Serverless application engine SAE comprehensive upgrade

The digitization of enterprises is developing faster and faster with the popularization of the Internet, and the technical architecture has undergone several changes. In particular, in the online business sector, there have been progressive changes from the initial single application to distributed applications to cloud native applications. However, while bringing convenience, it also brings a certain degree of complexity to enterprises: the threshold for new technologies to become available is high, and containers and microservices are two typical roadblocks. Even after microservice and containerization, enterprises still need to focus on server configuration, operation and maintenance, and capacity evaluation. They also face challenges of high performance and stability, and cannot enjoy the maximum value brought by the cloud. With its natural technological advantages, the Serverless application engine SAE has helped thousands of enterprises transform their container and microservice technologies. Recently, SAE has not only further provided a full set of microservice capabilities, but also provided new, more efficient, cost-effective, and smooth migration solutions for traditional job and PHP users.

The Serverless application engine SAE is a fully hosted, O&M free, and highly resilient general-purpose PaaS platform. Support full hosting of open source microservices/open source timed task frameworks/Web applications, and provide open source enhancements&enterprise level features. It can be said that SAE covers the complete scenario of cloud application, and is the best choice for cloud application.

Three major new features extend the new boundaries of Serverless

Serverless Job: New Transformation of Traditional Tasks

SAE Job, as a new type of load in SAE, focuses on task scenarios. According to business data processing requirements, it can quickly create a large number of computing tasks in a short time, and quickly release computing resources after the task is completed. It has features such as stand-alone, broadcast, parallel computing, and sharded operation, as well as timing, automatic retry for failures, and monitoring and alarm features, providing a fully managed, O&M free user experience.

Unlike traditional task frameworks, SAE Jobs are more convenient to use (non intrusive to code), more economical (resources are released immediately after the task runs), more stable (independent of online business, and task failures can be automatically retried), more transparent (visual monitoring and alarm), and more reassuring (no need to pay attention to underlying resources). More importantly, SAE Jobs can deeply integrate the micro service ecosystem and be compatible with open source K8s.

The main scenarios of SAE Jobs include scheduled tasks, data batch processing, asynchronous execution, and offline computing. At the same time, it supports zero transformation and migration of traditional framework XXL Jobs, micro service ecological integration, and improves the CI/CD process with the help of image building capabilities.

Compared to traditional distributed task frameworks, SAE Job provides three core values:

• Complete and fully hosted: SAE Job uses a one-stop, fully hosted management interface, with its mission lifecycle, observable, and other functions out of the box, allowing users to use SAE with low mental burden and zero learning costs.

• Single sided operation and maintenance: SAE Jobs shield underlying resources. Users only need to focus on the core business logic development of the task, without worrying about cluster availability, capacity, performance, and other issues.

• High resource utilization: The SAE Job product model uses on-demand, pay-as-you-go, and is only charged when tasks perform business logic, while there is no cost for the rest of the time, greatly saving resource costs.

SAE embraces the Terraform ecosystem and is more developer friendly

As the preferred cloud based tool for major customers at home and abroad, Terraform's value lies in its infrastructure, namely, code, which can automatically configure infrastructure, helping enterprises achieve faster, lower risk, and lower cost development, deployment, and expansion of cloud applications. Greatly improve the efficiency of automated operation and maintenance. After SAE accesses Terraform, developers do not need to understand each API, provide declarative IaC, operate SAE resources more securely, and interface with CICD/GitOps more easily. More importantly, it provides resource orchestration capabilities, enabling the one-click deployment of SAE and dependent cloud resources, greatly improving the efficiency of site building from 0 to 1. Currently, multiple Internet customers are already using it in production environments.

PHP one-stop application full hosting

When it comes to PHP O&M, everyone is familiar with various commercial server O&M panels. However, these panels only support stand-alone operation and maintenance, lack application side monitoring and second level automatic elasticity capabilities, and do not support incremental static file updates. They are not friendly to larger PHP applications.

In response to the above pain points, SAE provides a fully hosted PHP application service that is O&M free, highly elastic, and seamlessly integrated with APM monitoring. In terms of frameworks, it supports popular frameworks such as larravel, ThinkPHP, Swoole, and Wordpress. In terms of operating environment, online application architecture LNMP is supported, and PHP-FPM+Nginx is provided by default. Docker image and PHP zip package deployment are supported, greatly reducing the threshold for users to use. The PHP application hosting feature matrix is quite rich, including upload and download of development and debugging classes, built-in Xdebug, and elastic scaling of runtime classes, APM capabilities, and independent management of static files and directories through NAS and OSS. Based on these capabilities, PHP supports several typical usage scenarios, such as static site deployment, remote debugging, multi site deployment, and application migration of the stock ECS/server operation and maintenance panel.

SAE+MSE=Best Practices for Serverless Microservices

Serverless microservice=CI/CD pipeline+microservice framework (including registry and microservice governance framework)+Kubernetes/container+cloud operation and maintenance (including call chain, logs, alerts, performance monitoring, etc.)+elastic scaling service+traffic governance service.

The Serverless application engine SAE is deeply integrated with the microservice engine MSE, which commercializes the best practices of microservices that have been tested by Alibaba for more than ten years and are available out of the box. Based on the open source Spring Cloud/Dubo, it provides more powerful micro service governance capabilities.

White screen PaaS: reduces the user's threshold for use, and its interaction meets the expectations of most developers for PaaS. In addition, it has rich integration capabilities such as CLI, plug-ins, and OpenAPI. This PaaS is actually a base station that supports the lifecycle management, grayscale, and containerization transformation of microservice applications. Without such a base station, users may face a large number of black screen operating commands or APIs, which is extremely complex to use; In addition, as an enterprise oriented product, SAE also provides many enterprise level features, such as namespace isolation, fine grained permission control, and so on.

Front and rear full link grayscale: This is the most common type of requirement in enterprise production processes. It refers to specifying cookies, headers, and even the company's internal IP address, grayscale to the new version of the instance. SAE connects HTTP requests, gateways, consumers, and providers, and performs related routing on the agent according to rules, allowing users to achieve full link grayscale only through some whitescreen configuration.

End Cloud Joint Debugging: Using Cloud Tookit plug-ins to achieve end cloud joint debugging, the number of applications under the microservice architecture will be much larger than that of a single entity, so local development and debugging can be very problematic. With the help of IDEA provided by Cloud Tookit and plug-ins from mainstream IDEs such as Eclipse, developers can achieve local joint debugging with the cloud test environment by simply starting a consumer or provider, Greatly reduce the threshold of microservices in the development stage;

Observability: Under the microservice architecture, there are a large number of applications and it is difficult to locate problems. Observability is essential. SAE, in combination with Alibaba Cloud's ARMS, cloud monitoring, SLS, Prometheus, and other products, provides relatively complete solutions in metrics, Tracing, Logging, and other aspects, effectively addressing developers' pain points in observable aspects, including basic monitoring, call chain, real-time logging, and events.