Some reflections on the enterprise value of serverless application architecture

Preface

For the enterprise side, the core concern is how to get more revenue and higher profits, or, more generally, how to make more money; Enterprises make money mainly by selling enterprise services. When users buy more enterprise services, enterprises make more money; The lower the cost of selling enterprise services, the higher the profit income of enterprises. To sum up, the most desirable thing for enterprises is that their enterprise service can be continuously improved in terms of efficiency, cost and experience. Because the enterprise service experience is well done, customers who buy it will naturally increase; Companies with high enterprise service efficiency will provide more enterprise services in the same unit time; As the cost of enterprise services decreases, the profit and revenue of individual enterprise services will increase.

After defining the value of enterprise services, we understand that cost, efficiency and experience are the key to revenue and profit growth.

What is the Serverless architecture?

We can simply understand that the computing, storage, network, database, middleware services needed in the construction of applications have achieved Serverless, and each system has achieved the most refined use of cloud, and the architecture system has achieved the maximum value in terms of security, high availability, ability to handle high concurrency, and scalability. Let me give you a practical example: the Websocket cluster scenario implemented by the Serverless architecture - bullet screen application to explain it in more detail.

The project comprehensively uses the whole components of computing, storage, network, database and middleware, and is built according to enterprise standards. It also has the capabilities of security, high performance, stability and scalability, and realizes the modern access architecture idea of cloud, edge and end.

The websocket.serverless-developer.com primary domain name is managed through the global accelerated DCDN. The request from the primary domain will be forwarded to the ER program in the edge node. The ER program will cache and dynamically and statically split, and the dynamic resources will be forwarded to the Alibaba Cloud functional computing gateway. The function calculates the gateway elastic start instance, processes the business logic, and accesses the MNS message middleware and tablestore database storage. The static resources are cached to the maximum extent, and returned to the source from the OSS object storage when necessary. DCDN can perform edge protection to prevent DDOS attacks, and add Https security certificate for encrypted transmission of websites. The ER program of the edge node is serverless start and stop, which can achieve millisecond response time. At the same time, the function calculation will be flexible for more complex business computing power. When the number of visits is large, the instance will be expanded, and if there is no access data, it will be released to 0.

Barrage.websocket.serverless-developer.com provides websocket service separately, and DCDN automatically returns to the source to function calculation, because its own websocket protocol cannot be forwarded by edge applications.

It is worth mentioning that as a front-end programmer, the author has almost no professional knowledge of high availability, high concurrency, security and other aspects, but this does not prevent me from building these capabilities into my own applications. For more detailed introduction, please refer to "Everyone is a Serverless architect - websocket cluster practice" [1]

Advantages of Serverless architecture in enterprise digital transformation

Now we can reach a basic consensus that we expect to optimize the cost, efficiency and user experience of enterprise services through the digital transformation of enterprises. But let's not discuss the changes that enterprises need to make in the organizational culture for the time being, just look at digital management tools, specifically business software. The basic architecture of building software is slowly changing. From IDC to container cluster, today K8s has helped enterprises improve the operation and maintenance experience, efficiency and cost at the level of basic software architecture. The next stage of evolution is Serverless. It needs to be clear here that what we are looking for is the best balance of efficiency, cost and experience as a whole, not the absolute value of a single item, because there is a mutually exclusive phenomenon among the three. For example, the premise of improving your experience may be to increase costs and efficiency, while reducing costs or improving efficiency itself may also affect the experience. We expect that the Serverless architecture can achieve a better balance among the three in the applicable fields compared with container cluster management.

cost

From the perspective of computing resource cost: Serverless has more fine-grained computing abstraction than containerization. You can pay as you go, which greatly saves the waste of computing resources.

Development cost: With the increase of distributed topology nodes, the cost of development, operation and maintenance will increase. In addition, the lack of talents related to the new application architecture in the market will also affect the application of the Serverless architecture. However, it is worth noting that the Serverless developer tools are improving day by day, and the development paradigm of Serverless applications will be more clear. There will be more and more practice cases of Serverless application architecture on the market, and I believe that the development cost will be compensated soon.

efficiency

1. Iterative update efficiency of digital tools

Serverless architecture is essentially a refined cloud architecture. The network, computing, storage, database, middleware, etc. in the traditional server are all separately divided, and each one only focuses on its own best part. For example, the network provided by the edge node can reduce the user's access delay and traffic charges, the Serverless computing service provides extreme flexibility, the storage provides the possibility of unlimited capacity, the database has high performance read and write separation, and the middleware can provide the application's high concurrent processing ability. In summary, the component system in the Serverless architecture solves various complex IT problems beyond the application logic, This allows developers not to care about things other than business development, which can greatly improve the efficiency of iterative updating of digital tools.

In combination with modern development engineering systems such as DevOps and AIOps, Serverless can further improve development efficiency.

2. Enterprise service efficiency improved by digital tools

In the future, enterprises will increasingly rely on enterprise-level digital service capabilities, including performance, high availability, high concurrency, and security. However, it is often difficult for business-oriented R&D teams to deal with these non-business and complex software engineering problems. The application architecture of Serverless is essentially a kind of assembly paradigm. Its components are highly abstracted technical solutions with enterprise-level capabilities built by professional teams over several years. Therefore, for business research and development, it is not necessary to grasp the underlying details of its technology, just to be able to use it to serve the business itself. The software applications assembled in this way naturally have enterprise-level capabilities.

Assembled R&D of Serverless architecture

User experience

Here, we mainly index the service experience, and more specifically, the use experience of software applications involved in enterprise business. For example, the software function itself or the ease of use of the software. Software functions are not only related to the abstract definition of business, but also related to the implementation of technical teams. The rich atomization capabilities enable the Serverless architecture to help enterprises bridge the technology gap and have natural advantages in building more complex digital service software.

Taking the above webcookie cluster as an example, the relevant businesses of the enterprise launch the bullet screen application. However, due to the limited technical implementation, it is impossible to achieve large-scale and high concurrency implementation, which will inevitably affect users who want to use this service. However, with the Serverless architecture, the high availability architecture can be assembled to achieve high availability architecture, so even if the company does not have experts in the high availability and high concurrency field, it can also achieve the business demands of high performance and high concurrency.

In addition, thanks to the full link expansion of Serverless, developers can participate in performance optimization at the network level. Using the edge serverless computing power, we can do edge rendering and edge caching, so that the time for digital services to reach users is shorter, and the access experience of digital services is improved.