The author | grain are easy

In the 15th “Open Source China open Source World” summit forum, Ali Cloud senior technical expert, etCD founder, CNCF TOC Li Xiang won the 2020 China Open Source Outstanding Person Contribution Award. Congratulations li Xiang!

Last year, CNCF, the world’s top open source community cloud native Computing foundation, officially announced the re-election results of its technical supervision committee. Li Xiang, a senior technical expert of Aliyun, was selected as the first Chinese face in the history of the committee.

Li Xiang is one of the earliest CoreOS engineers, and participated in the creation of etCD, Operator Framework, RKT and other open source projects. In the open source community, Li Xiang is known to developers as the author of ETCD, an internationally renowned and most widely used distributed consistent storage system, which is used in production environments and customer products by Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Tencent, Microsoft, Google, VMWare and other enterprises. It is used to solve the problems of storage, management and backup of important meta information in distributed system, as well as the consistency and coordination of distributed system components.

After joining Ali Cloud, Li Xiang has been promoting the establishment of concepts related to automatic operation and maintenance, Operator concepts and OAM standards in the cloud native field. Operator provides the theoretical standard and practical basis for developers and operation and maintenance personnel to construct stateless and complex application operation and maintenance on the cloud native platform, which greatly improves the coverage of cloud native operation and maintenance platform. More than 500 Operator concrete implementations have emerged in the open source ecosystem, covering the operation and maintenance of almost all mainstream cloud native software. These include RocketMQ, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Consul, Argo, Kubeflow, and more. These ideas have deeply influenced the evolution of the cloud native space.

In the 15th “Open Source China open Source World” summit forum, Ali Cloud senior technical expert, etCD founder, CNCF TOC Li Xiang won the 2020 China Open Source Outstanding Person Contribution Award.

We asked Li Xiang for his thoughts on the progress of open source at home and abroad and the development of cloud native practices.

Open Source, from “use” to “Embrace”

The popularity of open source has been high in recent years. The so-called open source is to open the source code of software, allowing community members to modify, improve and innovate it, and share its results with all members of the community. In addition to developers participating in open source as individuals, enterprises are also stepping up their participation in the development of open source software.

Li Xiang mentioned that the integration of open source should be a cycle: use – find problems/make new features – submit code to the project – more people to use.

At present, the development of open source in China is more in the use stage, and open source technology is used in appropriate scenarios to solve some business problems. A good trend is that the recognition of open source technology in China is gradually increasing, and the number of enterprises and developers participating in open source is also increasing year by year. Alibaba is also actively promoting the implementation of some advanced open source ideas, such as cloud native. Li xiang said that if some forward-thinking developers in China are willing to take the time and effort to practice cloud native technology and constantly collide with foreign technology ideas, then we can have some influence on the development of the cloud native community and thus qualify to lead the development direction of cloud native technology. “Chinese developers are fully capable of participating in and influencing open source projects.”

There is also a trend that more and more domestic manufacturers build technology systems based on open source technology. Instead of just selling open source technology as before, these vendors are building or trying to build open source ecosystems and promoting them at home and abroad. In the past, when OpenStack was just coming out, there were many vendors packaging, integrating and selling based on OpenStack technology. Some domestic TO B manufacturers have also adopted similar ideas, such as the development of a good PingCAP. In addition, some startups are also consciously creating and promoting open source technology, which is a change of attitude toward open source in China.

Of course, the development of open source in China still needs to be improved. On the one hand, Li said, Chinese developers should be more actively involved in the construction of the entire open source community, not only in the construction of technology, but also in the clash of ideas. It’s not just about short-term issues or Bug fixes for open source projects, it’s about preparing for the longer term. Only by being involved in the community can we give the community more specific needs, help the development of the open source community, and even influence the future direction of the open source community.

