve R&D, operation and maintenance efficiency by 50%;
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Finally, extreme flexibility. Hundreds of millisecond-level elastic scaling, adaptive adjustment of resource usage according to traffic, application cold start to improve efficiency, support scaling down to 0, no need to pay if there is no business traffic, which is more friendly to emerging businesses and some innovative and entrepreneurial companies.
SAE2.0 will start a comprehensive public beta on August 7, and the open source version will be released on September 30.
ASK changed its name to Container Service Serverless
ASK is a serverless container service with K8s as the interface. The goal is to greatly reduce the threshold for using K8s. It is characterized by billing by Pod resources, no node management burden, and great optimization of elastic capabilities. Since its launch in 2018, ASK has served thousands of companies, such as Weibo, vivo, Shenshi Technology and so on.
The positioning of ACK is a flexible and customizable platform-level product applicable to all scenarios, such as database, big data, AI, middleware, etc., which can be deployed on the ACK platform; the underlying unified management of heterogeneous infrastructure, such as ECS, ECI , CPU, GPU, Lingjun, bare metal server.
With the deepening of enterprise cloud use, the demand for serverless application scenarios is more diverse, and the two products of ACK and ASK are also moving towards integration. Therefore, in order to bring clear product awareness and consistent user experience to enterprises, Alibaba Cloud officially changed the name of ASK to Container Service Serverless (ACK Serverless).
ACK Serverless makes it easier and smoother for enterprises to evolve to a serverless architecture. In addition to the name change, ACK Serverless ushered in a functional upgrade.
Firstly, K8s is free of O&M, fully managed for 10+ K8s core system components, and supports dynamic capacity planning; secondly, ACK Serverless has upgraded the intelligent elastic prediction AHPA, which improves the elastic accuracy rate by 80% compared with manual configuration; based on inventory-aware scheduling and Availability zone disperse scheduling, ACK Serverless improves the certainty of elasticity and the high availability of applications. A new big data computing solution is added. Based on multi-zone round-robin Spot ECI, preemption failures are downgraded to on-demand instances, and the total resource cost is reduced by more than 20%. I believe that the renamed and upgraded ACK Serverless will enable thousands of enterprises and developers to use the cloud more conveniently and flexibly.
Function Computing FC continues to promote the implementation of AIGC innovation
In 2023, generative AI will usher in a big explosion, and every enterprise hopes to use AIGC in its own business. However, the threshold for AIGC application development is very high, which discourages many enterprises and developers.
Function Compute makes AIGC application development easier. It integrates complete AIGC application cloud kits such as Serverless Application Center and Serverless Devs, and has a complete AIGC Competence Center, while embracing the open source ecosystem, allowing Alibaba Cloud products to be highly integrated with AI frameworks such as LangChain. Developers can develop and deploy models in open source ecology and community selection models such as ModelScope and HuggingFace.
At present, the Serverless Application Center has added more than 10 popular AI application templates such as Tongyi Qianwen, Wenshengtu, Tushengtu, and Tushengwen.
Previously, Forrester released the latest report. With its function computing product capabilities, Alibaba Cloud scored 24 of the highest scores in 40 scoring items, ranking in the Leaders Quadrant again. Alibaba Cloud has also become the only technology company in China that has entered the Forrester FaaS Leaders Quadrant twice.
In addition to serverless product upgrades, Alibaba Cloud also brought two comprehensive upgrades of IaaS products. The eighth-generation high-frequency computing instance is officially released. Based on Alibaba Cloud's new self-developed CIPU architecture, it has super computing power and brings users all-round capability improvement. For computing-intensive scenarios such as multiplayer online games, industrial simulation, and live video broadcasting, the eighth-generation high-frequency instances can provide computing services with extreme performance.
A well-known battle game platform in China, based on the eighth-generation high-frequency instance, the number of online users of a single battle suit directly increased by 60%, providing a smooth game experience.
In addition, the office security platform SASE released a lightweight version, that is, a zero-trust VPN version, which is mainly for the lightweight use needs of large enterprises, as well as the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. Meet the four scenarios of enterprise zero-trust remote office, office data protection, office network access, and global office networking.
Compared with the standard version, the lightweight version mainly reduces the number of VPC connections; limits the concurrent bandwidth, and at the same time reduces the price by 90%, which can meet the business travel and remote access needs of a team of less than 500 people.
At present, there are more than 10 million developers on Alibaba Cloud, serving 600 universities and 3 million innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises. Serverless provides a wealth of atomic services, with the advantages of full hosting, no operation and maintenance, high elasticity, and pay-as-you-go, which greatly reduces the complexity of using the cloud. Serverless is making the cloud the best platform for application construction, helping more enterprises to bridge the technological gap, obtain technological dividends, and gain competitive advantages.