Introduction: Alibaba Cloud was adopted for the first time to support the global broadcast of the Olympic Games this year, which is an important step for the Olympic Games to enter the digital era. For this particular Olympics, technology is crucial. We believe that this history-making practice will serve as a milestone to support more sports fans to transform cloud viewing into a major way to participate in international sports events in the future.
The author | min jia xu
First postponement, first restricted viewing… It is destined to leave a special mark in Olympic history. But beneath the many firsts, China’s technological prowess is making a historic breakthrough in the global sporting event on a key track.
Alibaba Cloud was used for the first time to support the global broadcast of the Olympic Games this year, which is an important step forward for the Olympic Games into the digital era. For this particular Olympics, technology is crucial. We believe that this history-making practice will serve as a milestone to support more sports fans to transform cloud viewing into a major way to participate in international sports events in the future.
The cloud-native power behind digital international sporting events
This is a true “sports event on the cloud”. In several core projects of this event, Ali Cloud not only provides abundant cloud computing resources support such as storage, computing and network, but also container technology plays an important role. At the same time, it validates the key trend that containers are becoming the new interface for using the cloud and the preferred way to deliver global applications. For example, container service ACK, as the optimal container execution environment on Ali Cloud, and container image service ACR, as the optimal container application distribution infrastructure, are accelerating the evolution of international events to digital development in a cloud-native way through the output of high efficiency, stability, extreme flexibility, security and intelligence.
Just as the Olympic spirit of “faster, Higher, Stronger, more united” reflects progress and transcendence, Ali Cloud container service is also constantly challenging the ultimate ability. In this attracted world attention sporting event service work, ali cloud enhanced version container services ACK Pro, container mirror service enterprise edition ACR EE, all with excellent play, build and run for the top of the project more applications provide strong power base, more proved to the world that “cloud native power” from China.
1. Stable as a rock, escorting the official website of the event
The particularity of the hosting conditions, the difficulty and the great challenges it faces all make every move related to this event attract worldwide attention. The official website is the most authoritative and real-time release platform for event information. Based on the high availability architecture of remote hypermetro constructed by Alibaba Cloud container service ACK Pro in Frankfurt, Hong Kong and other regions, the official website continues to provide stable, reliable, safe and high-performance access services to global audiences during the event. With its rock-solid performance, Ali Cloud container technology provides a key guarantee for the timely transmission of official schedule, event information, athlete status and Olympic story to the world.
2. Efficient and safe, providing real-time data sources for event information
For an event of this scale, it is no exaggeration to describe the amount of data generated. To make these information be processed efficiently, huge data warehouse becomes the inevitable choice. It is responsible for receiving information from the race results application, such as collecting information about race start times, athlete performance and so on, and then processing it centrally to provide data sources for other applications.
In order to ensure data security, business continuity and provide complete data protection for applications, the event data warehouse built a high availability architecture for remote DISASTER recovery based on ACK Pro, including Tokyo and Frankfurt. In addition, due to the need to collect, process and output data in real time, the system has high requirements for real-time performance. The excellent performance of ACK Pro and ACR EE fully meets the requirements of high real-time performance. ACR EE’s container image mass distribution capability and ACK Pro’s extreme elasticity can rapidly expand nodes and Pod can cope with sudden traffic peaks, even if the traffic volume grows rapidly.
In addition, the DevOps rapid deployment capability of container technology is also applied in automatic media tagging scenarios to integrate data from various sources, such as player entry time, goal time, etc., establish databases, and enrich metadata related to OBS video images through artificial intelligence. The project is also deployed and built based on ACK Pro to improve the automation of media tagging.
3, extreme flexibility, help the public “palm explore the Olympic Village”
While live viewing is strictly limited, technology has enabled the public to enhance the sense of interaction with the event in a variety of novel and interesting online ways. PinQuest, for example, is an Olympic-themed adventure mobile game that allows users to explore the Olympic Village on their mobile phones. Based on the key modules of extreme flexibility provided by ASK (Ali Cloud Container Service Severless Version), the game was launched and quickly completed online more than 10 days before the start of the event, fully reflecting the rapid deployment and extreme flexibility of containers.
A drop of water wears away a stone. Behind the wide application and satisfactory performance of container services in this competition, alibaba has accumulated core technologies and capabilities that have lasted for more than 10 years in the process of cloud native evolution.
Core technical capability of Ali Cloud container service
** Ali Cloud container service provides the most competitive container products in the industry, and has maintained the no.1 domestic container market share for many consecutive years. In addition to supporting large-scale events such as the Olympic Games, ** has also become the backbone of large-scale events such as Singles’ Day, 618 and Spring Festival Gala, supporting the group’s core e-commerce, Jushita of retail cloud, CPAAS of logistics cloud, MSE of middleware, CDN and ENS of edge cloud. Also supports AI and database cloud biotechnology and nail audio and video cloud biotechnology, precipitation rich core technology competitiveness.
2.1 Globalization Architecture
Alibaba Cloud Container service is available in 24 regions around the world, covering China, Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. It truly achieves global deployment with built-in BEST high availability practices and disaster recovery and backup solutions, which is very suitable for global business architecture scenarios and can help customers significantly improve system availability and stability. For scenarios with high reliability and SLA requirements such as The Olympics, the customer deployed multiple groups of containers at a cross-continent level based on ACK Pro and ACR EE, covering Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo, achieving zero failure throughout the whole process and satisfactory stability performance.
2.2 Enterprise-level Support
Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes) is one of the first Service platforms in the world to pass the Kubernetes consistency certification, providing high-performance Container application management services. Support life cycle management of enterprise Kubernetes containerized applications. As the leader of cloud computing container platform in China, it has accompanied and supported the development of customers in various industries since its launch in 2015.
