The author | Zhao Guangli of science and technology

For the first time, the Cloud Conference 2020 concluded in the form of online + offline. Recalling these two days, the most striking and impressive thing is “I heard that old Ma gave birth to a donkey”.

Alibaba’s “little Donkey” made an impressive debut

“Little Man Donkey” is a logistics robot sold by Ali Dharma Hospital. Let alone how ali’s goods flow robot will perform in the future, in terms of this transmission, it is definitely “Dharma Hospital” level.

That said, the most “out of the loop” — that is, “the most industry” and “the most focused on cloud computing” — at this dazzling technology summit, I’d like to pick “cloud native”.

Cloud Native: Alibaba’s new technology Strategy

Alibaba cloud original was released in the cloud conference on the second day, Alibaba announced the establishment of cloud native technology committee.

But in fact, on the first day of the Conference, Ali Cloud intelligent president Zhang Jianfeng has been heavily foretold.

On September 17, at the 2020 Cloud Conference, Zhang Jianfeng announced that Ali Cloud has entered the 2.0 era: The “super computer” feitian Cloud will be installed with a “digital native operating system”.

Ali Cloud 2.0: “Flying Cloud” + “Digital native Operating System”

“Just as Windows put computers into millions of homes, the upgraded cloud will make it easier for people to interact with cloud computing, enabling the cloud to reach more businesses and more people.” Zhang jianfeng said.

We see, “flying cloud” + “digital native operating system” combination, is not “cloud native”?

The next day, Alibaba announced the establishment of cloud native technology committee, the committee will “vigorously promote the comprehensive cloud native transformation of Ali economy”, “empower millions of enterprises to carry out cloud native transformation”, “help customers into the digital native era”, with Zhang Jianfeng proposed “Ali Cloud 2.0 era” form a response.

Alibaba cloud native technical committee shall be a senior researcher Jiang Jiangwei committee served as director, dharma hospital database chief scientist Li Fei fly, ali cloud computing platform, a senior researcher at Gu Yangqing, ali cloud native application platform, a researcher at a number of the “sweeping monk” class of technology such as Ding Yu Daniel, is also the head of each department involved.

Alibaba cloud native technology committee has a strong lineup

This lineup is tantamount to a declaration that Alibaba has taken the cloud as an important technology strategy for ali Cloud to open the next decade.

This is a bit of a mystery – where is the cloud native? What’s the magic of it?

What is cloud native?

What exactly is cloud native? The author previously in order to figure out the concept of this Internet “rookie”, specially consulted some information. But after learning for a long time, I found that there are still some clouds in the fog. In an attitude of responsibility to my readers, I am now unilaterally declaring that cloud native is more a summary of ideas or methodology than a technical term with an exact explanation (and if it is, it is dynamic).

Just kidding. To understand cloud native, try to deconstruct it in terms of what it means.

Literally, CloudNative is a combination of Cloud+Native.

• Cloud, of course, is where business applications live in the Cloud, not in localized data centers;

• Native emphasizes that applications should be “born for the cloud” and “born for the cloud” during development and design, and consider the cloud computing environment and how to make full use of the resource flexibility and convenience of services on the cloud, so that applications can run on the cloud in the best state.

For the idea of cloud native, Li Xiang, a member of the technical Supervision Committee of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF, founded in 2015) and a senior technical expert of Aliyun, shared his understanding with the author.

“Cloud native hopes to decouple the characteristics and general requirements of R&D through the concept of platforming, and gradually transfer the general requirements to the infrastructure environment. Only in this way can the R&D personnel be gradually liberated and the overall EFFICIENCY of ENTERPRISE IT r&d and operation and maintenance be improved.” Li said.

To make it easier to understand, he offers two perspectives:

• From the perspective of capability sinking, future R&D is bound to become more and more “simple”. Some things that need to be focused on outside the business in R&D will become easier or take for granted due to cloud native.

“For example, no one cares how to deal with a specific piece of hardware because the operating system has sunk that capability, or data management has become much simpler, no one cares how data is stored on the file system, you can just write an SQL statement to query it.”

