One Friday evening in April, Mingo, fresh from a voice conference, picked up the coffee on the table and drank it down. At the same time, he flipped through his notebook lying open on his right hand and thought about the questions he was about to be asked.
Having worked in Huawei for 15 years, he is currently the technical director of the R&D team of Huawei cloud official website, guarding the external “facade” of Huawei cloud.
As a technical manager, Mingo has a habit of “giving myself some quiet time every day. During this time, I try not to deal with emails and work messages. I can do some code development, review, and technical research.”
He is also used to arranging transactional work in the first half of the week. In the second half of the week, he can have relatively complete time to systematically discuss large technical solutions with the architects and designers of the team.
In delving into technology, Mingo likes to go down and look at its underlying mechanism, its source code. He is also a fan of the “10,000 hour rule” and believes that with enough time and effort, you can make a difference in your technology.
As a result, he was able to complete an almost impossible challenge with his team in just over half a year.
Again difficult, the official website “facade” can not fall
On the second floor of huawei’s nanjing Research Institute’s long stairway, a poster board has been erected: the Il-2 aircraft, riddled with bullets, kept flying and finally returned safely.
Two years ago in the afternoon, Mingo stood in the French window of his office with his arms around his chest and stared at the poster. His mind was on the task he had received ten minutes before: his team needed to complete all self-research and reconstruction of the content production platform on the official website within a limited time and reach the leading level in the industry.
It was a challenge to step out of their technological comfort zone, to abandon the technical architecture they knew so well and start from scratch, like there’s a highway to the end, but you can’t take it, you have to build a new one.
During this period, huawei cloud official website team not only needs to ensure the normal operation of daily business and solve various business requirements step by step, but also needs to allocate enough manpower to build a new content platform, which is short of time, manpower and heavy task.
After constant technical discussions, code rewrites, and validation tests, the minimum working version of the project was showcase, and everyone felt a sense of accomplishment and reprieve. However, a more urgent task was once again thrown at them: in order to ripen the product quickly, the next big push would be to use the self-developed system directly.
It was two months before launch, and the development team had to devote some of their resources to producing the page (which had to be completely redesigned to ensure user experience), as well as adding the capabilities needed for high concurrency, high availability, and security and reliability to the transition. It usually takes at least 3 to 6 months to perfect the ability.
Mingo and the team had to fight to the death. During that time, the details of the split work were written on the task board, new solutions were constantly overlaying the old version, and the conference room was filled with technical experts and new ones. They refused to compromise and charged forward.
For example, in order to ensure that the resulting pages could not be lost under any circumstances, the design team reviewed a lot of data, discussed and prototype with security, usability, and performance experts, and then chose the most ‘redundant’ solution, which ultimately successfully dealt with multiple emergencies and withstood the test of the big boost.
After 8 months, from the start of the project to the birth of the first content production page based on self-research, the official website team has delivered a good report card.
“It was very challenging, but we made it.”
At the same time, they also “incidentally” developed a PQP page quality platform, responsible for automatically checking the quality of the content of the page before the launch, including the page 404, sensitive words, English and Chinese word spelling, icon design elements are compliant with the specification and so on.
Since taking over huawei cloud official website, quality is the sword of Damocles hanging over Mingo’s head. In his words, “Quality is not important when there is no problem, but when there is a problem, it will become the target of public criticism, and the so-called good war will have no outstanding merit.”
How to ensure page quality stability, which is often ignored by many front-end technicians. “We went around consulting companies and partners, but none of us had such tools. We relied more on process assurance, such as notifying OnCall when problems were found, and then finding the person in charge layer by layer. It works, but it’s too inefficient.”
Therefore, it is both a sense of achievement and a challenge to transform the problem handling method of “people pulling and shouldering” into tool capability, make it into a platform to empower, and then run through the whole page release process.
At present, the PQP platform has been “open source” in Huawei. More than 80 websites, including huawei’s official website, have been connected to the PLATFORM to monitor the content quality of websites.
When it comes to quality, not only the quality of the page content, but also the quality of the stability of the website. Just think, 12306 every collapse, behind is how many users ridicule scold.
