CSDN: If you use two keywords to summarize the development trend of cloud native in 2022, what would be your evaluation?
——Prosperity and inclusiveness. “Prosperity” represents the vigorous development of current cloud-native technologies and products; “Inclusiveness” represents that cloud-native technology has moved from the Internet to finance, retail, government and enterprise and other industries, and has benefited thousands of industries and built rich applications. (Li Guoqiang, Product Manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform)
In 2022, cloud-native technologies will become increasingly mature. With the rapid development of technologies such as containers, serverless, and microservices, a prosperous technical system has been gradually built. Nowadays, with the advantages of cost reduction, efficiency improvement, continuous delivery capability, and ease of development, cloud native is constantly activating the application construction paradigm, causing changes in enterprise system architecture, production methods, business models, etc. There is no doubt that cloud native has become the key to the digital transformation of enterprises. the shortest path.
So, what’s new in the cloud native space in 2022? What developments in cloud native should we pay attention to in the future?
In this regard, CSDN interviewed Li Guoqiang, product manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform during the third Cloud Native Practical Summit, to explain to us the latest development of cloud native and Alibaba Cloud's latest practices in the field of cloud native.
The Cloud Native Practical Summit is a field technology summit hosted by Alibaba Cloud and Intel and hosted by Tianchi Platform. It provides reference for domestic cloud native practitioners through new product releases, best practices, industry cases, interpretation of technology trends, etc.
Cloud native hot technology development trends
container
As a representative cloud-native technology, containers are constantly reshaping the way the cloud is used. According to the "Global Container Management Forecast" released by Gartner, driven by accelerated digital transformation, more enterprises adopt cloud-based container management services, and 85% of large enterprises will use more container management by 2025.
This year, container technology is still developing strongly. Li Guoqiang observed that containers have a good development trend in cloud-native FinOps, cloud-native big data, hybrid deployment, and distributed cloud.
The first trend is the containerization of more and more new types of workloads . This year, containerization in the field of games and AI big data has become more and more obvious. Enterprises run core loads on containers for unified resource scheduling and help enterprises make better use of elasticity.
In terms of co-location, Alibaba Cloud open sourced the cloud-native co-location project Koordinator this year. It provides enhanced orchestration and scheduling capabilities on K8s, supports different types of workloads, improves resource efficiency by 100%, and achieves differentiated SLO guarantees. Let low-priority tasks impact latency-sensitive tasks < 5%.
The second development trend is distributed cloud . Enterprises can build a combined online and offline hybrid cloud solution based on container distributed cloud, which not only takes into account offline reuse and compatibility, but also takes into account the improvement of cloud efficiency. In September 2021, Alibaba Cloud container service was fully upgraded to ACK Anywhere, allowing enterprises to obtain consistent container infrastructure capabilities wherever they use the cloud.
Alibaba Cloud uses the distributed cloud container platform ACK One and the edge container service ACK@Edge to cover more enterprise cloud usage scenarios. ACK One helps enterprises build unified online and offline solutions and conveniently manage applications in a unified manner. It can support a variety of scenarios such as data center elasticity to public cloud and public cloud capabilities sinking to customer data centers. Yuanrong Qixing, a well-known autonomous driving technology company, manages autonomous vehicles through edge containers based on ACK@Edge, quickly covering many smart vehicle devices, effectively reducing management costs, and increasing operation and maintenance efficiency by more than 60%.
Alibaba Cloud's container service product family has become the cloud-native operating system for enterprises. Based on Alibaba Cloud Container Service, Alibaba has achieved 100% cloud native migration of its business.
In addition, cloud native FinOps has developed well this year. In the post-epidemic era, how to use cloud native technology to help enterprises better reduce costs and increase efficiency has become a new question facing cloud vendors. Alibaba Cloud combines industry-financial integration practices and FinOps concepts to launch the ACK FinOps suite, which helps enterprises achieve cost visibility, optimization, and controllability through digital means and intelligent methods.
