Introduction: The author of this article comes from the R&D center of China Life Insurance Co., LTD., and has relatively senior experience in enterprise digital transformation and cloud native practice. The following content is collated from the author’s reading of the newly published “Ali Yunyun Native Architecture Practice”.
Author | Xiao Sheng
The author of this paper comes from the R&D center of China Life Insurance Co., LTD., and has relatively senior experience in enterprise digital transformation and cloud native practice. The following content is collated from the author’s reading of the newly published “Ali Yunyun Native Architecture Practice”.
Beginner’s mind
As IT practitioners in the financial industry, participating in the digital transformation process of traditional enterprises, we have been thinking about two questions: first, what is digitalization and why should digitalization be used? Second, how to promote digital transformation, how to plan and adjust the path, tools and organization?
We often confuse the concept of informatization and digitization, thinking that some business systems on the line or some digital market, to complete the IT construction goals. But in reality, it may just change the way some information and data flow to the leadership, not the way the whole business works. The original manual operation still needs manual operation, and the process to be followed (even some new processes are added in the newly built system), with no significant change in efficiency; Whether the performance of an enterprise has been improved, and if so, whether IT is positively correlated with IT construction and cost-effective, etc., are often lack of effective evaluation methods, which are easy to fall into the pit of pseudo digitalization.
“Any architecture must serve the enterprise strategy, and cloud native architecture is no exception!
“Companies need to be clear about the relationship between business strategy and cloud IT strategy, whether cloud IT strategy is just a necessary technical support to the business strategy, or whether cloud IT strategy is part of the business strategy itself.”
I strongly agree with the view mentioned in the book “Ali Yunyun Native Architecture Practice” that technology ultimately serves enterprise value. Therefore, we believe that digitization is to improve the business model based on the ability of informatization, aggregate all links and data on the whole value chain, and focus on guiding business operation and decision-making. The final form of expression is the intelligent form of “full total factor data + automation + real-time”.
“The main requirements of the technology architecture for digital business are business continuity, rapid roll-out, business cost control and technology enabling business innovation.”
In order to enable business development teams to deliver high-quality products faster and more reliably to meet the ever-faster business requirements, “small front end, big midstage/big back end” is the way to go. By making the front end lighter, business development teams can be more focused and deliver more agile; And the middle and back end do a bit heavier, high-quality design and specification are deposited in them, which best practices reuse is also higher.
The core idea can be summed up in one word – “sinking”.
When we put the public technical ability and method of sinking into the development framework, sinking to the base platform, sinking to the automation process, based on the ability to build applications can be very agile, and was born in a high quality the architecture of the system (so-called win on the starting line), the cloud native architecture is the ability to best practice methodology of subsidence ground.
Set out
“Cloud native Architecture is a collection of architectural principles and design patterns based on cloud native technologies, designed to help enterprises and developers take advantage of the platformization capabilities and resilient resource capabilities provided by cloud platforms.
Cloud native includes cloud native technologies, cloud native products, cloud native architectures and development concepts for building modern applications.”
Modern applications and cloud native applications are built or implemented based on cloud native architecture and development concepts, such as 7 architecture principles such as servitization principle and elasticity principle, 10 architecture modes such as computing storage separation mode and event-driven mode, and development concepts such as DevOps and GitOps.
Cloud native architecture and cloud native development concept are built or implemented based on cloud native technologies and products, including container technology, DevOps technology, microservices, Service Mesh, Serverless, cloud native big data, cloud native AI, cloud native security and more than ten other technologies and products. Among them, the concept of Open Application Model (OAM) is refreshing, which extends the standardized declaration of resources in PaaS to the standardized declaration of applications and configurations, “making simple applications simpler and complex applications easier to manage”.
Finally, cloud native products and cloud native technologies again require cloud infrastructure based on public, private, or hybrid clouds. The composition of cloud native is such a progressive relationship.
