Inventory | Cloud Native Summit Released

On November 5, at the 2022 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference, Alibaba researcher and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform Ding Yu delivered a keynote speech at the Cloud Native Summit, proposing a new paradigm for building cloud native activation applications. During the sharing, Alibaba Cloud has released many new products and new upgrades in the cloud native field, and continues to lead the industry's cloud native technology trend.

Cloud native has become a very popular technology trend. From cloud to cloud, cloud native can help enterprises solve a series of problems in application construction from the PaaS level. Three major paradigms are becoming reality:

The first paradigm is comprehensive containerization. Because the container forms the standard of operation and maintenance, and becomes a new interface for enterprises to use the cloud, and also a new interface for developers to interact with the application system, which is conducive to building a highly flexible and scalable system, so as to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase. Through containers, enterprises can enjoy the benefits of O&M standardization and flexible architecture, as well as the ubiquitous deployment and delivery of software and standardized management of O&M.

The second paradigm is the Internet-based core technology applied in the whole industry. We are using the Internet technology and the Internet architecture to reconstruct the application system, which has brought many benefits: distributed scalability, support business agile iteration, build an elastic architecture, and calmly cope with traffic peaks.

The third paradigm is serverless application. From a technical point of view, it can realize the hierarchical decoupling of technical components, so that the application can achieve full custody and free operation and maintenance, improve the system's operability and reduce costs. Through extreme flexibility, all components can be covered, and it is very easy to build applications on the cloud.

Container service has fully entered the era of intelligence

Although the container service ACK has greatly lowered the threshold of K8s, the management and operation and maintenance of a large-scale and distributed cluster are still full of challenges. For example, how to schedule applications to improve resource utilization while ensuring stability; How to plan, analyze and optimize the cost of the application; How to locate and repair the cluster in time when there is a problem.

Intelligentization can solve these problems. Intelligentization is an inevitable trend in the development of container platforms. Alibaba Cloud container services have fully entered the era of intelligence. There are three upgrades:

The first upgrade, intelligent hybrid scheduling, and the new generation of scheduling system Koordinator, helps users improve the overall resource utilization.

The second upgrade, intelligent cost management and container service FinOps suite, helps users realize visible, controllable and optimized cloud costs.

The third upgrade, intelligent operation and maintenance experience, and container service AIOps suite, help users achieve data-driven diagnosis decisions, assist in fault prevention and positioning, and automatic diagnosis can cover more than 90% of problems.

These capability upgrades will further lower the threshold for the use of container technology, make ACK more inclusive and serve a broader customer base.

Internet-based core technology

Heavyweight release 1 | Micro service re-upgrade: new cloud native gateway open source

In the cloud native era, micro-services are facing new demands and technical challenges, especially in terms of performance, high availability and security. Today, Alibaba Cloud has officially opened its cloud native gateway, Higress, which is the industry's first standardized, highly integrated, scalable, and hot-updated cloud native gateway.

Standardization: With the popularity of K8s, K8s Ingress has gradually become the API de facto standard in the cloud native era. It fully supports this standard, and has made significant improvements in service governance (including grayscale, current limitation, preheating, timeout, and retry), leading the evolution direction of the standard.

High-integration: For the first time, Higress integrates the flow gateway, micro-service gateway and security gateway to create a high-integration gateway. It establishes a high-performance and security defense line at the entrance. The back-end supports K8s/Nacos/ECS/Serverless multiple runtime routing, and creates the most powerful gateway implementation.

Easy to extend: Higress provides the richest plug-in extension mechanism to meet customers' flexible routing and security customization requirements, and supports the most comprehensive language extension mechanism; Of course, in order to reduce the threshold for customers to use, dozens of plug-ins are integrated by default, and it is convenient for developers to contribute common capabilities through the plug-in market to generate benign interaction.

Hot update: Because the traditional Nginx update rules require reload, which will lead to link jitter and traffic loss, and cannot tolerate real-time communication, video, and IoT, so the hot update mechanism is used for all the certificates, routes, security rules, and plug-ins of Progress, which takes effect in milliseconds and has no business awareness.

In addition to the open source cloud native gateway, Alibaba Cloud comprehensively upgraded the microservice engine MSE3.0, including three core capabilities:

The first major capability is to register the configuration center. Compared with mainstream open source solutions such as Nacos, the performance is improved by 40%, providing 70+monitoring indicators, providing health detection, and helping customers achieve service autonomy.

The second major capability is micro-service governance, which has precipitated Alibaba's 10+practical experience, helped customers shorten the implementation period of micro-service governance by 30%, improved the efficiency of development and testing by 50%, and eliminated 80% of online risks.

The third major capability is the cloud native gateway. Alibaba Cloud integrates the traffic gateway, micro-service gateway and security gateway, and has also upgraded the architecture, upgrading the instance-level protection to route-level protection, and improving the overall performance by 90% compared with the traditional gateway.

Heavyweight Release II | Observable Re-upgrade: Maximize the value of observable data

In the era of cloud origin, the system architecture is becoming increasingly complex, and improving the observability becomes the only way to reduce complexity. Today, observability has become the standard to measure the level of enterprise IT. Cost governance, business continuity and business growth all require observability technology. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud launched the cloud native observable suite ACOS, from application monitoring to link tracking, to help enterprises achieve cost management, risk management, intelligent operation and maintenance, and ensure the efficient and stable operation of digital businesses.

The three components of Alibaba Cloud's native observable suite, ACOS, also received important upgrades at the cloud habitat conference.