For enterprises to participate in open source, whether it is a start-up, or cloud vendors, from 0 to 1 to do some open source projects, and trying to do some innovative and advanced nature of the project, the domestic in the open source community and on the influence of carry forward advanced productivity, and even to make some international well-known brand of open source, To truly integrate into the open source development process.

There is, of course, a way to play in the open source world.

About Open Source Governance

Some time ago, Google formally transferred ownership of the Istio project trademark to Open Usage Commons (OUC). After accepting Istio, OUC will work with the project steering Committee to develop guidelines for the use of the Istio project trademarks in the community. This has triggered a heated discussion in the industry, as THE CNCF TOC, Li Xiang talked about his views on open source governance.

Open source can be understood in terms of three parts. The first part is open code, making it available for people to see and modify. This is the most basic thing any open source project should do. The second part is about the brands and patents involved in the open source work. This part of the work is open and the brand is subordinate to a neutral organization, so that when other manufacturers or users use it, they will not be restricted by the patent and there is no brand worry.

The third part is the openness of the governance model. The openness of the governance model means that each project has a governance organization, and those who make certain contributions to the open source project or meet certain standards are allowed to join the governance organization and have certain say and decision-making rights for the future development of the open source project. For example, Alibaba opened an open source project X today. At the beginning, the five people who participated in the voting were all from Alibaba. If Alibaba’s contribution decreases one day and B’s contribution increases, then B company has the right to promote the governance of this open source project and control its direction. The Redis project, for example, recently abandoned its autocratic management model in favor of a new “community autonomy model.” This means that the future of the Redis project will be decided by the community as a whole, rather than by Sanfilippo, the father of Redis.

By transferring the brand and patent to the OUC, Google has made the brand subordinate to a neutral organization, which means that on top of the open code, the brand and patent associated with the code have become neutral, so that everyone involved in the project can use the Istio brand, and everyone is equal.

From the perspective of the users of the open source project, we must hope that open source projects can do the above three parts (code), brand, management model to be able to open, in the long run, this is the most favorable situation for the user, so open source projects can according to demand oriented to development of community, rather than according to participate in a company’s intention to develop.

However, Google did not open up the governance model. First, Istio project is still in the early stage of development. If the governance model is opened, many people will participate in the early process of Istio. From the perspective of commercialization, if Google has the right to govern the open source project, it will have certain control over the future direction of the project, which will have a certain first-mover advantage for The layout of Google’s product line in the future. This is also a consideration for Google’s lack of open governance model.

Istio is hot because it is the most high-profile open source project in the Service Mesh community, which is one of the most promising trends in the cloud native space.

Cloud native: Enterprise concerns and irresistible industry trends

In recent years, the concept of cloud native has attracted more and more attention from the industry. As an innovator in the field of cloud native, Li Xiang is also promoting the technology preaching of cloud native in China, including deeply participating in the writing of ali cloud native architecture white paper and participating in the design of cloud native practice courses. Cloud native concept for domestic enterprises, is still in an early stage of development, whether technology, products, standards, etc., are still in the process of rapid iteration. When enterprises apply cloud-native technologies and products, there are inevitably some concerns.

Q: What is the gap between the development of cloud native field at home and abroad?

Li Xiang: Generally speaking, there is no big gap between the development of cloud native technology concepts at home and abroad. However, the rise of cloud native concept is in North America, so the development center of community ecology is still in Silicon Valley, and some new technical concepts or architecture applications, innovative scenes, etc., also need some time to be slowly introduced to China.

The big difference is the acceptance of cloud services by domestic and foreign enterprises. When we mention cloud, the first thing that comes to mind must be resource saving, flexibility, cost reduction and technology bonus. North American companies generally have high labor costs, so they will be willing to pay for software services in the cloud to save labor costs wherever possible. Many domestic enterprises are not short of R&D personnel and have strong overall R&D capacity. In the case of limited added value provided by cloud services, many enterprises will develop some customized capabilities by themselves.