In the field of service mesh, in April 2022, Google proposed to donate Istio to CNCF. In September, Istio officially became a CNCF incubation project. A more open Istio community governance model will be supported by more companies and developers, driving more innovation and technology maturity. In 2022, Istio announced the introduction of a new sidecar-free data plane mode, Ambient Mesh, to solve common operational challenges by transferring data plane functions from sidecar containers to network infrastructure. It can be said that Istio's development is promising in the future. Alibaba Cloud's service grid ASM product is the industry's first fully managed Istio-compatible service grid product. Its infrastructure layer is Alibaba Cloud's seventh-generation ECS server based on the third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor. 3rd Generation Intel® This has laid a solid performance foundation for Alibaba Cloud Service Grid ASM. This year, ASM products have obtained the first batch of advanced certifications for trusted cloud service grid performance evaluation, ranking first, and full marks in all items.
Thanks to Alibaba Cloud's large-scale container application practice, in the global public cloud container platform analyst report released by Forrester in the first quarter of 2022, ACK has become a global leader comparable to Google. This is also the first time that a Chinese technology company has entered container services. Leaders Quadrant. According to the "2021-2022 China Developer Survey Report" released by CSDN, 52% of developers are using Alibaba Cloud, taking the lead in the use of container cloud platforms.
microservice
Under the tide of digital transformation needs, enterprise systems have moved from traditional single applications to distributed and more standard microservice architectures. However, with the development of distributed microservices, microservice frameworks have become more complex and system architectures have become increasingly complex. How to manage microservices well has become a concern for enterprises.
In April this year, Alibaba, Bilibili, ByteDance and other companies jointly launched and open sourced the OpenSergo project. From the perspective of microservices, OpenSergo covers key governance areas such as traffic governance, service fault tolerance, service meta-information governance, and security governance. It provides a series of governance capabilities and standards, ecological adaptation, and best practices, and supports Java, Go, and Rust. and other different languages.
Li Guoqiang said that the above model is a new attempt this year, which is to jointly promote community development by setting standards and uniting more forces to seek support from upstream and downstream enterprises and communities. It aims to build a unified service governance specification and implementation that has nothing to do with language or technical form, and is close to the business.
In addition, in the field of cloud native gateways, due to the many types of gateways, traditional gateways cannot meet the high elasticity and other needs of containerized applications. In October this year, Alibaba Cloud open sourced a new generation of cloud native gateway Higress, which follows the Ingress/Gateway API standard and converts traffic gateways into , microservice gateway, and security gateway are three-in-one, solving the problems of multiple gateways on one gateway, greatly simplifying the complexity of the gateway system for users. Since its release more than a month ago, there have been 700 Stars, and the community is highly active.
observable
In the cloud-native era, the IT operation and maintenance environment faced by enterprises has become increasingly complex, posing high challenges to the enterprise's operation and maintenance capabilities. A comprehensive observation system is extremely critical. However, in the past, there were problems such as inconsistent standards and scattered data storage in the observable field. As OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, etc. gradually become de facto standards, more and more companies are beginning to build observable systems based on these open source standards.
Based on the above trends, Alibaba Cloud has released the cloud-native observability suite ACOS, which forms an observable data layer for indicator storage analysis, link storage analysis, and heterogeneous data source integration. It also provides data display through standard PromQL and SQL. Alerting and data exploration capabilities.
Li Guoqiang said that different industries have different demands for observables. For example, in the Internet industry, public clouds are the main focus. When building observables, they hope to match the open source system, and enterprises independently choose suitable products to build relevant technical systems; in government The enterprise industry has many demands for one-stop service observability systems, and the cloud native observability suite ACOS can provide one-stop functions such as data collection, data storage, data display, and alarm processing.
It is worth mentioning that at this Cloud Native Practical Summit, Alibaba Cloud Cloud Native Observability Suite ACOS released the Observability Integration Center 2.0 upgrade, which currently supports one-click integration of 50+ cloud services and technology component indicator observations, ECS /ACK/EDAS and other deployment applications have zero-modification observation integration, and the observation access efficiency has been improved by more than 20%.
