Brief introduction:Cloud native offers developers three advantages: zero maintenance of the application infrastructure, zero resistance to application architecture modernization, and zero boundary between the digital and physical worlds.
background
Cloud native is the inevitable product of cloud computing development, and the continuous growth of cloud native is no accident.
In 2021, what will the cloud native look like and what new changes will it bring? Ali Cloud container service research and development director Yi Li recently in Ali Cloud developer Conference delivered a speech “cloud native application new boundary”, and said that cloud native for developers to provide three aspects of convenience: application infrastructure “zero” maintenance, application architecture modernization “zero” resistance, digital and physical world “zero” boundary.
Cloud-native: Born of clouds
Cloud native is a cloud-born technology that is rooted in developers and provides the most cloud value.
According to the CNCF 2020 Developer Status Report, more than 4.7 million developers worldwide are now using cloud-native technologies, accounting for 36% of all back-end developers. Developers have become the main drivers of cloud native change.
Application infrastructure “zero” maintenance
Cloud-native technologies such as containers and Serverless continue to drive computing interfaces up and complexity down, allowing developers to focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure, which can greatly improve r&d efficiency.
Aliyun offers developers the country’s richest cloud-native offerings, helping companies focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure. Enterprises can realize the Internetization of application architecture through container services, functional computing and service grid. On top of this, products such as cloud native database, cloud native AI and cloud native big data can help enterprises accelerate the digitalization and intelligence of business processes
Application architecture modernization has “zero” resistance
More and more enterprises hope to bring new benefits and better meet the needs of business development through the application of modernization, such as micro-service and Mesh. But new technologies can also have a big impact on existing application architectures. Using cloud native technology, the existing application architecture can be smoothly upgraded step by step.
When modernizing an existing application, developers need to break down a single application into a distributed microservice architecture, such as Spring Cloud/Dubbo, which builds service governance logic into the application in the form of AN SDK code base. But there are several problems with this architecture:
- Intrusive: In a microservices framework, the implementation and lifecycle of service governance capabilities are coupled to the business logic. Changes and enhancements to service governance capabilities require the reconstruction and deployment of applications, resulting in higher upgrade and maintenance costs.
- Implementation binding: Since microservices framework cobblebases are often implemented by specific languages, it is difficult to support integration between heterogeneous systems in multiple languages (Polyglot).
Therefore, the community proposed a Service Mesh architecture that decouples the application’s business logic from the Service governance capabilities. The service governance capability runs in a separate Sidecar process, deployed independently. Network interception provides transparent service discovery, traffic management, observability, and security capabilities for applications.
Solves the above invasive, binding problems, the specific advantages are as follows:
- Complexity sinking: The service governance implementation sinks down to the infrastructure and can evolve independently. Allowing developers to focus more on the business application itself.
- Zero intrusion: Zero trust security, observability and other high order capabilities can be achieved without code modification.
- Multilanguage support: Transparent support for multiple programming languages and frameworks.
So are microservices and service grids either one or the other? How to integrate and coexist with existing microservice architecture while transforming the service grid?
With the efforts of the community, the service grid and microservices can be well integrated to support the smooth evolution of the enterprise microservices architecture.
The managed service grid ASM provided by Aliyun
- Support Dubbo communication protocol, through a declarative way to support gray release, canary release, lossless offline and other capabilities.
- Using ali’s open source Nacos service registry, service registration and discovery of Mesh applications and microservice applications can be supported in a unified way. Nacos 2.0 improves performance by 10 times, effectively enabling large-scale service grid applications to be implemented.
- Apache Dubbo 3.0 is also exploring Proxyless support for the service grid in a proxy-less way; In Proxyless mode, the traffic management of Dubbo application can be realized directly through UDPA protocol of service grid without sidecar. This approach can further delay the network and reduce the resource overhead.
- The service grid has also enhanced support for vm application deployment to facilitate smooth upgrade of legacy applications.
Taking Dongfeng Nissan motor as an example, the paper introduces the service grid migration of the enterprise. First of all, its data services are developed in Python/Java and other different languages. Java applications use Dubbo microservice framework, while Python uses REST/HTTP for service invocation, which lacks unified service governance capability. Second, virtual machines, container deployment and other methods coexist, hope to fully migrate to the container architecture.
With THE ASM service grid, Python/Java applications, virtual machines, or container deployments can join the service grid to implement service governance in a unified and declarative way. Among them, the existing Dubbo microservice applications and applications in the grid can use the Nacos registry to realize service registration and discovery, keeping the compatibility of the existing application architecture.
