Serverless application life cycle management platform

With the continuous popularization and application of the Serverless architecture, issues such as the lack of a Serverless tool chain system, complex update/deployment processes, fragmented resources, and difficult management have also emerged. Although the open source of the Serverless Devs developer tool in November 2020 has to some extent solved some of the problems caused by the lack of a tool chain system, developers still face challenges in their practical work, focusing on the application, conducting overall operation and maintenance operations on the Serverless architecture, and conducting overall resource management behavior. Therefore, it is particularly important to build an application management platform that can help developers play a role in the entire lifecycle of Serverless applications.

On May 9, 2022, after 10 months of polishing and testing, the Serverless Application Center was officially launched.

This is the Serverless application platform

The Serverless Application Center is an Alibaba Cloud Serverless application lifecycle management platform. With the Serverless Application Center, users can quickly deploy and manage applications without additional cloning, building, packaging, and publishing operations before deploying them. The Serverless Application Center helps users quickly connect cloud upstream and downstream services, easily precipitating best practices.

Serverless Application Center opening address: https://fcnext.console.aliyun.com/applications/

The release of the Serverless Application Center, on the one hand, hopes to further achieve and improve the full lifecycle management capabilities of Serverless applications through the linkage with the Serverless Devs tool chain. On the other hand, it also hopes that the Serverless Application Center can help developers experience the Serverless architecture more quickly, make it easier to get started and use the Serverless architecture, and manage Serverless applications more scientifically and intuitively. At the same time, the Serverless Application Center will be an attempt to "Serverless On Serverless", not only providing developers with more support and convenience as a new capability, but also becoming a best practice that supports massive users to use the Serverless architecture and deploy massive Serverless applications based on the Serverless architecture.

The goal of the Serverless Application Center

The Serverless Application Center, as a serverless application lifecycle management platform, carries several important responsibilities to a certain extent:

• Enable developers to experience and get started with Serverless applications through whitescreen operations that are simpler, more convenient, and faster;

• Enable Serverless applications to develop, create, update, operate, maintain, and iterate in a more scientific, secure, and stable way;

• Aggregating and managing traditional resources in an application dimension allows developers to truly focus on the business and applications rather than being scattered resources on different product pages;

Therefore, the initial goal of the Serverless Application Center has become simpler and purer: ease of use and ease of use.

Start the journey of Serverless in one step

The Serverless Application Center will greatly reduce the user's hands-on complexity in the OnBoarding process of Serverless applications. Through white-screen operations, developers can quickly create relatively complex application cases through simple configuration, and these application cases will serve as an important reference for secondary development, learning, and experience.

Please click the link here to view the video:

https://others-file-system.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/appstore/202204102343.mp4

As shown in the video, users only need to find the appropriate application on the application page and click the Create button to quickly create the application. After the application is created, there will be relevant test domain names available for experience.

Currently, the application center has provided a rapid experience of over 20 popular applications in nearly 5 categories, including mall cases, audio and video processing, and Web frameworks, whether it is the one-click deployment of traditional frameworks such as Django, Express, Flask, and SpringBoot, or the rapid creation and use of blogs and content management systems such as Zblog and Wordpress, or the backup source of CDN, the one-click creation of online disks/cloud desktops The extremely fast experience of video transcoding/slicing/compression, and the Serverless Application Center can help developers start their journey to Serverless in one step.

1 to n combined with tools

In addition to quickly creating template applications, developers can also choose to create projects through code repositories such as Github.

Please click the link here to view the video:

https://others-file-system.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/appstore/202204102343%281%29.mp4

As shown in the video, when a developer chooses to create a project through the Github code repository, the Serverless Application Center not only creates the application itself, but also places the application code in the specified code repository, allowing developers to conduct secondary development of the project based on the case/template.

It is worth mentioning that:

• All applications created based on the Serverless Application Center are applications that comply with the Serverless Devs specification, that is, developers can use the Serverless Devs developer tool to develop, debug, deploy, and other related operations on the application;

For example, for applications where the developer Clone is placed in a designated repository, development and multimodal debugging (local debugging, end-to-end cloud debugging, cloud debugging, etc.) can be performed locally. After completion, the business can be updated by pushing the code to the code repository or creating a Release.

• The Serverless Application Center can not only quickly create template applications for reference and secondary development through case applications, but also directly import existing applications that meet the Serverless Devs specification, host existing applications to the Application Center, and experience the relevant functions of the Serverless Application Center.

Resource management based on application dimensions

As we all know, Serverless applications often involve many products, such as database resources, messaging middleware resources, object storage, log services, and other resources. In other words, a complete Serverless application is usually an organic combination of FaaS products and many BaaS products. Therefore, users of Serverless often face the problem of managing many resources, However, these managed resources are often located on different product pages, which brings great inconvenience and complexity to the later management, operation, and maintenance.

As shown in the following figure, the Serverless Application Center will display and manage resources based on application dimensions:

Through the creation and update of application dimensions, as well as the display and management of resources in application dimensions, the Serverless Application Center further abstracts the originally scattered resources, enabling developers to more clearly and intuitively operate, maintain, and manage their own applications through application dimensions.

realization

"It is possible to serve more developers by daring to try yourself. Although there are already a large number of businesses implemented using the Serverless architecture within Alibaba, it is still not" typical "in our eyes. How to" Serverless On Serverless ", so that the Serverless architecture can not only have a large number of internal applications to serve other industries/businesses, but also create more value for the team itself,", As a result, the Serverless Application Center has become a cloud native application that was born in the Serverless architecture and grew up in the Serverless architecture.

The Serverless Application Center, based on the extreme flexibility characteristics of the Serverless architecture itself, has built a highly available, cost-effective, and highly available backend service through the organic combination of FaaS products and BaaS products with minimal time and cost.

Through HTTP triggers (API gateways), the basic business function will receive requests initiated by users on the client side, as well as WebSockets notifications sent from code warehouses such as Github, and perform basic processing on these information (including but not limited to permission authentication, identity authentication, and other related operations). Then, through message middleware (some events do not pass through message middleware), different events will be sent to different business functions, "And conduct business processing. If there are deployment related events such as creation and update, they will be further distributed to the deployment function for business deployment. Throughout the entire process, metadata, cached data, log information, and so on will be continuously stored in the corresponding BaaS product through the Proxy module.".

During the entire project construction process, business students only need to design the overall architecture, and develop and deploy relevant business functions. The operation and maintenance of BaaS products in the project, as well as the flexibility of FaaS products, are all implemented and responsible by the platform. On the one hand, it can enable development students to devote more energy to more valuable business logic, and on the other hand, it can greatly improve the research and development efficiency of the business, Accelerate the efficiency of business innovation iterations and shorten the project launch cycle.

Of course, we will share in more detail about how to implement the "Serverless On Serverless" section of the Serverless Application Center in future technical sharing and articles.

Roadmap

Although the Serverless Application Center has released a beta version, there are still certain shortcomings. Currently, relevant research and development students are also continuously improving and optimizing. Of course, we still have many functions to be updated and further improved, including but not limited to:

• Application creation:

• Support for more code repositories:

• Gitee

• Gitlab

• Codeup

• Support for more triggering schemes:

• Github Action triggered

• Cloud effect triggering

• Jenkins trigger

• Application management:

• Application deletion capability

• Application dimension monitoring and alarm capabilities

• Resource editing capabilities for application dimensions

• Online application editing capabilities

• Serverless Devs developer tool and application center linkage capability