In order to maintain the stability of huawei cloud website, they also highly available against doing a multi-layered security, such as many copies of the disaster backup, data live and so on, in six rooms in four areas of the world have found a place for huawei cloud server, the club’s official website and bought four different CDN manufacturer to avoid any risk of subjective and objective. Build a number of escape channels, one button to complete the rapid flow switch. It’s like peeling an onion. You peel off one layer and the inside is still intact.
“Huawei cloud official website is our front, console, background services may be hung, but the official website is like the flag of Shangganling, even if it is a commander, I can not fall, must be erected there.”
Cloud life is hidden in the business
To this end, the architecture and production and release process of Huawei cloud official website are also being constantly optimized and improved.
React is powerful and flexible, Angular has rich components, and Vue is simple and easy to build, making it a bit of a mess to choose from.
Mingo, too, had been stuck in the middle of choosing a technical framework. After some discussion, the team chose a compromise — they and the Web Capabilities Center settled on the following principles: The basic capability team maintains a set of mainstream technology framework and component library, each business team has its own choice, can directly use, can also choose other technology stack according to the need, but the core of ** is to comply with the unified design specifications, to achieve even if the page produced by different technology stack can also let users have no perception difference effect. Let developers find the framework that best matches the business characteristics of their care.
The question then arises, how do you put together the pages produced by these old and new technology stacks and different technology frameworks to present them to users?
Huawei cloud introduced ** micro front-end framework, so that each small team, different technology stack can coexist. The purpose of ** micro front end is low coupling, it minimizes the influence between modules, each module can use different technology stack as required, so as to reduce the cost of technology stack switch, ensure smooth transition of products, avoid the quality risk brought by one size cuts all.
At the same time, all services are deployed in the container, everything is code. Applications, middleware, and underlying operating systems are packaged into standard packages, and modules are the same regardless of the environment and deployment time. There is no difference between the development environment and production environment due to inconsistent system, middleware version, and configuration. This is also the basis for continuous delivery and rapid iteration.
From one shoulder to the low efficiency of resistance development, to today’s standard page release process, the architecture of huawei cloud website also entered into a new stage: the background using micro service architecture, front end USES micro front-end architecture, page online follows the standard enterprise processes, change numerous for brief, make full use of technical features, to break the bottleneck of actual business.
For example, the previous web development, whether the page function, or page content changes, are not around the developers, any minor changes on the page have to modify the HTML code or CSS script. In this case, casually modify a word, development requirements row down, half a month has passed.
In order to let everyone can get “free”, so there is a page production platform, can let the business personnel to complete the page modification; With visual construction, drag components can be completed wySIWYG web page production; With the content quality detection platform of the system, it can ensure the safety of the page online. Through IT, all online actions are efficient and controllable, and the final link of DevOps on the official website is broken through.
This is also mingo’s understanding of cloud native. ** “Cloud native itself is not an architecture, it’s more of a definition, a methodology. ** When you look at it, cloud native is all about these key elements: microservices, DevOps, continuous delivery, containerization.”
Currently, Huawei cloud has a unified release pipeline platform for DevOps. All services are released to the production environment through this platform. In terms of continuous delivery, about 65% of huawei cloud official website features are independently released by feature, and hundreds of features are released to the production environment every week.
Let the bullets fly a little longer
Conway’s Law states that the structure of an organization determines the overall technical architecture. As the front-end and back-end organizations of Huawei cloud are separated and each party performs its own duties, some frictions may inevitably occur in technical communication. But it is also trying to use technology to bridge human-caused communication problems as the tide of cutting-edge technology surges.
Take Node.js as an example, it is commonly said that it is JavaScript running on the server side, which allows front-end staff who understand JS to write simple back-end services and complete some interface assembly. “With Node.js, if a programmer takes a simple requirement and implements it himself from the front end to the back end, he can increase productivity by 30 percent by eliminating communication costs and the need to synchronize releases.”
According to Mingo, this is what we call a “big front end,” a “full stack developer.” The full stack capability is to eliminate the loss caused by the cooperation of some organizational teams and reduce the loss, which can naturally bring qualitative improvement to the development efficiency and mode.
Speaking of the improvement of development efficiency, the current fire Serverless is setting off a revolution in the field of cloud computing, this storm also spread to the front end, for this, Mingo is more cautious.
