Introduce: Cloud is original this concept already more and more thorough popular feeling, but to “cloud is original after all what?” This question is still a variety of interpretations, recently I have some feelings about what cloud native is, so I write down to share and discuss.

The concept of cloud native is becoming more and more popular, but the question of what is cloud native? This question is still a variety of interpretations, recently I have some feelings about what cloud native is, so I write down to share and discuss.

I now think that cloud native is actually a way for many companies to quickly acquire various basic capabilities (such as: Extensive scale scalability, extremely high availability, extremely low innovation/operating costs, big data analysis/operational capabilities, etc.), and do not need to be like many companies before, in order to have these capabilities, huge investment, or to put it in another word: cloud native is professional basic capabilities of the universal, readily available.

Application and the application of many years ago faced in today’s world situation is so different, the difference and play in today’s business faces fierce competition has a lot to do, I had always felt like ali accumulated in the process of development, a lot of ability, few companies will need outside, just like the billions and billions of dollars of how hard it is to appear, but now is not the same, Therefore, this also lays the foundation for the application of today’s era. The requirements of technical competence are also far different. Let me briefly say a few points:

  1. Usability requirements are much higher than in the past: Today’s apps often have high usability requirements as soon as they go live, because it’s easy to send users to the competition if something goes wrong.
  2. The requirements for scalability are much higher than before, mainly reflected in two aspects: one is the size of the team, now the business company is easy to rapidly develop to more than 100 people, and how to keep the R&D efficiency of more than 100 people as far as possible, which has a very high requirement for the scalability of the system; The second is the user scale, now the user scale of many services can quickly break through millions, tens of millions of scale, which requires the system must be able to rapidly scale according to the user scale;
  3. The cost of innovation and operation must be low: business competition is extremely fierce, and speed is the key, so how to quickly launch various businesses without too much investment is extremely important; Another aspect is the cost of operation, which is closely related to the scale of users and fierce competition of the current application.
  4. Play of big data: now many businesses on the customer, recommendation, search and other big data requirements are still quite high.

Ali is a in the process of their own development, gradually meet the challenge, the competitive environment basic also won’t ask for a business to come up the various ability have good), but had no cloud is available, so in the process of development to accumulate all kinds of ability, now through open source, cloud to export the commercialization ability, even now such a competitive environment, All kinds of students with innovative business ideas can still go online as quickly as they did in those days, instead of spending a lot of time and effort to polish the basic abilities they need first.

I haven’t been through the whole process of Ali’s development myself, so I’ll talk a little bit about what I’ve been through.

  1. In 2007, the biggest problem Taobao faced in terms of its basic capabilities was scalability. At that time, two phenomena appeared: the number of users increased greatly, and the machine had been basically added to the bottleneck; Research and development personnel growth, research and development efficiency decline is very obvious. At this stage, Taobao did a very important round of structural transformation, honing the basic technical products such as service framework, message middleware, library and table scheme, distributed file system, distributed cache, and so on. Combined with the redesign of business architecture, the problem of scalability was well solved.
  2. In 2009, Taobao was faced with usability problems and frequent failures, so it began to accumulate various skills such as monitoring, rapid recovery, tracing and system design, such as asynchrony of non-critical paths. The investment in availability has been continued until the full link compression test was created to solve the demand for availability and certainty in the special case of Double 11. Through the multi-room system of double activity in the same city and multi-activity in different places to build a strong disaster capacity and rapid recovery capacity; As well as the offline scene to add the later face of different usability solutions. The accumulation of high availability schemes in various scenarios also makes the availability of business more and more guaranteed.
  3. Around 2011, Alibaba began to think that the operating cost of resource investment might be exaggerated in the future, so in 2011, it began to improve the efficiency of machine use through containerization and continued to optimize the cost. Later, it continued to solve the problem of short-term peak cost input such as Singles’ Day through cloud resource elasticity. Through online and offline mixed department, the problem of increasing investment in big data machines and low utilization rate of online machine cluster resulting in waste is solved. After years of efforts, the operation cost of machine resource investment is still relatively controllable under the condition of rapid growth of business.

As mentioned above, Alibaba has gradually formed a complete capability by relying on huge human input, scene polishing and years of continuous investment. Today’s businesses can be structured in a cloud-native way so that they have these capabilities right from the start, or at least so that they don’t lag behind on these basic capabilities in today’s fierce and demanding business competition environment, so that they can devote more energy, time, and resources to real business innovation. Such a concrete cloud native is quite valuable for the innovation of the whole society.

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