The road
“The upgrade of the cloud native architecture is a thorough upgrade of the entire IT architecture of an enterprise. Each organization must tailor the upgrade of the cloud native architecture according to the situation of the enterprise. Among them, organizational capability and technology stack are equally important.” On the road of digital transformation, the historical burden of traditional enterprises is really not small. To carry out structural transformation without stopping business is like changing the engine, operation process and even crew of an airplane in flight.
The author comes from China Life Insurance Co., LTD., and has personally experienced a case of service technology upgrade. It is the case that cloud native technology gives us a new answer when we have to.
In the early stage of IT construction, smokestack systems were everywhere; With more and more systems, the interaction between systems is more and more large, and the need for servitization is put on the agenda. More than a decade ago, the CONCEPT of SOA represented by bus architecture was popular, and various systems were connected to the service bus. However, with the rise of mobile Internet, the service pressure is increasing year by year, and the bottleneck of bus bus architecture gradually appears. A jitter of bus is easy to cause the blocking of various services, and the introduction of micro-service architecture aggravates this phenomenon.
At this point, the service registration discovery model is already mature, new systems are implemented by Spring Cloud and similar products, but existing systems cannot be transformed in this highly invasive way, resulting in high cost and risk. With the emergence of multiple programming languages, it is difficult to implement the same service governance across different languages. We struggled to maintain the service bus and make it as robust as possible on an architectural level. It wasn’t until a few years ago when we heard about the concept of a service grid, a non-invasive SideCar model to be exact, that we realized the answer was coming. At present, we are in the process of full grid.
The SideCar model itself is nothing new, but why has it become so popular in recent years? In the final analysis, it is the maturity of container technology, DevOps and other cloud native technologies that solve the problem of the cost and efficiency of the operation and maintenance of a large number of SIDecars. Therefore, the cloud native technology itself also pays attention to the timing and complement each other, and we, as the application party, take the trend and “break the original steady state and build a new steady state”.
“In addition, the design of cloud native architectures also needs to consider organizational changes. Mentioned a very important cloud native architectural principles of service is (including micro, small services, etc.), the field is a typical principles of conway’s law, for enterprise’s technical architecture and communication architecture must be consistent, otherwise it will lead to deformity of architecture of service, and even lead to organizational communication costs and increased “evasive” phenomenon.” The landing of any scheme, people are the first element. Bring up Conway’s law when giving technical lessons to new colleagues or sharing architecture. The structure of a product is the epitome of an organization’s structure, or, more bluntly, “the butt determines the head.” Some technical structure or management process, organizational structure is unavoidable; Without major changes to the organizational structure, the solution we choose is not necessarily the most ideal, but the most appropriate under the current organizational structure.
As for ourselves, we need to constantly remind ourselves to look at problems and think about solutions from the whole process, the whole scene and a higher level, outside the circle defined by the organizational structure.
His own way
“However, it should be noted that cloud computing service companies, including AWS, AliYun and Microsoft, have not built their cloud service software architecture systems in full accordance with these software architecture standards. This is no accident at all, as these companies are well aware that cloud-based software architecture should be a software architecture for a decentralized organization, not a traditional software architecture for a centralized organization. Therefore, traditional software architecture standards need to be further customized and tailored for cloud native architectures to give full play to their value. Software architecture design patterns have the same benefit concerns as traditional software architecture design methods, but they differ in their specific design methods.”
Of course, just because you have a map doesn’t mean you won’t get lost. From the enterprise to the team, each organization has its own pain points and demands, as well as corresponding culture and advantages. After choosing the right direction, the specific landing must explore the road in line with the characteristics of the enterprise itself, which requires constant practice and trial and error. Ali ACNA architecture design method and maturity model evaluation system can be used as a reference for the evolution degree and effect of technology architecture in digital transformation.
“The technology strategy of the enterprise is shifting towards business architecture and its governance.” As DevOps grows in popularity, the application delivery process will become more standardized. “The proliferation of cloud service types will lead to new development models and frameworks.” Finally, I want to emphasize returning to my original aspiration. Technology serves enterprise value, comprehensively evaluates the rate of return on investment, and ultimately achieves the effect of helping enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency, reduce risks and improve experience.
The original link
This article is the original content of Aliyun and shall not be reproduced without permission.