Cloud native technology activates a new paradigm of application construction

On August 11, the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Apsaras Technology Summit was held in Shenzhen. At the meeting, Alibaba Cloud proposed three major paradigms for cloud native activation application construction and released the latest products and solutions. Based on the distributed cloud container platform ACK One, realize the consistent management of multi-region distributed systems; Release the ACK FinOps solution to enable enterprises to realize digital cost management and optimize the original cloud generation. At the same time, it was announced at the summit that RocketMQ5.0, a message queue, was fully commercialized to help enterprises build a stable message system with the advantages of better cost, super-scale flexibility, lightweight and easy integration, and full-link observability.

Ding Yu, a researcher at Alibaba and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform, delivered a speech at the main forum. The following is based on the content of the speech.

Ding Yu at the Summit

Today, enterprise application construction still faces great challenges. How can resources be used as needed to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase? How to fully ensure business stability and continuity under the complex system architecture, and how to achieve application agility and business intelligence? And, very importantly, how to ensure the credibility and security of the system? Enterprises urgently need to fully exploit the technological dividend of cloud computing, help business development and create more business value. Cloud native can activate the application construction paradigm to solve the challenges faced by enterprises in the new era.

Fully containerized. Containers bring standardization of operation and maintenance. Today, containers have become a new interface for cloud computing and enterprise interaction, and have improved flexibility and scalability, helping enterprises cope with the rigid need to reduce costs and increase efficiency. At the same time, we also see a trend of full load containerization. Today's containerization is not only about micro-services, but also about new applications such as AI and big data, which makes container deployment ubiquitous.

Internet-based core technology. Internet-based can support the agile iteration of business, and at the same time build an elastic architecture, so that applications can cope with the peak of traffic in a leisurely manner, and achieve high availability, high reliability, and ensure business continuity.

Apply Serverless. Serverless has greatly improved the efficiency of enterprise development, operation and maintenance. And because of full hosting, it brings more extreme flexibility, covering all scenarios, and making it easier to apply to the cloud.

IDC predicts that by 2024, the proportion of new production-level cloud native applications in new applications will increase from 10% in 2020 to 60% due to the adoption of technologies such as microservices, containers, dynamic orchestration and DevOps.

What cloud native products and solutions does Alibaba Cloud provide to build new paradigms for the three major applications?

First, let's look at container services. Since the release of Alibaba Cloud container products 7 years ago, it has developed into a new interface for enterprise customers to interact with Alibaba Cloud's self-developed Feitian Cloud operating system. Compared with the open source solution, Alibaba Cloud container service has achieved a 20% improvement in the performance of compute-intensive applications, a 50% reduction in container network latency, a 100% improvement in the utilization of heterogeneous resources, and full link visibility. At present, the container service ACK has been fully upgraded to ACK Anywhere, providing a unified container infrastructure capability wherever the enterprise needs the cloud.

Distributed cloud container platform ACK One: consistent management of multi-region distributed systems

It is predicted that by 2025, 50% of large enterprises will promote business innovation through distributed cloud. To this end, Alibaba Cloud has launched the enterprise-level multi-region/multi-cluster container management platform ACK One, which greatly simplifies the cluster management interface and provides consistent management, delivery, and operation and maintenance experience. Whether based on public cloud, private cloud, own IDC or edge node, users can conduct unified container cluster management, resource scheduling, data disaster tolerance and application delivery through ACK One.

As a leading cancer precision medical company in China, Oceanson supports the processing of cancer gene detection data based on ACK container technology, making full use of the flexibility of the cloud. The daily processing capacity has increased by 10 times in the past three years, and the cost of single sample processing is 60% lower than that of the cloud.

Vivo is a well-known smartphone manufacturer in China. Its AI computing platform, through ACK One, can meet the demand for computing power in a timely manner and greatly shorten the resource delivery cycle from several months to days. For temporary short-term use of computing power requirements, using public cloud resources through hybrid cloud can reduce costs by more than 90%.

ACK cloud native AI suite: heterogeneous computing power, speed up efficiency

The goal of cloud native AI is to use cloud native technology and ecology to help users systematically, conveniently and efficiently build AI engineering platforms that meet their needs, and open the pipeline of AI capability production. Therefore, Alibaba Cloud has created the ACK cloud native AI suite, which can improve the utilization of computing resources when running AI tasks and speed up task execution. It is especially suitable for heterogeneous computing and deep learning scenarios. It can speed up AI data access by 35%, speed up distributed training by 20%, and improve GPU resource utilization by 100%.

Any door (social product soul) is based on Alibaba Cloud ACK cloud native AI suite, builds an AI platform from 0 to 1, unifies the operation and maintenance, flexibility, and scheduling of heterogeneous resources, and efficiently manages AI development, training, and reasoning tasks. The model iteration efficiency is improved by 2 to 5 times, GPU utilization is increased by 44%, and cost savings are about 52%.

