Highlights: How Alibaba Cloud Container Service fully supports the wonderful Asian Games

Author: Liu Jiaxu Xie Chengsheng Xianwei

introduction

In 2023, the 19th Hangzhou Asian Games will be successfully held in Hangzhou. Under the interplay of the light of the Asian Games and the light of technology, this Asian Games became the first "Asian Games on the Cloud" in the history of the Asian Games, using cloud computing to create history. The core system and broadcast of the event were fully moved to the cloud, laying the foundation for the digital popularization of large-scale events. With a solid foundation, the Hangzhou Asian Games achieved a complete success on the wings of technology. Alibaba Cloud's native technologies have played an important supporting role in many core projects of this competition, such as container service Kubernetes version ACK, container image service ACR, etc., which have once again promoted the output of capabilities such as efficiency, stability, extreme elasticity, and security intelligence. International sports events are accelerating their digital evolution in a cloud-native manner.

Container Service Kubernetes version ACK integrates Alibaba Cloud's virtualization, storage, network and security capabilities, provides high-performance and scalable container application management capabilities, supports the full life cycle management of enterprise-level containerized applications, and helps enterprises efficiently run cloud Kubernetes Containerized applications. Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK became the only global leader in Asia in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management report in 2023, and in 2022 became the only domestic product to enter the Forrester Leaders Quadrant. As an important product asset management platform in the cloud native field, the container image service ACR provides enterprises with secure hosting and efficient distribution capabilities for cloud native products, accelerating enterprises' cloud-native iterative innovation.

Just like the progress and transcendence reflected in the spirit of sports, Alibaba Cloud Container Service is constantly challenging its ultimate capabilities. In the service guarantee of this sports event that attracts attention in Asia, the container service professional version ACK Pro and the container image service enterprise version ACR EE have performed well to provide a strong capability base for the construction and operation of more upper-level project applications. It also proves to the world the cornerstone capabilities of cloud native from China.

Let's review how Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native container services ACK and ACR help the wonderful Asian Games.

Stable as a rock, protecting the core system of the event

During the games, the Hangzhou Asian Games event information system AGIS played a very core role, including the event management system (GMS), results release system (RDS) and event support system (GSS), supporting 56 competition venues and information technology command centers. , main media center and Asian Games Village and other important facilities operate around the clock, serving more than 100,000 registered users, including athletes, broadcasters, reporters, staff and volunteers from 45 countries and regions around the world. Take the event results release system as an example. It is one of the most important information system groups during the Asian Games. At the end of each event, under the scheduling of the event results release system group, the game results are imported from the venue's timing and scoring equipment into the venue's score system, collected into the central score system, and released to the outside world through different modes such as printing distribution, information release, and data interfaces. Present.

Such a core system requires the system to have extremely high stability and high availability, with no room for errors. Relying on the rock-solid stability of ACK, both the event management system and the results release system use ACK as the cloud native base to build multiple ACK clusters with cross-AZ high availability and build a DMZ/Trusted isolation architecture (DMZ/Trusted architecture) It is a network security architecture design used to protect communications between an enterprise's internal network and external networks). ACR stably supports the event information system and the Zhejiang Government Cloud Platform to provide a smooth application deployment experience during the Asian Games. During the competition, the number of reported obstacles in the cloud native field was 0.

In July 2023, ACK became the first product to pass the "Cloud Service Stable Operation Capability-Container Cluster Stability" assessment by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and won the "Advanced Level" certification. This is a high recognition of ACK's stability.

ACK stability comes from large-scale practical experience:

ACK manages tens of thousands of K8s clusters across the entire network, providing comprehensive support for a variety of online customers and business scenarios.
As the base, ACK and ACR have carried out the previous super-large-scale e-commerce businesses such as Alibaba Double Eleven and 618, and have rich experience in the extreme pressure of Alibaba e-commerce scenarios.
Optimize the parameters, performance, architecture, etc. of the community's native K8s, and form product capabilities and stability functions.
ACR EE products integrate full-link high availability and DevSecOps secure delivery chain capabilities, stably support billions of image pulls per month, and serve thousands of enterprise-level customers for in-depth use in production environments.

Extreme flexibility and high availability, ensuring one-stop access to the Asian Games

The Organizing Committee of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou launched the first one-stop digital viewing service platform in the history of international large-scale comprehensive sports games. By using high-tech technologies such as blockchain, big data, and artificial intelligence, it connects various resources in the digital city. Integrating various scenario applications in the Asian Games city, the Hangzhou Asian Games Organizing Committee focuses on the six aspects of "food, housing, transportation, travel, shopping, and entertainment" and combines the ticketing function to provide audiences with everything from ticket purchase, travel, and game watching to accommodation and dining. and travel services. The Asian Games One-Stop has a total of 119 million users, an average of over 100 million daily visitors, and a cumulative visitor count of over 6 billion. Some key applications include:

Asian Games PASS

"Asian Games PASS" integrates various application scenarios such as admission to scenic spots, reservations at cultural and museum venues, and public transportation travel, providing tourists with convenient services of "one-code access."

Event inquiry

Event query integrates event schedules, competition events, Asian Games venues and other information to provide users with integrated services such as match results display, Asian Games medal list, and Asian Games venue inquiry.

Online torch relay

On the occasion of the 100-day countdown to the Asian Games in Hangzhou, the Intelligent Asian Games One-stop Service has been upgraded to launch an "online torch relay". Netizens around the world are wearing Asian Games digital torchbearer costumes and holding Asian Games digital torches. The fire has spread to 45 countries and regions in Asia, deepening exchanges and mutual learning among Asia's diverse civilizations.