• Cloud native also hopes to gradually platform or de-platform some common capabilities, making them an environment for r&d rather than a process for r&d.

“For example, by standardizing and automating the deployment and delivery process through containers, r&d doesn’t have to pay attention to this process. When some of the original processes become an environment, it will be very natural and very comfortable to use. This is actually one of our goals in the future of cloud native.”

To sum up with an unfortunate analogy:

Just as automation and intelligence are revolutionizing manufacturing, cloud computing is revolutionizing IT development from the perspective of capacity sink and standardization. The concept of cloud native is “the integration of various efficiency improvement innovative technologies based on cloud”, which further enhances the “abstraction level” on the basis of cloud computing virtualization, so as to truly reduce software development and operation and maintenance costs in essence, and realize development optimization and efficiency improvement.

Why cloud native?

Our daily life has almost been “living in the cloud”. Especially during the epidemic, most of us “use nail to go to work, attend cloud classes, go out of the health code, order food to home”. Behind this fairy day, a series of business innovations supported by cloud computing and cloud native technology.

With the sweep of digital economy, enterprises are ushering in the tide of IT transformation. In this process, people are demanding more and more intelligence and digitalization. For enterprises and institutions, how to quickly and accurately dig out new business opportunities and model innovation from massive business data is a problem we have to face.

In the cloud era, “Oriental Hope Group” in the chemical industry needs to establish a unified mobile office platform for the whole group; Ele. me, a food delivery service, needs to flexibly mobilize its APP response capacity based on peak meal times; Hotwind, which sells clothes, needs to develop a handheld interface that fits into a personalized e-commerce style…

When talking about aliYun’s upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 and the installation of a digital native operating system on Fetian Cloud platform, Zhang Jianfeng described the following picture:

In the 1.0 era, the cloud was like a DOS computer. Organizations and enterprises needed to master a complex set of codes, instructions, and development skills to run. In the 2.0 era, the cloud is like a “Windows system computer”, users do not need to understand the code, just need to operate the graphical interface to build their own applications.

“Aliyun 2.0 will enable people who don’t understand the code to access the cloud.” “It provides a new mode for people to interact with cloud computing, making the cloud easier to use and application development,” said Zhang jianfeng.

On the Cloud Computing Conference, Jiang Jiangwei (xiaoxie), a senior researcher of Aliyun, demonstrated how cloud native can help enterprises quickly achieve visual resource planning, second-level flexible resource selection, automatic flow control and fault recovery.

Demo screenshot of Aliyun EDAS3.0 cloud native application architecture

Although concise, the presentation vividly illustrates how cloud native can help enterprises or organizations gain cloud computing dividends at lower cost, shorter path and faster speed, and better cope with changing and uncertain business challenges.

How will cloud native change the cloud?

At this point, cloud native almost has a general “shape”. Integrated cloud native characteristics, Li Xiang to cloud native development trend of “sketch”.

“If we define cloud native more broadly, we hope that future software applications, software architectures and software infrastructure can be built on the cloud based on cloud native construction, so as to make full use of cloud resources and delivery capabilities, and give full play to the advantages of cloud platform and scale.”

Li Xiang predicted that from the perspective of the development trend of cloud native, cloud platform will be easier to control, more open, more secure, and cloud service interface will be floating, the boundary will disappear.

Manageable cloud – “The premise of automation is standardization, such as standardizing capabilities on the cloud through the Open API. Cloud native will make the cloud manageable. “Think of the cloud as an operating system where you can encapsulate and redevelop those capabilities through autonomous capabilities, and we’re even exploring ways to drag and drop and visualize capabilities to make it easier for you to use them.”

More open cloud – “cloud services standardization and ecological integration will further. Ali cloud also can appear more third-party cloud SaaS products, that they can also feed into ali cloud of ecological system, to provide users with the native service support. In this way, the ecological of cloud platform will be more active, vigorous development.”

A more secure cloud — “We may be able to provide an application-oriented security architecture at a higher level, where the integration and end-to-end management will be hosted by a cloud-native architecture, where the security of IT devices, host operating systems and other details will no longer be a concern. Like a building, cloud native can define it as a security system, and users don’t have to worry about which floor has several security guards.”