Ali is one of the earliest companies to practice the concept of cloud native in China. After the internal practice is mature, it starts to influence more enterprises by external output. We attach great importance to how to bring more added value to enterprises through cloud native, and this added value must exceed the value brought by customized development of enterprises, only in this way, enterprises will be willing to embrace cloud native. In the future, Alibaba will also develop some more competitive products and provide more valuable services to influence overseas users and make the domestic cloud development conform to the international standards.

Q: What will the future look like for services on the cloud?

Li Xiang: The cloud of the future is definitely not resources. For cloud manufacturers, the focus is not to sell these basic resources, but to establish a service system and ecosystem on the cloud, so that enterprises can use the cloud services more conveniently and conveniently. With the development of cloud service scale, one cloud service can be delivered to many users, and due to the marginal effect, the cost of each cloud service will be significantly reduced, making it more cost-effective for enterprises. But this also poses a challenge for Aliyun, how to better scale the cloud services, make each service more refined and more universal, so as to help enterprises solve more common problems.

Q: When selecting cloud native technology, enterprises have doubts about the security, reliability, performance and continuity of cloud native technology stack in large-scale application. How can this problem be solved?

Li Xiang: It is understandable that there are concerns about cloud native, after all, cloud native is still in the early stage of development. Ali Cloud has done a lot of work to help domestic enterprises understand and use cloud native. We address concerns about the reliability, performance, and continuity of the cloud native stack in two ways. On the one hand, it tries to use these technologies internally. Alibaba has very rich and large-scale use scenarios inside, through which the cloud native technology can be polished. After the technology is mature, we will return these technologies to the community and help the cloud native community to improve the quality of technology and development level.

On the other hand, Ali Cloud provides a wealth of cloud raw products and services, cloud raw products family. In the past, if an enterprise wants to use cloud-native technology or products, it needs to spend a lot of energy to study some open source projects, do its own operation and management, and consider integration, stability guarantee and other issues, so as to establish a cloud-native platform. Today, in order to make it easier for enterprises and developers to use cloud native technologies and products, better accept the concept of cloud native, and solve the reliability, performance, continuity and other issues that enterprises worry about, Ali Cloud provides a whole family of cloud native products, providing very strong SLA protection.

In addition, regarding the security of cloud native, ali Cloud security sandbox technology was commercially launched in 2019, supporting ECI, ACK, SAE edge computing and other businesses. Ant Financial acquired Hyper to build a secure and reliable container operating environment. Ali Cloud security sandbox is a security container Runtime built on MicroVM. First, it is a MicroVM based on hardware virtualization technology, using a deep customization optimized hypervisor, a minimalist virtual machine device model. Secondly, Ali Cloud security sandbox is also a container Runtime, providing image distribution, image management, container network, container storage, fully compatible with OCI and CRI specifications. In addition, confidential computing containers based on the integrated design of software and hardware began to emerge. Ali Cloud and ant team jointly launched inclavare-Containers, an open source container runtime technology stack for confidential computing scenarios. It is based on secret computing technologies such as Intel SGX and supports Ant Occlum, the open-source community’s Graphene Libary OS, which greatly reduces the development, delivery and management of secret computing applications.

Q: More and more manufacturers begin to explore the implementation of OAM, what is the charm of OAM?

Li Xiang: OAM (Open Application Model) is a set of application description specifications (Specs) jointly initiated by AliYun and Microsoft and jointly maintained by the cloud native community. The core philosophy of OAM is “application centric”, emphasizing that r&d and operations collaborate around a set of declarative, flexible and extensible upper level abstractions, rather than directly using complex and arcane infrastructure-level apis.

Under THE OAM specification, the research and development and operations concerns are completely separated. Development and operations can easily define and publish applications by writing a very small number of fields that are relevant to them, rather than complete K8s Deployment and HPA objects. This is where “upper level abstraction” comes in.

