"Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) components are separated from clusters, which ensures that the clusters are not affected when the ASM components are updated. The ASM instances and the Kubernetes clusters are decoupled in lifecycle management. In ASM, multiple ingress gateways can be customized at a time with ease by using one custom resource definition (CRD). ASM also increases the utilization of Kubernetes clusters."

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Container Service for Kubernetes - ACKAlibaba Cloud Service Mesh - ASM
01

About Huadiao


Shanghai Huadiao Technology Co., Ltd. is an innovative technology company founded by several veterans in the Internet industry and a group of young entrepreneurs. The company focuses on the research and development (R&D) of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem based on the Internet and intelligent hardware. The company aims to provide comprehensive, all-in-one, and secure charging solutions for users across a range of markets, including communities, public places, and municipal services. Using the intelligent charging piles as stepping stones, the company builds community shopping malls for residential quarters in which the charging piles are deployed. This fosters an intelligent community ecosystem that facilitates "affordable shopping and smart living" for residents within 200 meters.
02

Challenge


Propelled by rapid business development, the company needs to improve its digital competitiveness and extend its value chain. The customer needs to implement canary releases and implement visualization and management of microservice access traffic. The customer routes business traffic and publishes business applications by community, and has legacy business code. The customer needs to publish different versions of business applications to hundreds of communities. The iteration and publishing process is complex. At the same time, the customer wants to containerize legacy systems that are run on VMs and manage the systems in service meshes. A new business process R&D system needs to be constructed in the cloud, and cloud-native optimization and transformation must be performed by using container technology. This way, the customer can resolve issues such as unstable system during business application deployment, excessive manual intervention required during rollout, and inability to perform upgrades in a stable way.
03

Why Alibaba Cloud


Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) components are separated from clusters, which ensures that the clusters are not affected when the ASM components are updated. The ASM instances and the Kubernetes clusters are decoupled in lifecycle management. In ASM, multiple ingress gateways can be customized at a time with ease by using one CRD. ASM also increases the utilization of Kubernetes clusters. ASM is more stable and trustworthy than open source products. It helps achieve more stable service operation and saves maintenance resources. The canary release capability enables progressive releases to gradually enlarge the scope of application of new versions. This way, the impact of change remains within a manageable scope. The circuit breaking mechanism prevents the faults in a single application from spreading in the microservice system. This reduces the impact of the faults and improves the robustness of the microservice system. In addition, ASM supports legacy systems, which lessens the complexity of containerization and ensures overall service availability. The Alibaba Cloud support team is very dedicated and supportive, and provides quick responses even during holidays.
04

Architecture


1. Managed control plane: ASM is highly available, does not require O&M investments, and provides optimal security settings. Development engineers can focus on business applications instead of infrastructure O&M. In addition, development engineers can create ASM instances in a few clicks without complex configuration. 2. Powerful fine-grained application traffic management policies and canary release: ASM provides fine-grained traffic routing policies and supports diverse DevOps practices such as canary release, circuit breaking, and fault injection. ASM allows engineers to create ingress gateways in a few clicks and customize multiple ingress gateways at a time. 3. High security and availability: ASM guarantees service security and high availability, allowing the engineers to focus on business requirements. The Secret Discovery Service (SDS) feature can be enabled to expose secure HTTPS services and dynamically load certificates for service gateways, thereby improving the security of service gateways. ASM implements authorization based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) in a progressive manner and provides easy-to-use Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and JSON Web Token (JWT) features. 4. Pain-free migration of non-containerized applications: ASM provides mesh capabilities for legacy systems that are run on VMs. This allows the customer to migrate legacy systems to containers in a pain-free manner.
05

Looking Forward


Huadiao focuses on the R&D of an IoT ecosystem based on the Internet and intelligent hardware. The company aims to provide comprehensive, all-in-one, and secure charging solutions for users across a range of markets, including communities, public places, and municipal services.