Build a comprehensive cloud-native open source ecosystem

Open source is fundamental to basic software. Cloud+open source will together become the root of the digital world. The basic software for the future digital world should be built on open source and need to be built and shared across the industry. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud not only actively embraces open source, but also actively rewards and leads it. Open source has become one of Alibaba's technology strategies.

On July 28, Alibaba Group CTO Cheng Li was invited to participate in the 2022 Open Atoms Global Open Source Summit and mentioned in the main forum speech that container technology has evolved from Alibaba's internal practices to cloud commercialization, and has gradually become a global leader in container technology.

He mentioned, "Alibaba Cloud is an important corporate contributor to the global Kubernetes community and has made significant contributions to the global cloud native open source community. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud Container Service ACK was officially released, becoming the first batch of products to pass Kubernete consistency certification in the world. This year, Alibaba Cloud became the only enterprise in China to enter the Forrester public cloud container platform leadership quadrant."

Alibaba Cloud has built a complete cloud native open source ecosystem, helping Kubernetes extend to more scenarios such as edge, AI, and hybrid cloud through multiple open source projects such as KubeVela, OpenYurt, OpenKruise, and Fluid. KubeVela has created a modern application delivery management factual standard for the cloud computing era, focusing on applications, defining the boundaries and collaborative methods between research and development, operation and maintenance, and infrastructure, and has become a CNCF sandbox project. In 2021, the ICT Academy released Kube Vela's Application Model (OAM) as an industry architecture standard.

OpenYurt is the first cloud native edge computing project of Alibaba Open Source, helping to build an intelligent and integrated edge computing cloud native infrastructure. It has now become a CNCF sandbox project. Since OpenYurt opened its source, its upstream and downstream cooperation has significantly improved its influence in technology, community and industry, and won the TOP 3 edge computing Influence Project of the Asia Pacific CDN Industry Alliance in December 2020; In terms of ecological cooperation, we have conducted multi-level cooperation with upstream and downstream ecological partners such as VMware, Intel, Shenxin, Unicom, and IBM in terms of IoT, cloud edge collaboration, hardware, edge AI, and edge security. Among them, we have deeply cooperated with the LFEdge EdgeX project to jointly promote the cloud biological model standard, becoming the industry's first initiative.

On November 11, 2021, Alibaba Group achieved 100% application of cloud native technology, completing the largest cloud native practice in the world, and all e-commerce, search, big data, and AI businesses were running on a unified container platform. Container Service ACK has provided container application management services to over 10000 cloud based enterprises such as the Internet, finance, retail, manufacturing, and transportation.

Alibaba Cloud has many well-known open source projects in the cloud native field, including two top Apache projects and ten CNCF hosting projects, covering technology directions such as containers, application delivery, messaging, microservices, and Serverless. Open source activity and influence are comprehensively leading. Among them, some open source projects have also become field fact standards. For example, Apache RocketMQ, as the first top-level project of Internet middleware Apache in China, has the first market share in the business messaging field in China; Apache Dubbo is the most influential and highly adopted domestic microservice framework among open source service frameworks. Like RocketMQ, Dubbo has entered the first square of the Apache China Open Source Project Quadrant in terms of globalization and influence.

Apache RocketMQ is a top-level Apache project open sourced by Alibaba. As the first open source distributed messaging middleware in China, RocketMQ 5.0 has the highest market share in the business messaging field in China. With a significant upgrade, RocketMQ 5.0 is the first in the industry to promote a cloud native "Messaging, Event, Streaming" integrated message processing platform, RocketMQ has entered the first square of the Apache China Open Source Project Quadrant in two dimensions of globalization and influence, and has become an elective course in Open Source Practice in the School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University; In terms of commercialization, Alibaba Cloud MQ messaging products based on RocketMQ have surpassed IBM and become the largest market share in China.

Apache Dubbo is a top-level Apache project open sourced by Alibaba. It is the most influential and widely adopted domestic microservice framework among open source service frameworks. Like RocketMQ, Dubbo has entered the first square of the Apache China Open Source Project Quadrant in terms of globalization and influence. According to the latest "Open Source Digitalization Report in the Field of Microservices" released by X-lab Open Lab, Dubbo's open source activity ranks fifth in the world in the microservices framework. Dubbo 3, launched in 2021, has developed into a user-friendly new generation of cloud native service frameworks based on large-scale usage scenarios incubated in Alibaba, continuing to lead the wave of selection of next-generation service frameworks in China.

This year, Alibaba Cloud continues to make breakthroughs in the cloud native field and has released two major open source projects: one is the cloud native hybrid system Koordinator, which is based on Alibaba's internal large-scale hybrid practice to create solutions for users with the lowest access cost and the best hybrid efficiency in cloud native scenarios. The other is the OpenSergo project, jointly launched with enterprises and communities, to address various losses and high complexity issues caused by interoperability between different frameworks.

Currently, Alibaba Cloud's open source mainly covers four major fields: cloud native, operating system, big data&AI, and database. The total number of stars on GitHub has exceeded one million. Alibaba has been ranked first in the activity and influence of open source by Chinese manufacturers for ten consecutive years.