First of all, Prometheus has become the first choice of observation for many enterprises. Prometheus monitoring, as the container observation fact standard, has become the default observation infrastructure for more than 50 cloud products of Alibaba Cloud, and is connected with the APM indicators, eBPF indicators and OpenTelemetry indicators of the application real-time monitoring service ARMS, extending the observation range from specialized containers to the whole stack.

Secondly, as an observation interface, Alibaba Cloud's Grafana service will also usher in a new upgrade of 9.0. The new Prometheus and Loki query statement generators and the enhanced search explore function enable users to obtain stronger data query and analysis capabilities. At the same time, in order to cope with the increasingly rich heterogeneous observable data sources, the Grafana service is integrated with more than 20 observable storage services, such as the log service SLS and Elasticsearch, to help enterprises build a unified observation interface more easily. One-click import/export of self-built instances, automatic data export reports, one-click data backup, recovery, user operation audit and other enterprise features have been further enhanced.

Finally, in order to help enterprises' cloud applications open a multi-dimensional observation perspective. In terms of data collection, the application real-time monitoring service ARMS integrates the OpenTelemetry and Prometheus ecosystem in a comprehensive way. Through the OpenTelemetry supplementary services and customized component burying points, while improving the observation dimension, the manufacturer can be locked. And realize the unified query of multi-source Trace with the help of TraceExplorer.

Heavy release 3 | RocketMQ5.0 comprehensive upgrade: from message service to cloud native event flow platform

Message queue has always been the core component of enterprise Internet architecture. Alibaba built the popular message middleware RocketMQ based on e-commerce scenarios in 2012 and contributed to the Apache community. After more than ten years of polishing, RocketMQ has made many achievements.

The community of Apache RocketMQ is very active, with more than 700 contributors worldwide. More than 75% of enterprises choose to use RocketMQ, and more than 80% of mainstream cloud vendors provide RocketMQ's commercial hosting services; As the initiator and core contributor of RocketMQ, Alibaba Cloud has served 100000 enterprise customers from more than 20 industries, including the Internet, retail and automobile, for more than 10 years; It carries tens of millions of TPSs and trillions of messages.

Application Serverless: leading the next generation of application architecture

With the deepening of enterprises' use of cloud, the ability of cloud is also upgrading. In the past, enterprises used cloud to buy resources, instances, specifications and applications. We have always said that "cloud computing is the same infrastructure as hydropower and coal, but now this has not been fully realized.

Alibaba Cloud has been promoting the upgrading of product forms and research and development methods. It hopes that from providing resources to providing services, this service is the ability to plug and play. Without management and maintenance, enterprises can realize automatic scaling, free operation and maintenance, fully managed platform, and billing by usage, which truly realizes the service and modularization, which is also the direction of cloud product upgrading and evolution.

It can be said that the Serverless Singularity has come. The so-called Singularity is the turning point from stable development to high-speed development, which indicates the beginning of the industry's landing. At present, Alibaba Cloud has more than 20 types of Serverless products, and will promote the comprehensive Serverless core products. Serverless is the best way to realize the cloud's ability to provide services, and also the best paradigm to enable cloud computing infrastructure to be implemented in thousands of industries.

In addition to the change of product form, Serverless also brings about the change of software R&D paradigm. With Alibaba Cloud providing more and more comprehensive Serverless products, many cloud products have become modular, API, and service-oriented. It can be assembled, and applications can be built by dragging and dropping.

Therefore, under the Serverless architecture, the R&D method is upgraded to assembly-type R&D, which can achieve process arrangement, event-driven, and even visualization, which completely subverts the original software R&D method, greatly improves the R&D efficiency, and flexibly responds to business challenges. According to the survey and statistics of authoritative institutions, assembly-type R&D can improve the efficiency of R&D by more than 50% compared with the traditional model.

Comprehensive serverless practice of pumpkin film in 7 days

Cloud native PaaS: CNStack2.0 launched

CNStack is an application-centric cloud native technology center. On the basis of heterogeneous hybrid cloud infrastructure, it provides unified computing power management and optimized scheduling, provides full technology stack support for applications in different scenarios in an open and cloud-based manner, improves users' business innovation ability exponentially, accelerates research and development efficiency, reduces resource marketing and operation and maintenance costs, and ensures business continuity, becoming the best path for enterprise digital transformation.

Since the release of CNStack 1.0 in 2021, it has provided assistance in the process of digital transformation of multiple customers in multiple industries, and won the Cloud Native Technology Innovation Case Award at the Cloud Native Industry Conference in 2022.

Today, the cloud native stack 2.0 is released in a big way. The whole platform is more cohesive and the experience has been greatly improved. It has become the best carrier for enterprise digital transformation and construction of digital applications.

There are three major capabilities to upgrade:

First, unified computing power support. Support the mixed management of CPU/GPU computing power of different manufacturers and different architectures, and support the mixed scheduling of multiple loads of container virtual machines.

Second, one-stop application management. The application development, testing, operation and maintenance are managed in a one-stop manner throughout the life cycle, and the container service, distributed application, cloud edge, and DevOps are covered in full scenarios.

Third, rich and easy-to-use capability centers. Rich cloud components provide complete technology stack support for business innovation. The capability center components have been verified in scale, and the operation, maintenance and stability are guaranteed. The cloud native stack allows enterprises to focus on their own business and accelerate the realization of business objectives without technical constraints.

In the future, Alibaba Cloud will continue to lead the standard in the cloud native field, continue to make breakthroughs, and promote the rapid development of the field and industry.