Over the past year, ACK has implemented aggressive technology upgrades, including: high performance cloud native container network Terway 30% improvement compared to community, high performance storage CSI support for efficient volume management of large scale Oracle host database, ASK upgrade extreme flexibility. In terms of large-scale scheduling, ACK efficiently and stably manages the largest container cluster of tens of thousands in China, and is the first manufacturer to complete the large-scale certification of ict (10,000 nodes and 1 million PODS) in China.
ACK’s Pro managed cluster is a cluster type developed on the basis of the original standard ACK managed cluster, inheriting all the advantages of the original managed cluster, such as Master node hosting, Master node high availability and so on. At the same time, compared with the original managed version, it further enhances the reliability, security and scheduling of the cluster, and supports the SLA of compensation standard, which is suitable for the enterprise customers with large-scale business in the production environment and high requirements for stability and security.
- More reliable managed Master nodes: stable support for large-scale cluster management and control; Etcd Dr And backup and recovery, cold and hot backup mechanism to maximize the availability of cluster databases. The key indicators of the control components can be observed to help you better anticipate risks.
- More secure container cluster: The etCD on the management plane uses encrypted disks by default. Data side by choosing to install KMS-Plugin component to achieve Secrets data encryption drop disk. Open security management and provide security Management advanced edition with enhanced detection and automatic repair capabilities for running containers.
- More intelligent container scheduling: Integrating kuBE-Scheduler with more emphasis on performance, it supports multiple intelligent scheduling algorithms and NPU scheduling to optimize the container scheduling capability in large-scale data computing and high-performance data processing scenarios.
- SLA guarantee: Provides SLA guarantee of indemnity standard, and the availability of cluster API Server reaches 99.95%.
Alibaba Cloud Container Registry (ACR) is a secure hosting and efficient distribution platform for Cloud native products that meet OCI standards, such as Container image and Helm Chart. ACR EE supports global synchronization acceleration, large-scale and large image distribution acceleration, multi-source build acceleration and other full-link acceleration capabilities. It is seamlessly integrated with container service ACK to help enterprises reduce delivery complexity and create a one-stop solution for cloud native applications.
1. Diversified OCI product hosting supports multi-architecture container image (such as Linux, Windows, ARM and other architecture container image), supports Helm Chart V2 / V3, conforms to OCI specification of product management.
2, multi-dimensional security guarantee cloud native product encryption storage, support image security scan and multi-dimensional vulnerability report, ensure storage and content security; It provides network access control management of container image and Helm Chart, and fine-grained operation audit to ensure product access security.
3, accelerate application distribution support global multi-region synchronization, improve the efficiency of container image distribution; P2P distribution acceleration ensures rapid service deployment and expansion.
4, improve the delivery of cloud native applications provide the function of cloud native application delivery chain, the whole link can be observed, traceable and configurable independently; Policy-based automatic blocking is supported to implement application change at one time and automatic delivery in multiple scenarios globally, improving delivery efficiency and security of cloud native applications.
2.3 Stability guarantee system
Container service ACK supports tens of thousands of the largest Kubernetes clusters in China. Efficient and stable mass cluster management is crucial. ACK uses the following means to build a stability assurance system.
- Integrated operation and Maintenance
The ACK unified o&M platform integrates the monitoring, alarm, log, inspection, metadata management, and asset management functions of all clusters on the entire network, enabling real-time observation and management of all clusters in 24 regions. For example, if the master component, system component, and abnormal events of the user Kubernetes cluster are abnormal, they can be observed on the O&M platform and automatically trigger an alarm. The efficient operation and maintenance management platform supports ACK to manage tens of thousands of clusters on the whole network and improves the stability of the whole network.
- Full scenario diagnosis
ACK provides the autonomous container service CIS, which enables users to conduct in-depth inspection and diagnosis of clusters covering networks, nodes, components, and services, providing users with professional inspection and diagnosis capabilities and friendly user experience, significantly improving users’ ability to manage clusters. In practice, users can warn their clusters and businesses to do inspection and generate inspection reports. ACK allows users not only to deploy and use Kubernetes, but more importantly, to empower users through the professional capabilities of the product and improve the user’s use of Kubernetes depth and experience.
- Perfect security plan system
For Olympic Games activities, container service based on the existing support process, targeted to develop the whole process support plan, including advance plan, emergency plan, failure drill, duty scheduling, etc. Container service has rich experience in safeguard. The annual routine safeguard activities include the annual Double 11, 618, Spring Festival, etc. These large-scale safeguard activities are complex and comprehensive, and the container service has achieved nearly zero failures in the process of these activities every year. In addition to the above major support activities, there are normal chaos based fault drill and surprise inside the container service. Chaos system will inject faults randomly. The container team on duty will receive alarms and deal with them immediately according to the plan in the plan system. After normal training, the team’s emergency handling ability was tempered to maturity and understanding, which can well realize the goal and methodology of 1-5-10 (alarm within 1 minute, fault location within 5 minutes, fault repair within 10 minutes). These security systems, honed repeatedly after actual combat, have been applied to the Olympic Security special, effectively guaranteeing and supporting the stable and smooth operation of the Olympic Games.
Containers and the future of globalized application delivery
In the world watches sports event, ali cloud depth of container services involved in the games and activities, a rock-solid to the website, the data processing of the event, such as core project, brought the global cloud native industry leading technology, products and services, together with ali cloud each product line successful completion of the sporting event on the “cloud”.
In the future, the container service will be held in the paralympic games and winter Olympic Games to provide service guarantee, ali cloud has been building an efficient, safe, smart and unbounded container technology ability and steady as a rock of service quality, to promote science and technology of light with the light of the rings in photograph reflect, help more industries around the world, enterprises to accelerate the process of the digital transformation.
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