The backend service of the Asian Games One-stop Service is built based on the ACK cluster. It is safe, stable and reliable throughout the game, and successfully completes the task of ensuring the exciting and efficient operation of the Asian Games service.

In terms of high availability, Asian Games One Stop relies on ACK's cloud-native base and high-availability product functions to achieve high-availability architecture in the same city, remote disaster recovery, and data synchronization, truly realizing a multi-center financial-level disaster recovery architecture in two places. Based on the best practices of remote disaster recovery provided by ACR EE, Asian Games One Stop achieves cross-regional high availability of business images and further improves the disaster recovery capabilities of container images against unknown potential risks.

In terms of fast flexibility, the Asian Games One-Stop is a C-side application. In scenarios such as opening/closing ceremonies/passing on the torch/ticket sales, efficient and stable fast and flexible capabilities are required. Asian Games One-Stop adopts a flexible strategy that combines intra-cluster flexibility and extra-cluster flexibility:

In-cluster elasticity: The elastic technical means relies on the HPA solution to quickly adaptively expand and shrink Pods.

External elasticity of the cluster: After the elasticity of the internal resources of the cluster is exhausted, external elasticity will begin. The solution includes destabilizing nodes and destabilizing ECI containers. By leveraging Alibaba Cloud resources to quickly elasticize ECI Pods, you can create tens of thousands of Pods in minutes. By configuring the ECI Pod to pull the ACR image cache, the ECI Pod can be started in seconds. By installing the ACR EE on-demand loading and P2P distribution suite on the cluster, the cluster solves the traffic peak problem that occurs when deploying large-scale applications in the cluster and enjoys the ultimate elastic experience.

As the first one-stop digital game viewing service platform in the history of international large-scale comprehensive sports games, Asian Games One Stop has set a benchmark for future events. ACK and ACR were fortunate to participate in this historical event and fully proved the high Flexible and rich product capabilities such as availability and flexibility.

Serverless makes "hosting competitions with a mobile phone" a reality

The intelligent base supports a variety of intelligent services for the Asian Games. Among them, "Asian Games Ding" is the world's first integrated intelligent hosting platform for large-scale sports events jointly built by the Hangzhou Asian Organizing Committee and DingTalk, providing services for 100,000 event staff Provide services.

Asian Games Ding is connected to 293 applications in various business fields such as administrative approval, meteorological services, conference services, and medical services, and is connected to a variety of Asian Games core system applications on Alibaba Cloud, including competition video systems and IT event tracking and management systems. , volunteer management system, etc.; used by nearly 100,000 staff and volunteers, with more than 250,000 daily messages and more than 5,000 daily video conferences.

During the Asian Games, nearly 100,000 staff realized online flat communication and collaboration through the Asian Games nails. In addition, the Asian Games nail can also support real-time translation in 13 languages, including Chinese, English, Japanese and Thai, to facilitate communication between staff from different countries.

As a unified business collaboration platform, the Asian Games Ding is connected to 293 applications in various business fields such as administrative approval, meteorological services, conference services, and medical services, and is connected to a variety of Asian Games core system applications on Alibaba Cloud, including the competition video system , IT incident tracking and management system, volunteer management system, etc. At the same time, the Asian Games Ding adopts Yida low-code to develop new applications to efficiently and conveniently meet the new business processes emerging in the preparation and operation stages of the Asian Games.

Not only that, the Asian Games nail also solves the problem of intellectual asset accumulation of the Asian Games, providing support for collecting event documents, clarifying numerous digital assets, and realizing digital asset precipitation. It can not only ensure the smooth holding of the event, but also support the subsequent holding of the Asian Games and Large-scale sports events such as the Olympic Games provide experience and reference.

Such rich functions are all based on ACK Serverless deployment. Support for Serverless Container is an important direction in the evolution of K8s. ACK Serverless based on elastic container instance ECI has been widely used in customer scenarios, such as Weibo hot search, DingTalk conference and other familiar online applications to exert extreme flexibility Scaling capabilities are also helping more and more AI and big data customers reduce costs and increase efficiency. In terms of Asia Games system application release, ACR EE's global synchronization capabilities help Asia Games deliver business applications with high quality and efficiency, and achieve full-link cloud-native application release. By deeply integrating ACR EE's global synchronization capabilities with Asia Games' self-built CI/CD tools, Asia Games' platform realizes one-time local construction and automatic distribution of application images in multiple regions around the world, thereby opening up the release process of the global business regional release system. Greatly improved the application delivery rate of the Asian Games nail system.

Outlook

Before the Asian Games in Hangzhou, Alibaba Cloud's container service product family has accumulated a wealth of application scenarios and cases for large-scale sports events, such as the cloud-native base that is the core system of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

In this Asian Games, Alibaba Cloud ACK and ACR once again deeply participated in the events and activities, and steadily undertook core projects such as the Asian Games Information System AGIS, Asian Games One Stop, and Asian Games Nails, bringing industry-leading expertise to the sports games. Leading cloud-native technologies, products, and services worked together with Alibaba Cloud's various product lines to successfully complete the support and guarantee work for the Asian Games.

In the future, Alibaba Cloud ACK and ACR will also provide service guarantees at the upcoming Paris Olympics. We will continue to build cloud-native technical capabilities and rock-solid service quality with security, stability, performance, and cost optimization to promote Alibaba Cloud's The light of technology and the light of the five rings complement each other, helping more industries and companies around the world accelerate their digital transformation process.