Microservices Engine (MSE) is an O&M-free and highly available engine service. MSE provides three modules: Microservices Registry, Cloud-native Gateway, and Microservices Governance. Microservices Registry provides fully managed instances that can serve as registries and configuration centers. Microservices Governance provides open source microservices governance capabilities, without requiring you to modify code and configurations. MSE can be used in the big data and microservices fields to help you accelerate business integration and reduce modification costs.
Microservices Registry
Microservices Registry provides features such as microservice registration and discovery, configuration management, and distributed data management. Microservices Registry supports three types of engines: Nacos, ZooKeeper, and Eureka. Microservices Registry is suitable for the following business scenarios:
Service registration and discovery
Microservice applications are increasingly used along with the rapid development of cloud computing. MSE provides an O&M-free, highly available, and stable registry for microservice applications that are developed based on the Spring Cloud or Dubbo framework.
Consistent coordination of distributed applications (support for non-microservices scenarios)
MSE ZooKeeper provides a series of distributed coordination solutions, such as distributed locks and distributed queues, to help you build a high-availability distributed application system. If you use big data components such as Hadoop, HBase, Kafka, and Flink, ZooKeeper instances that are provided by MSE are used for the high availability (HA) solution by default.
Recommended service integrations
Microservices Governance
Enhanced stability of microservice application releases and improved development efficiency
When you release a microservice application, you can use Microservices Governance provided by MSE. Microservices Governance delivers the following benefits for your applications without requiring you to modify code and configurations:
Elimination of risks during application releases
Microservices Governance provides features to completely eliminate the risks that may occur during application releases. The features include configuration management, graceful start and shutdown, and end-to-end canary release. For more information, see Implement graceful start and shutdown of microservice applications by using MSE.
Elimination of risks that are caused by occasional issues
Microservices Governance provides capabilities to effectively perform throttling, load balancing, fault isolation, and degradation when traffic surges or related services fail in some scenarios. The capabilities include throttling, degradation, circuit breaking, and isolation.
Agile development of microservices at low costs
Microservices Governance allows you to logically isolate multiple development environments from each other, without generating extra costs for adding physical machines. This helps resolve environment preemption and conflict issues and implement agile development.
Recommended service integrations
We recommend that you integrate MSE with Elastic Compute Service (ECS), ApsaraDB RDS, Object Storage Service (OSS), and Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).
Cloud-native Gateway
Integration of traffic gateways and microservices gateways to reduce resource consumption
Traffic gateways such as NIGNX gateways provide global policies that are irrelevant to backend business applications. The global policies include the policies that are related to HTTPS certificate offloading, web application firewalls, and global traffic monitoring. Microservices gateways such as Spring Cloud Gateway provide policies that are tightly coupled with your business. Each policy is specific to a business field such as microservices governance or identity authentication. Cloud-native gateways of MSE integrate traffic gateways with microservices gateways. This integration reduces resource consumption by half and allows you to use and maintain gateways at a lower cost.
In the traditional gateway mode, traffic gateways are used to schedule north-south traffic and provide security protection, and microservices gateways are used to schedule east-west traffic and implement microservices governance. In the next-generation gateway mode, cloud-native gateways are used to schedule both east-west traffic and north-south traffic, provide security protection, and implement microservices governance. The following figure shows the deployment architecture in the traditional gateway mode and the deployment architecture in the next-generation gateway mode.
Various authentication capabilities to reduce secure access costs
Authentication is an essential feature of gateways. Cloud-native gateways of MSE provide JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication and OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication based on OAuth 2.0. Cloud-native gateways also support Alibaba Cloud Identity as a Service (IDaaS) authentication. IDaaS authentication helps you implement third-party sign-up. Third parties include Alipay, Taobao, and Tmall. Cloud-native gateways extend authentication capabilities by using plug-ins. This helps you reduce secure access costs.
Cloud-native gateways are used to schedule both east-west traffic and north-south traffic, provide security protection, and implement microservices governance. The following figure shows how a cloud-native gateway implements the authentication feature.
Recommended service integrations
We recommend that you integrate Cloud-native Gateway with ApsaraDB RDS, OSS, and ACK.
Task Scheduling
Various types of jobs to meet scheduling requirements in different scenarios
Alibaba Cloud SchedulerX provides various types of jobs that are based on different programming languages for time-based scheduling and workflow scheduling. The job types include Java job, script job, Go job, DataWorks job, Spring job, HTTP job, and Kubernetes job. For more information, see Job Types.
Visual workflow orchestration for simple job dependency management
Alibaba Cloud SchedulerX allows you to configure jobs on GUIs and transfer data between jobs. For more information, see Use workflows to orchestrate jobs.