At present, Ali Cloud EDAS service has become the industry’s first production-level application management platform built on OAM, and will soon launch the next generation of “application-centric” product experience; In the CNCF community, Crossplane, a well-known cross-cloud application management and delivery platform, has also become an important adopter and maintainer of the OAM specification.

In fact, not only AWS Fargate, but all Serverless services in our cloud computing ecosystem can easily use OAM as a presentation layer and application definition for developers, thus simplifying and abstracting complex infrastructure apis. The original complex process operation “one click” to upgrade to kubernetes-style declarative application management.

More importantly, thanks to OAM’s high scalability, users can deploy container applications on Fargate and use OAM to describe functions, virtual machines, WebAssemblies, and just about any workload type you can think of, They can then be easily deployed on Serverless services and even seamlessly migrated between different cloud services.

Q: How will cloud native evolve in the future?

Li Xiang: We always hope that the product ecosystem of Yunyuansheng can be standardized and open. Services and infrastructure between different vendors can be interconnected. Applications developed by users can run on Aliyun containers or other vendors’ containers, and the things that applications rely on can be open interfaces in nature. This has been the direction of Ali Cloud efforts. From the perspective of cloud native development, we are also trying to achieve open standards, and better integration with the community ecology, so as to reduce users’ concerns.

Alibaba pays close attention to the development of four aspects in the cloud native field:

One is the contribution to Kubernetes and Containerd. Ali has carried out large-scale practice internally, and built together with upstream companies in terms of performance, scale and efficiency. From the perspective of the whole ecology, Ali is one of the earliest manufacturers to start the layout of cloud native, and is also trying to expand the scope of cloud native coverage and expand the boundary. Ali Cloud launched the open source project OpenYurt, on the one hand, to return ali Cloud’s experience in the field of cloud native edge computing to the open source community, on the other hand, it also hopes to accelerate the process of cloud computing extending to the edge, and discuss with the community the unified standard of cloud native edge computing architecture in the future.

Second, In the micro-service system, Ali has a relatively profound accumulation, and has also done a lot of open source work. Through some open source projects, such as Dubbo and Nacos, the experience and practice in Ali micro service system will be exported. In addition, Alibaba is also integrating its microservices and open source technologies with the cloud, so that customers using the cloud can more easily use open source products directly.

Third, promote the evolution of micro-service system to the next generation. Especially in the field of cloud native, people are optimistic about the development of Service Mesh. Ali is also promoting the integration of micro-service system and Service Mesh to achieve better compatibility and interoperability, so as to improve the activity and maturity of the whole ecosystem of Service Mesh. At the same time, we are making some of our open source projects and cloud products more cloud-native or cloud-friendly, such as RocketMQ, a messaging system. We are making the RocketMQ open source software more resilient and Serverless in order to reduce costs and make it easier to deploy on the cloud.

Fourth, try some innovative, advanced cloud native exploration. For example, the Kubernetes standard implementation of THE OAM Open Application Model Crossplane project, after deep cooperation with the OAM community, today Crossplane is an application and cloud service management control plane for hybrid cloud scenarios. It is dedicated to the management and delivery of applications based on K8s declarative apis, following open application model standards, and abstracting and managing cloud services in a cloud platform-independent, end-user friendly manner through a unique mechanism.

The entry of the Crossplane project into the CNCF Sandbox also means that, starting today, all code, documentation for the implementation of the OAM Kubernetes standard, and ownership of the entire Crossplane project itself, will be transferred to the CNCF community for hosting. Complete decoupling with any commercial company behind the project, be it Ali Cloud or Microsoft Cloud.

The first KubeCon 2020 Online Summit

On 30 July – August 1, alibaba cloud native, click on the link to make an appointment and polite: developer.aliyun.com/topic/aliba…

“Alibaba Cloud originator focuses on micro-service, Serverless, container, Service Mesh and other technical fields, focuses on the trend of cloud native popular technology, large-scale implementation of cloud native practice, and becomes the public account that most understands cloud native developers.”