The number and the physical world “zero” boundary
Digital innovation needs to go deep into the industry and merge the physical and digital worlds to realize the business value of innovation. Cloud edge and end of computing integration has become a trend, yesterday’s Ali Yunfeng will describe the future direction of cloud development, a cloud core, a cloud multi-form, cloud and AIoT combination, which can support ubiquitous computing. The cloud native technology represented by container will become the most important carrier of the next generation of distributed cloud applications because of its advantages of agility, lightweight and portability.
Logistics is a typical scene of digital innovation, surrounding the four dimensions of people, goods, machines and vehicles, involving a large number of data processing, intelligent scheduling and other complex business scenarios. Sto Express, for example, is involved in the transfer, transportation and delivery of hundreds of millions of parcels every day. Digital technology plays an important role in logistics supply chain optimization. Sto Express has built a logistics cloud PaaS platform with integrated cloud edge and end architecture based on AliYun edge container products.
- PaaS platform is responsible for distributed resource scheduling, application management, big data processing and intelligent analysis in the central cloud.
- Edge cloud nodes located in local storage centers support the core process of express delivery services with IoT devices. Operations such as scanning and verification can be completed locally, reducing delay and strong dependence on the cloud.
Such a structure can help enterprises to reduce costs by 30%, the stability from 99.9% to 99.95%, not only to support the daily business, but also to calmly deal with the double 11 business peak.
Cainiao Logistics Cloud PaaS uses ali Cloud edge container service ACK@Edge to solve the challenges of distributed resource scheduling, application management, autonomous operation and maintenance after computing subsidence. The core technology behind it is the OpenYurt project of Alibaba Cloud, which has become a CNCF sandbox project.
Edge computing is faced with technical challenges such as decentralized computing, heterogeneous resources and weak network connections. OpenYurt is a cloud-edge collaborative computing framework based on Kubernetes. It has the core capabilities of edge application management, edge autonomous self-healing, and edge computing power management.
In addition, OpenYurt adheres to a non-invasive implementation of native K8s, featuring standardization and openness. In the past two years, OpenYurt has been deployed in CDN, Youku, Cainiao, Industrial Brain, and Urban Brain, and supported customers such as Sounds.com and Kuaisou.
If the cloud is the brain of enterprise intelligence, IoT devices are the eyes and hands, enabling interaction with the physical world. K8s reduces the management complexity of massive distributed devices and enables unified management and better collaboration between distributed applications and IoT devices. There are huge innovation opportunities when cloud native and IoT are combined.
Work together with VMware to build a cloud-based IoT ecosystem, and gather open source communities to create domain standards
Ali cloud container service we, VMware China r&d center, director of research and development director wide road to achieve the two sides announced technology in the field of edge native “cloud computing” strategic cooperation, hope that the future depends on the open source community strength, accelerate the build at the edge of the cloud native ecosystems, jointly promote the cloud edge fusion process, help more enterprise comprehensive hug for intellectualization transformation and upgrading.
Based on the same vision and vision, OpenYurt community and Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry community will deepen cooperation in the fields of edge computing, IoT, and cloud native. On the one hand, the device management mode in IoT is redefined through cloud native mode to realize device twin capabilities. On the one hand, it’s leveraging EdgeX Foundry’s mature ecosystem to enable cloud-native applications to support a wide range of iot protocols and devices.
Alibaba Cloud open source project OpenYurt and VMware open source project EdgeX Foundry jointly initiated and maintained by the Chinese community have launched a deep cooperation, will help enterprises and edge business developers without any transformation of K8s, IT architecture of cloud edge integration and collaboration easily. EdgeX Foundry (EdgeX) is an open source “plug and play” IoT Edge platform that supports devices from different manufacturers using different protocols. Meanwhile, OpenYurt extends Kubernetes to edge scenarios through native plug-ins and supports all upstream Kubernetes features.
The reader’s welfare
After Alibaba released the white paper of cloud native architecture to the community, Ali Cloud heavily released the book “Ali Cloud Cloud Native Architecture Practice”, providing more detailed technical details and landing scenarios, this book has been ali Cloud intelligent president, President of damo Institute Zhang Jianfeng, Alibaba CTO Cheng Li strongly recommended.
Now launch the reader to send book activity, scan the qr code below to find “Attack cloud native, provide more possibilities for developers” article, comments:
Interactive topic: If there is an image or a word to replace cloud native, what do you think it is and why?
Each of the three readers with the most comments and likes will receive a copy of Ali Yunyun Native Architecture Practices.
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