Serverless
Currently, Serverless is accelerating the reshaping of application architecture and R&D models, and cloud R&D methods are undergoing fundamental changes. Serverless provides many prefabricated modules, which greatly reduces the threshold for software development and improves software production efficiency. Developers can efficiently conduct research and development, operation and maintenance, and deployment on the cloud.
In order to help enterprises and developers use the cloud more lightly and flexibly and achieve agile business innovation, this year Alibaba established a strategy of using "cloud native" as the group's overall technical architecture. Alibaba Cloud even announced that its core products will be fully serverless and is committed to Let enterprises and developers use the cloud as easily as using electricity.
As of press time, Alibaba Cloud has implemented serverless for more than 20 core services, and will comprehensively promote the serverlessization of the overall product system in the future.
Talking about the booming development of Serverless this year, Li Guoqiang said that the concept, capabilities and market coverage of Serverless are still on the rise and are far from reaching their true peak. This year, the market's understanding of it has gradually matured, and more and more people have begun to apply the Serverless architecture. There are many applications suitable for evolving to the Serverless architecture. This year is the first year of domestic serverless development. I believe that in the next few years, serverless will gradually iteratively evolve and achieve large-scale implementation.
Comprehensive cloud native and in-depth use of the cloud, an excellent tool to reduce costs and increase efficiency
In the post-epidemic era, enterprises face unprecedented challenges when carrying out digital transformation: First, in the general environment, enterprises this year have a strong demand for "cost reduction and efficiency improvement." Second, with changes in epidemic prevention and control policies, experts predict that the economy may recover quickly next year. Enterprises need to re-examine whether their IT systems are robust enough to face the sudden increase in business in the future; in addition, rapid changes in the market will bring new business opportunities. Are the enterprises' own digital capabilities agile enough to cope with rapid changes in business?
Cloud native is energizing the way applications are built, helping businesses stand out from the competition. Cloud native helps users build robust and elastic applications with the advantages of high elasticity, traffic management, and high availability to face changes such as sudden increases in business traffic. At the same time, cloud native is based on a standard build and release process, allowing users to quickly release products to respond to ever-changing market demands.
In terms of cost reduction and efficiency improvement, Alibaba, for example, relies on its strong technical capabilities and in-depth use of cloud through comprehensive cloud native. At the same time, Alibaba also enjoys the technical dividends brought by cloud research and development to achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In the 2022 Double 11, Alibaba Cloud combines the practice of industry-financial integration and FinOps concepts, from unified scheduling and mixed deployment to comprehensive FinOps practices. Measured by unit computing power TCO, compared with the 2021 Double 11, the unit computing power cost TCO has dropped. 8%.
Looking back at Alibaba's journey to the cloud, from the core system in 2019 to the comprehensive cloud nativeization in 2020, and then to 100% of Alibaba's business in the cloud in 2021, it has now entered the deep cloud use stage of cloud nativeization. According to According to official data, this year Alibaba Group’s expenditure on business forms supported by PaaS accounted for 43% of total cloud costs.
The above is also a typical process of enterprise cloud use: in the initial stage of cloud use, enterprise cloud use starts from the most basic IaaS layer and moves the original IDC to the cloud IaaS layer. There are still a lot of self-built technologies in the PaaS layer, and enterprises need a A professional operation and maintenance team is responsible for building PaaS layer product capabilities and leading product evolution. With the deepening of cloud use, users realize that the cloud PaaS layer has provided powerful enough product capabilities, and users only need to focus on the business itself. Therefore, enterprise cloud use gradually covers from the IaaS layer to the PaaS layer, and so on. In recent years, the proportion of cloud usage in the PaaS layer has become higher, and at the same time, the investment in technical manpower has decreased. In the process of in-depth use of the cloud, the total cost of IT investment is also decreasing year by year, fully releasing the dividends of cloud native, and ultimately feeding back to the business, allowing cloud native to help enterprises ultimately achieve cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
Adhere to cloud-native open source and build an open and integrated ecosystem
For the sustainable development of cloud native technology and ecology, it is not enough to rely on one company alone. Open source plays a vital role in promoting the development of cloud native. Alibaba Cloud has always spared no effort to contribute to cloud native open source:
In 2018, Alibaba Cloud proposed the concept of "cloud native trinity" to form a unified technical system with self-developed technologies, open source projects, and commercial products, and actively participated in creating an open, standard, healthy and benign cloud native technology ecosystem. Up to now, Alibaba Cloud has initiated and participated in more than 30 cloud-native open source projects, including 13 CNCF projects and 2 Apache top-level projects. Currently, it has accumulated 2,000+ contributors and 270,000 Stars, covering 1 million+ developers worldwide. By. In the 2022 CNCF developer collaboration impact rankings, Alibaba Cloud ranked second in the world, second only to Google.
