The difference is all in the details.

Serverless’s next decade of cloud computing requires not only continuous improvement in technology, but also intensive efforts in product experience. Recently, Ali Cloud Serverless upgrade again, released a series of optimization around the product experience, including functional computing FC fully integrated into the container ecology, add the trigger of container mirror; Announced the open source Serverless Devs, the first Serverless developer platform in China, to help developers achieve one-click experience of multi-cloud products and rapid deployment of Serverless projects; SAE provides flexible policy configuration in the QPS/RT dimension and adds enterprise-class features such as traffic limiting and degradation to enhance application lifecycle management. EventBridge has been released to help users easily build loosely-coupled, distributed event-driven architectures with the standardized CloudEvents 1.0 protocol.

Function computes FC + container technique, 1 + 1 > 2

Barriers to experience?

The advantages of functional computing are obvious. It helps developers to undertake a large number of complex capacity expansion and reduction, operation and maintenance, capacity planning, cloud product integration and other responsibilities, enabling developers to focus on business logic, improve the delivery speed (time-to-market), and continue to optimize costs. However, migrating from traditional applications to functional computing still faces many challenges, such as inconsistent operating environments, high learning costs for application construction, code pack service limitations, lack of versioning of deliverables, and lack of support and integration of popular open source tools such as CI/CD pipeline.

The solution is in the container!

Container ecological deposits are rich and mature enough to be widely accepted for use, and application containerization has become the de facto standard for development and deployment. The new version of FUNCTIONAL computing FC supports container image as function deliverables, combining container’s excellent development, deployment and ecology (before launching) with features of functional computing itself, such as operation free, zero idle cost and cloud service integration (after launching), comprehensively upgrading developer experience:

** Simplifies application Serverless: ** No code modification or recompilation of binaries, shared objects (*.so), local debugging, keeping development and online environment consistent

** greater function code limitations: ** image supports a maximum of 1 GB before decompression (compared to a maximum of 50MB before decompression of code package), avoiding separation of code and dependencies, simplifying distribution and deployment;

** Container image hierarchical cache: ** incremental code upload and pull, improve development efficiency and reduce cold start latency;

** Mirror sharing, reuse: ** logic can be portable, reduce repeated development construction.

** Mixed deployment: ** The same application Serverfull (ECS, container ACK), Serverless (FC, ASK, SAE), mixed deployment of different applications or cut flow between different services of the same application, to achieve the balance of consistent performance, rigid resource delivery, rapid expansion, and minimal operation and maintenance.

**CI/CD: ** Continuous build, integration testing, code upload, storage and standard version management, rich open source ecosystem CI/CD tools can be reused.

Serverless Devs, solve the Serverless tool chain problem

The implementation of Serverless is not a single commercial product, but requires a set of tool chain, because Serverless involves the creation of applications, project development, testing, as well as release and deployment, etc., is the whole life cycle management of the entire development operation and maintenance project.

Serverless Devs is a componentized and plug-in Serverless developer platform, aiming to solve the Serverless toolchain problem in a more open and standard way.

  • ** Less cost to learn: ** Developers don’t need to study and learn every Serverless tool on the market, just use Serverless Devs, can easily and quickly “get started” mainstream Serverless services and frameworks.

  • **Serverless Devs provides the App Store, where developers can quickly search for required application cases or components through keywords, and complete project configuration through visual editing. Project deployment can be completed with a click of the mouse, shortening the overall deployment time by nearly one time.

  • ** More flexible use: **Serverless Devs can not only describe function calculation, API gateway, object storage and other resources when describing projects. Install, Build, Publish and other behaviors can also be described by plug-in and Hook provided by Serverless Devs. At the same time, Serverless Devs does not limit the command of each component, but encourages developers to develop different capabilities for different components to deal with more and more complex scenarios. This flexible and open use method improves the development and operation efficiency of Serverless project by 90%.

SAE — Shortest path to Serverless landing core production applications

If we say, function calculation provides a more efficient implementation path for innovative business or off-line scenarios that consume a lot of computing power; Therefore, **SAE (Serverless App Engine) ** provides a shortest landing path for Serverless core production applications.

In microservice scenarios, SAE provides application lifecycle management, including application development, application deployment, application management, monitoring management, and log management.

** Smooth migration, operation-free: ** Spring Cloud/Dubbo microservice applications or Spring Boot applications can be deployed to SAE without any code or business logic changes. At the same time, because it shields the underlying details of IaaS and K8s, it solves the pain points of microservice architecture and container service operation and maintenance, and has the absolute advantage of 0 threshold +0 transformation +0 container foundation, so as to save labor costs and focus on business itself.

** Enterprise features rich, stable business: **SAE provides out-of-the-box micro-service governance, application monitoring capabilities, built-in ARMS basic version capabilities, end-to-end application monitoring and problem location diagnosis provides a good support, saving a lot of troubleshooting time. The built-in AHAS of SAE greatly enhances the stability and reliability of the microservice system in the face of business peak.

** Save limited resources, Serverless: ** Timing flexibility and monitoring flexibility (CPU, Memory, QPS, RT, etc.) allow for second expansion to maximize the high availability of the entire system cluster and reduce the waste of limited resources. In addition, one-button start-stop functionality is unique to SAE to save development and test environment costs.

EventBridge — Standard for event-driven architectures

This is a leader in product concept

In July 2019, AWS launched EventBridge, hailed as the most important product since Lambda, which is now standard in event-driven architecture. Event-driven architecture has been listed as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends by Gartner and will become the mainstream of microservices in the future.

The Serverless event bus EventBridge released by Ali Cloud is designed to solve the current pain points of event processing:

  • Cloud products need to redundantly write multiple events or retrieve data from multiple event sources: We use EventBridge to build the cloud product event center.

  • Without a unified event standard, event protocols between cloud services are not compatible: we use the standardized CloudEvents 1.0 protocol to build event-driven architectures.

  • Overlapping event capabilities between cloud services are not scalable, events are independent, and economies of scale cannot be achieved: We use EventBridge to connect industry partners and third party SaaS providers with standardized access to upstream and downstream events.

Details are not polished overnight, and experience can not be improved behind closed doors. The open source of Serverless Devs and the abundance of Serverless products and tools mean that we will continue to improve the overall experience of the Serverless ecosystem in a more open way.

You are invited to join the Serverless Technology Developer Exchange Group (Pin number: 33947367), Let’s Serverless! **

Ali Cloud first Serverless developer offline salon in Beijing

This offline event will invite domestic front-line Serverless technical experts from Aliyun, Taobao, Xianyu, Baifu Travel, etc., to bring developers:

  • Taobao/Tmall to deal with double 11 traffic peak how to scale practice Serverless.
  • Cut to the developers pain point, tell about idle fish, Baifu travel and other Chinese enterprises Serverless landing and “step on the pit” experience.
  • First disclosure of aliyun’s latest open source tool chain Serverless Devs design details and future trend.

There will be a fun Serverless laboratory open for the first time, click to register, and Serverless with technology masters, so that innovation becomes easier.

Serverless public number, release the latest information of Serverless technology, collect the most complete content of Serverless technology, pay attention to Serverless trend, pay more attention to the confusion and problems encountered in your landing practice.