Serverless App Engine (SAE) is a fully managed application hosting platform built on Kubernetes that handles infrastructure, scaling, load balancing, logging, and monitoring. Deploy apps in any language from source code, a code package, or a Docker image in seconds without modifying your code, scale instances automatically, and pay only for the resources you use.
Service architecture
The following figure shows the SAE architecture. For terminology, see Terms.
Features
| Feature | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Application lifecycle management | Run phased releases and canary releases, including traffic-ratio-based canary releases. Monitor the release process end to end and roll back if needed. |
| Engineering platform | Deploy in seconds from source code, WAR packages, or JAR packages. Automate continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Use application templates, CLI, a component library, and a cost manager to streamline delivery. |
| Non-intrusive microservices governance | Migrate Spring Cloud and Apache Dubbo apps to SAE without code changes. Built-in service registration and discovery, environment isolation, configuration management, throttling and degradation, graceful start and shutdown, service authentication, and end-to-end canary releases. |
| Ultrahigh elasticity |
Trigger auto scaling within seconds based on CPU, Mem, queries per second (QPS), response time, TCP connections, or SLB QPS. |
| Application cold start acceleration |
Start Java applications within seconds. Reduces resource consumption and speeds up deployment, scaling, and runtime. |
| One-click startup and stop of environments | Use namespaces to isolate development and test environments. Start or stop an entire environment with a few clicks to avoid wasting resources on idle instances. |
| Non-intrusive application monitoring | Monitor Layer 7 inbound traffic, Java applications, and traces using Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology — no instrumentation required. Supports multiple programming languages and frameworks. |
| Remote debugging and on-premises/cloud interconnection | Debug Java applications running in SAE remotely. Subscribe to on-premises services and register them in the SAE built-in registry so on-premises and cloud microservices can call each other. |
Billing
SAE charges based on the resources you use. For details, see Billing overview.
References
Choose the path that matches your situation:
| Situation | Where to start |
|---|---|
| I want to understand what SAE can handle | Scenarios — covers application hosting, microservices model transformation, auto scaling, and CI/CD |
| I'm ready to deploy my first application | Get started with SAE — walkthrough with best practices |
| I have questions or feedback | Contact us — join the DingTalk group |