The world's first container computing product is released, activating a new paradigm of cloud migration and cloud use

12.23 Yuanchuanghui·Shanghai Station, let’s talk about LLM infrastructure

On October 31, at the Hangzhou Computing Conference, Ding Yu, head of Alibaba Cloud's cloud native application platform, announced that Alibaba Cloud's container computing service ACS was officially released! ACS will significantly lower the threshold for enterprises and developers to use the cloud, and truly implement the Serverless concept on a large scale.

Ding Yu released ACS at the main forum of Yunqi Conference

The container computing service ACS is the first to integrate containers and resources, redefine container computing power, upgrade the computing power delivery model to a serverless form, and achieve the harmonious unity of containers and serverless through ACS. The load types supported by ACS are also more abundant, which greatly reduces the cost and cost of using containers and K8s for enterprises.

The benefits are significant:

First, it is extremely easy to use and quick to get started: containers and resources are integrated, and users do not need to pay attention to the underlying nodes and clusters; through minimalist product design, users only need simple configuration to create applications. At the same time, the ease of use is increased by 50%, eliminating the need to spend a lot of time understanding many complex products and technical concepts, and significantly reducing the threshold for using K8s and the cloud.

Second, on-demand flexibility and pay-as-you-go: ACS is the first in the industry to create a super-flexible Pod configuration model that supports 1:1~1:8 resource ratios , allowing users to freely choose as needed; at the same time, ACS also provides second-level elasticity capabilities , allowing enterprises to calmly cope with traffic fluctuations; in terms of usage and billing models, ACS supports three methods: on-demand elasticity, resource reservation, and savings plans, and provides second-level billing models to provide users with more choices while keeping costs low. More affordable.

Third, rich scenarios and flexible deployment: ACS is deeply integrated with the Alibaba Cloud product system, and supports the seamless migration of open source ecosystem and self-developed products to the cloud. In addition, ACS pioneered the reuse of computing power allocation resources in the industry, allowing resources to be flexibly allocated among user loads and cloud product loads, reducing resource idleness.

Fourth, free combination and high cost performance: ACS allows users to focus on Pods, shielding generation and model differences, and provides three types of Pod instances: general, task and exclusive, and natively supports network servers, microservice applications, Web applications and other general business loads support big data computing, AI computing, audio and video transcoding and other task loads, and also support real-time performance-sensitive services such as high-performance network servers, gateway systems, middleware, and databases. For a variety of application loads and cloud products, you can choose the most suitable instance type and freely combine it to fully adapt, which is expected to save enterprises 20% of costs.

Currently, the container computing service ACS has opened testing invitations. Click to read the original text to enter the official product website experience.

Process-based development makes it easier to build applications on the cloud

In addition to changes in the cloud paradigm, Alibaba Cloud has also creatively proposed the concept of process-based development and created a new development paradigm centered on function computing, event bus EventBridge, and cloud workflow CloudFlow.

As one of the earliest cloud vendors in China to deploy Serverless, Alibaba Cloud launched Function Compute FC in 2017. Developers only need to write code and upload it, and Function Compute will automatically prepare the corresponding computing resources, greatly simplifying the development and operation process.

This year’s Yunqi Conference features a new upgrade to Function Computing 3.0. The industry's first Shenlong Serverless GPU architecture, cold start is greatly optimized, the full-link scheduling delay is reduced by 80%, and the function execution performance fluctuation rate is reduced by 70%; as an event-driven fully managed computing service, it is lightweight and flexible enough, allowing users to use less code to achieve business innovation better and faster.

Compared with Function Compute 2.0, version 3.0 highlights ease of use, high flexibility, and can be seamlessly integrated with more Alibaba Cloud services. Function Compute FC achieves cost reduction through large-scale resource pooling and scheduling strategy optimization, and the maximum reduction in tiered pricing can reach 93%.

In addition, SAE2.0 has also received a major upgrade. SAE is a zero-code modification, extremely easy-to-use, adaptive and flexible application full hosting platform. It requires no operation and maintenance of IaaS and K8s. It can deploy online applications in any language from source code/code package/Docker image in seconds (such as Web/ Microservices/Job tasks) to SAE, and automatically scale instances, bill based on usage, and have supporting capabilities such as logging, monitoring, and load balancing out of the box.

This upgrade focuses on elasticity, user experience, applicable scenarios, etc. In terms of elasticity, the elastic efficiency is optimized to the hundred millisecond level and supports shrinking to 0. It also provides idle billing capabilities, and the CPU is not billed when there are no requests. Zero modification and migration, application creation in seconds, one-click grayscale. Newly supported web application types, from instance hosting to traffic hosting.

In order to allow developers to experience more extreme and efficient development, Alibaba Cloud released the Serverless development platform - Serverless Devs . Users do not need to care about the underlying resources. They can deploy with one click based on templates. They can also participate in the development of components and plug-ins, improve operation and maintenance efficiency, and realize the full implementation of the project. Life cycle management.

In order to allow enterprises and developers to develop on the cloud more quickly and conveniently, Alibaba Cloud has released Cloud Workflow (CloudFlow), which is a powerful process orchestration development tool for developers , fully managed, high concurrency, high Available to help users simplify and automate complex cloud business processes and workflows, and build applications on the cloud more conveniently.

The emergence of cloud workflow has accelerated the arrival of the process development paradigm.

As Alibaba Cloud provides more and more comprehensive serverless products, many cloud products have become modular, API-based, and service-oriented. Cloud workflows can be assembled for these products and applications can be built through drag-and-drop. Under the Serverless architecture, process-based development will become mainstream. Compared with the traditional model, process-based development can improve efficiency by more than 50%.

Users can collect and distribute events through the event bus, quickly implement event processing and customized business logic through function computing, and orchestrate multiple cloud services or customized application components through workflows, thereby easily building elastic and highly available cloud native application. This development method can not only increase development speed, but also reduce development and operation and maintenance costs, further promoting the digital transformation of enterprises.

To sum up, Alibaba Cloud products will make different trade-offs according to the needs of different fields, from the perspective of elasticity, ease of use, and burden on business transformation, but all products have a very certain trend, which is serverless.

Confluent becomes Alibaba Cloud technology partner

In addition, at this Computing Conference, Confluent officially became a technology partner of Alibaba Cloud . According to the agreement, the two parties will jointly expand the Asia-Pacific market and provide information to users in mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Streaming platform services. Kamal Brar, senior vice president of Confluent Asia Pacific, and Ding Yu, head of Alibaba Cloud's cloud native application platform, participated in the cooperation signing and witnessed the comprehensive upgrade of the cooperation.

Actively helping enterprises reduce their "psychological burden" is what Alibaba Cloud has been doing. It provides the best product technology in the industry, creates the best user experience in the industry, reduces manufacturers' concerns about binding, and requires more open standards. Alibaba Cloud will continue to use the power of the community to promote thousands of enterprises and developers to embrace Serverless and obtain technological dividends.