Minmo Zhixing is an AI company dedicated to automatic driving. Its AI platform is based on the cloud native AI suite Fluid and EMR JindoFS for data set cache acceleration, effectively solving the performance bottleneck of the storage and computing separation architecture, significantly improving the efficiency of training and reasoning on the cloud, and the maximum training speed can be increased by about 300%. The efficiency of multi-machine and multi-card training was improved by 70%, and the overall TCO was reduced by 20%.

ACK FinOps solution: digital cost management, cloud generation cost optimization

With the deepening of enterprises' use of cloud, enterprises are facing new problems of cloud cost management difficulties. Cloud cost optimization capability has become the primary demand of enterprises' use of cloud management. Alibaba Cloud combines the practice of industry-finance integration and the concept of FinOps, and applies artificial intelligence technology to provide cloud cost optimization tools. It launched the ACK FinOps solution to help enterprises quickly realize the financial operation and management of full-link enterprises on the cloud. It is easy to do pre-budget preparation, pre-warning and prediction of key indicators in the event, post-multi-dimensional cost analysis and optimization suggestions.

In May this year, the ICT Academy released the standard of "Trusted Cloud • Cloud Cost Optimization Tool Capability" and the first batch of evaluation results. With its product capability of cost management on the cloud, Alibaba Cloud has passed all 33 capability indicators with full marks, becoming the first cloud service provider in China to pass the cloud cost optimization standard of the ICT Academy.

TCL is the representative of the domestic intelligent manufacturing industry. Through the cloud native IT cost management scheme, it is easy to realize the cost sharing of departments and teams. Through the optimization strategies of automatic elastic scaling, intelligent resource portrait recommendation, application mixing and overselling, TCL has achieved the "strategic frequency" of technology, business and financial teams, and the Group has saved 30% of IT cost investment throughout the year.

As a leader in the domestic Internet finance industry, China Insurance, while taking into account the stability of the architecture, resource cost efficiency, and data security, has shortened the corporate IT cost governance cycle from quarter to day, and reduced the resource idle rate from 30% to less than 10% through the idle resource patrol, tenant level fee sharing, flexibility, and hybrid methods provided by the cloud native IT cost governance scheme.

Observable suite ACOS: ensure efficient operation of digital business

Next, let's look at Internet middleware. Cloud native not only reshapes the enterprise IT architecture, but also changes the operation and maintenance system and process. The concept of "observable" came into being and has become an important standard to measure the level of enterprise IT governance. From problem location and risk identification to cost management, business continuity governance and even business growth, all rely on observable technologies and data.

Alibaba Cloud Observable Suite ACOS forms an observable data layer of index storage analysis, link storage analysis, and heterogeneous data source integration around the Prometheus service, Grafana service, and link tracking service. At the same time, it provides data display, alarm, and data exploration capabilities through standard PromQL and SQL.

Changjitong is a small and micro enterprise finance and management company under UFIDA. Based on Alibaba Cloud observable suite, the fault location time is reduced by 50% and the operation and maintenance workload is reduced by 30%; With ACOS, the number of failures is reduced by 30%, the average failure response time is reduced from 3 hours to 30 minutes, and the user satisfaction is increased by 15%.

Message queue RocketMQ5.0 officially commercialized

Today, the message queue RocketMQ5.0 is officially commercialized. This upgrade will reduce the price by 50% compared with the previous generation. The commercial version of RocketMQ 5.0 provides a new generation of sales instances. First of all, in terms of super scale flexibility, it can achieve 0 to 1 million TPS super scale scaling; Secondly, in terms of observability, it supports full link call chain integration and customized monitoring index integration; Finally, in terms of integration, it fully supports native Java/C++/C #/Go SDK, which is more stable.

Finally, apply serverless.

Serverless has become the core technology of cloud computing since its development. The mainstream scenarios are solving problems through Serverless. Alibaba Cloud has provided a complete tool chain, enabling enterprises to build applications on the cloud more easily through Serverless architecture, and fully enjoy the dividends of Serverless.

With the popularization and use of the Serverless architecture, the lack of the Serverless tool chain system, the complex update/deployment process, the scattered resources and the difficulty of governance are also exposed. Alibaba Cloud launched the Serverless application center: massive scenario-based templates, which make the whole life cycle management of Serverless applications easier. Through the Serverless application center, users can quickly deploy and manage applications without additional cloning, building, packaging and publishing operations before deploying applications, helping users quickly link upstream and downstream services on the cloud, and easily precipitate best practices.

In the future, we hope that more enterprises will activate the enterprise application construction paradigm through cloud native product technology, fully release productivity, and realize digital innovation and upgrading.