Data source: X-lab Open Laboratory/Mulan Open Source Community OpenDigger Project
In the past, Alibaba Cloud initiated and donated many projects such as KubeVela, OpenYurt, Fluid, OpenKruise, sealer, ChaosBlade, ServerlessDevs, and OCM, which have entered the CNCF, covering application delivery management, edge computing, multi-cloud hybrid cloud, hybrid deployment and other fields.
According to the "China Internet Development Report (2022)" released by China Internet, in the field of cloud computing, the cloud computing market will maintain rapid development in 2021, with the overall market size reaching 178.1 billion yuan, a growth rate of over 33%.
The cloud computing market is huge and enterprises have diverse needs. Alibaba Cloud looks forward to joining hands with all parties to adopt an "ecosystem first" strategy to build an open and integrated cloud-native ecosystem and help facilitate the digital transformation of thousands of industries.
Alibaba Cloud builds an open and integrated partner ecosystem by building three major systems: resale ecosystem, product ecosystem, and service ecosystem. In terms of resale ecology, through cooperation with partners such as Chuangyun, Qinglian, Chengyun Technology, ECCOM Network, etc., we promote more enterprises to use cloud native product technology to achieve digital innovation; in terms of product ecology, firstly, through rich and comprehensive Cloud-native products serve SaaS and ISV vendors well and form joint solutions. This year, Alibaba Cloud, Dingjie Software, and Dahai Technology have created joint solutions in the industrial field to better serve manufacturing customers and improve the level of corporate intelligent manufacturing; second, through cooperation with the product ecosystem, we will introduce excellent products, Integrate with Alibaba Cloud's existing product system to provide a more comprehensive cloud native solution. At present, Alibaba Cloud has carried out in-depth cooperation with ecological partners such as Xieyun, Xingyun Innovation, and Kangaroo Cloud. In terms of service cooperation, we cooperate with Whale, iSoftStone, etc. to provide personalized services to enterprise customers based on cloud-native technologies and solutions to meet different service demands.
How do developers embrace the cloud-native era?
According to CSDN 2021 statistics, among the 32 million registered CSDN users, the number of developers reading and researching cloud native technology has reached 4.06 million. Cloud native has become an inevitable development trend. How can developers fully embrace it?
Li Guoqiang suggested that for operation and maintenance personnel, technically, they should learn and adopt more container and serverless cloud-native technologies to help enterprises reduce IT costs. In terms of thinking, it has gradually developed from technical thinking to business thinking. This year, the FinOps concept has penetrated deeply into the enterprise. Operation and maintenance developers can combine the FinOps concept and shift from focusing on the stability of the business to focusing on the health of the business to achieve more stable and efficient operations. Create business value.
For application developers, the next generation of application developers are developers who have "lived" in the cloud and are cloud-native application developers. At present, some developers have not yet formed the working habits of cloud-native development, and still use the method of developing code offline and then deploying it to the cloud for running. The next step is for application developers to change their original thinking mode and learn event-driven architecture (EDA), Knowledge of assembled programming, serverless architecture, etc., and timely attention to cloud application development models and related application frameworks and programming models.
Click to read the original text and learn more about the summit~