Application Management - DevOps Best Practice for Cloud Resources

01 Tools for cloud resource management and operation and maintenance

At present, there are five major problems concerning the control and operation and maintenance of ECS.

First, with the development of business, the number and types of enterprise cloud resources are increasing, which brings challenges to management.

Second, the users of resources and the financial parties have obvious demands on account splitting and cost optimization from the management perspective.

Third, as more and more business parties use cloud accounts and resources, how to use them safely poses challenges to resource managers.

Fourth, with the increase of resource scale, how to effectively manage and improve the efficiency of operation and maintenance will bring challenges to the operation and maintenance personnel.

Fifth, there are too many entrances to cloud resource management and operation and maintenance to find best practices.

In order to solve the pain points of cloud resource control and operation and maintenance, standardization, automation, data and process must be realized. It is necessary to achieve grouping and decentralized management, get through account permissions, and accelerate the implementation of approval process.

In terms of automation, it is necessary to further improve efficiency, reduce human operation, ensure regular alarm operation and maintenance, and pay attention to the use of resources at all times.



02 Management of application grouping dimension resources

Application grouping mainly involves three concepts.

First, the configuration of application grouping. Under each application, create some different groups. You can create different application groups according to different environments or regions. This enables grouping of multiple deployment environments and architectures.

Second, resource management. Support the import of required resources, scenario based application grouping, and elastic capacity expansion in grouped resources.

Third, resource operation and maintenance. When vulnerabilities or security risks occur during resource grouping, monitoring and event mechanisms are triggered through security and risk management. In addition, it also supports the compilation and deployment of CICD code.

In order to solve the problems of large number and variety of cloud resources, difficult management and difficult access to control, etc. Alibaba Cloud supports the import of more than 30 types of cloud resources and unified management of cloud resources.

In order to solve the problem of product fragmentation, Alibaba Cloud puts best practices together through group management to facilitate the rapid use of these capabilities.

In order to solve the problem of resource decentralization and account sharing, Alibaba Cloud uses the tag capability to associate all resources together. The user can view the expense distribution of your current resources, monthly bills, etc. in the expense center of your account.

Take the nailing scenario as an example, mount a part of ECS to the load balancer. Through application grouping, select nail application to directly create an application. During the creation process, all association relationships are automatically created in the form of resource stations. Then, these resources will be automatically imported into the application group for the convenience of subsequent control.

Next, let's talk about elastic expansion and contraction. Application management integrates elastic scaling. Each application group can be directly associated with an elastic expansion group. Users can formulate elastic scaling rules based on business. The system will expand and shrink the capacity according to the expansion rules.

In addition, elastic scaling supports automatically joining RDS, automatically associating SLB/ALB, scaling configuration, and lifecycle linking.



03 Operation, maintenance and monitoring of application grouping dimension resources

Automatic operation and maintenance supports resource operation and maintenance at the grouping level, and can associate resource events and alarms. Users can arrange operation and maintenance tasks at will, which is flexible and extensible.

In terms of instance management, common operation and maintenance tasks include sending remote commands, uploading files, disk cleaning, starting and stopping instances. In image management, it mainly supports updating images, deleting images, and creating images.

In the customized template of the OOS O&M orchestration, the automatic O&M supports timed machine on/off, temporary bandwidth upgrade, and timed execution of any template. Automatic operation and maintenance supports more than 120 cloud product threshold alarms and more than 40 cloud product system event alarms

Next, let's talk about monitoring and events. If you import some resources into an application group, you can view all the monitoring, such as CPU utilization and load balance indicators under a group. I'm very impressed. Users can also be equipped with alarm related capabilities, cloud monitoring capabilities, etc.

In addition, event operation and maintenance integrates five system events. It includes planned O&M events, unexpected O&M events, instance cost events, instance security events, and instances that need to be migrated due to the underlying upgrade.

In security risk management, it mainly includes vulnerability scanning, baseline and cloud platform configuration detection. Among them, vulnerability scanning will automatically scan Linux software vulnerabilities, Windows software vulnerabilities, application vulnerabilities, and emergency vulnerabilities on a regular basis.

As shown in the figure above, when building code, users need to bind cloud efficiency enterprises, create new pipelines, authorize the release of ECS, and then associate pipelines for code scanning, building, deployment, and testing. Finally, it is published to the Kubornetes cluster, Alibaba Cloud container service, Alibaba Cloud ECS or its own host.

This lesson helps you to think and understand operation, maintenance and control from a new perspective. From the perspective of resource dimension, let's transform to the perspective of application grouping to re understand the operation, maintenance and control.

Application grouping can import all resources, control and maintain these resources. In addition, application grouping supports elastic expansion, automatic operation and maintenance, monitoring alarm, resource control and other capabilities.

Q&A link, user Q&A

Q1 What factors would encourage an organization or enterprise to consider introducing DevOps?

A: If the number of enterprise resource controls is large, the business is complex, and the operation and maintenance costs are high. DevOps automation tools can be used to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Q2 What security related problems will you encounter in DevOps?

Answer: If it is related to user permissions, users with different permissions can perform automation related tasks. You can assign different permissions through tags.

Q3 Is the API of automation function open?

A: Yes. The capabilities of Open API include resource import, cloud monitoring, and elastic capacity expansion. It can be called directly through Alibaba Cloud or SDK.

Q4 What problems may be difficult to solve in the process of business growth?

A: With business growth, users can divide power and account. They can associate different roles through grouping or different labels. With the growth of resources, you can set up some automated tasks in the application grouping or user orchestration console. Improve the utilization of resources and save costs through visualization, monitoring and alarm, elastic capacity expansion, etc.