Cloud boundaries will disappear — “Hybrid cloud, proprietary cloud, multi-cloud and so on May become blurred in the future, and users will no longer have to care about these fragmented concepts, just a unified cloud native platform or operation plane.”

Further development of Serverless – “It is likely that people will use cloud in Serverless mode in the future, and the service interface of cloud will continue to rise to speed up the efficiency of r&d and operation and maintenance. Users no longer have to care about the underlying and resource issues of the cloud. These issues will be “abstracted” by Serverless model. Resilience, resource management and operation and maintenance capabilities will become automatic capabilities.”

How does cloud native work in its early stages?

Xiao Xie explained the future picture of cloud native at the Cloud Habitat Conference, and specially arranged the “Observation team on cloud” composed of ctos of various enterprises to ask questions on cloud. Zhou Lei, IT director of Hotwind, raised an issue that enterprises are very concerned about.

He asked: “For most of us who are not professional IT enterprises, we are also using microservices technology, distributed database technology and so on. These technologies help improve system performance and increase scalability, but also bring technical complexity and higher technical threshold. We care more about how to build business applications quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. What will Alibaba do about that?”

In plain English, it’s saying, “I don’t care if you’re native or not, is the barrier to access these new technologies lower or higher, more complicated or easier?”

Xiao Xie answered on the spot: “Ali Cloud ensures open source in the PaaS layer, and the part related to the online business of enterprises ensures open source and maintains the timeliness of version update; for example, for typical products such as EDAS, Ali Cloud will adhere to the combination of open source and enterprise governance in technology.”

In response to Xiao Xie’s answer, Zhou Lei said that he was “generally satisfied”, and he hoped that cloud platform would have more visual tools to help enterprises build business applications with lower code, “I believe there will be such a day”.

The fact that companies are asking such questions shows that cloud native is still in its early stages of development. This explains why Alibaba has set up a special technical committee at this time to bring aliyun’s cloud native practice from behind the scenes.

With alibaba’s internal rich, large-scale use of the scene, Ali Cloud took the lead in internal attempts to use and polish cloud native technology —

• During the epidemic period, based on ali Cloud container solution, Dingtalk added 10,000 cloud hosts within 2 hours to support 200 million office workers to start online work;

• Sto Express moved its core system to Aliyun, and carried out application containerization and micro-service transformation. IT reduced its IT cost by 50% when IT processed 30 million orders per day.

• The application of China Unicom card using Aliyun original PaaS platform has improved the card opening efficiency by 10 times, reduced the demand response time by 50%, and increased the page view from 10 million to 110 million……

It is through such specific practice that Ali Cloud has the confidence to return the technology to the community after it matures, and help the cloud native community to improve the technical quality and development level.

On the other hand, in order to make it easier for enterprises and developers to use cloud native technologies and products and better accept the concept of cloud native, Ali Cloud has created a whole family of cloud native products, providing very strong SLA protection.

“In the past, if an enterprise wanted to use cloud-native technology or products, it had to spend a lot of energy to study some open source projects, do its own operation and management, and consider integration, stability and other issues to build a cloud-native platform.”

Li Xiang said that Ali Cloud to create a family of cloud native products can play a professional, scale effect, to provide users with the guarantee of safe use of cloud native. Moreover, many users prefer to start their cloud native trial from the community, so Ali Cloud will also inject its own cloud native capabilities and experience into the community.

Aliyun original panorama

In Zhang jianfeng’s vision, cloud native is to elevate the interaction between people and cloud computing to a new mode: cloud computing is no longer cold, but more and more people.

Furthermore, Zhang Jianfeng said that Ali Cloud 2.0, which injected the concept of cloud native, will change the form of enterprise organization — cloud not only makes enterprise information system more agile and intelligent, but also can enhance the collaboration between organizations and bring efficient social synergy.

“This is a new set of ideas and methods, and Ali Cloud has made some progress in its efforts over the past few years. This is the only way to digital upgrade.” Zhang jianfeng said.

“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.”