Serverless Outlines a world where there is no setup, no middleware to deploy, no specific usage scenarios, no business types, just code to deploy. This is a utopia for techies, but Mingo believes that current Serverless technology has certain limitations. Development teams cannot use only one technology or component, and many technologies or frameworks need to be analyzed and tuned at the middleware and operating system levels. Serverless currently does not achieve this flexibility and adaptability.
Huawei cloud official website team also tried to use Serverless to improve development efficiency. For example, some services with insensitive background execution and low availability requirements can be deployed and triggered by timers to achieve certain effects. But when it comes to full scenarios, especially multi-part solutions, the Preferred Serverless service is not considered.
“Maybe I am more cautious, the government has advanced or new technology, habitually observe for a while, let the bullet fly for a while, after the technology is mature and stable to follow, then it is not too late.”
Mingo has made many departs in the selection of technology stack. He believes that the front-end team must combine the actual business needs to choose the technology stack, and then observe whether the ecology of the technology stack is continuously evolving. It is not advisable to follow others’ opinions and pursue high ambitions.
Beyond the technical label, vision determines altitude
Looking back at the iteration of front-end technology, it can be said that it is changing rapidly, new frameworks, component libraries emerge one after another, new programming languages come in waves…
Mingo, who dabbled in different technology stacks, kept thinking, what is the purpose of technology? In the process of building huawei cloud official website, he seems to have found the answer.
The backend technology stack, led by JAVA, has stabilized both the technical language and the framework over the decades of iteration. In contrast, the front end is still running towards the peak of the technology maturity curve, and the future will gradually transition from a hundred flowers to one or two mature and stable frameworks to unify the country and complete the whole ecology step by step.
Some of the current mainstream frameworks are essentially similar, and the deeper you go into a field or technology stack, the more consistent you’ll find.
In the midst of the storm, Mingo believes that the three technological directions with more potential and exploration space are immersion, intelligence and low coding.
The first is immersive, with the WYSIWYG front end pursuing richer forms of presentation and interaction. For example, in the field of industrial manufacturing simulation, the twin digital model can be verified by various tests. Similarly, on the front end, the product can be visually presented on the website, so that users can intuitively perceive the operation mode of the solution.
Here, he drew in the air, “you can imagine the background can not see touch some networking solutions moved to the front desk, the process of the program, data flow can be seen, very magical, ** but also very test back-end data and front-end rendering ability, but we are trying.”
The second is intelligence. On the one hand, huawei Cloud official website team will further optimize the intelligent algorithm and strategy in search and recommendation to achieve accurate intelligent recommendation of thousands of people and improve the user registration conversion rate. On the other hand, the team will make more explorations in the intelligent production of content, including articles, images, advertisements, etc., to assist the operation staff and business staff to produce higher quality content.
The third direction is low coding, now most business people can produce simple pages, involving some complex pages only developers involved. In the future, more and more pages, interfaces and processes will be implemented in low-code or no-code ways, both for operators and end users.
The emergence of front-end new technology, the ultimate purpose is to respond to business, quickly solve the needs of production, operation, which is also the direction of all technologies are exploring.
By this stage, the scope of the big front end was expanding, and Mingo became more comfortable with looking at the web pages presented to him from an architect’s perspective and observing the logic behind them. “Any content that involves user perception, in fact, is the big front end to pay attention to, for the front end personnel, the front end is not only a technology, it is more like a goal.”
At the beginning, the concept of the front end was vague in the industry, and the front end staff all laughed at themselves as “cutting figures”. There were no three popular frameworks, and at the beginning of chaos, everyone felt the stones to cross the river.
This era is gone. For today’s front-end personnel, technology is the foundation, and the thinking and vision on it determine the height of technology.
“There’s a lot of debate on the forums about which programming language is the best. In fact, to be constrained by the merits of a technology is to label oneself. It’s like some people on the front end are stuck with the ‘front end’ label because they think there’s no room for development in page writing.”
“If you position yourself as a simple development, one skill will suffice. But if you want to grow, you have to learn to think outside of that box, to improve the user experience, for example, and to learn more than just one framework or language. In the process, I moved my technical capabilities and positioning from developer to architect to CTO standards.”
You can have the church, the moon and sixpence in your heart.
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