MSE Microservices Governance Release Enterprise Edition

Microservices architecture is a double-edged sword. With the complexity of microservices architecture, even the smallest problems can affect the entire system on a large scale. Therefore, the efficiency and stability issues brought by microservices architecture are likely to be much greater than the architectural dividends brought by microservices themselves.

Recently, Alibaba Cloud MSE microservice governance launched a major enterprise version, with microservice governance capabilities covering various scenarios from traffic protection to traffic isolation and recovery, from development joint debugging to release and launch, helping enterprises quickly build a complete microservice governance system.

MSE microservice governance aims to help enterprise customers build businesses that are always online.

Microservice governance is a necessary path for microservice transformation after reaching a certain stage

With the development of microservices technology, the concept of microservices has long been deeply rooted in people's hearts. More and more enterprises are choosing microservices architecture to develop their business applications, because microservices architecture can make business iterations more efficient. The core challenge of software architecture is to solve the system complexity problem caused by the rapid growth of business. When we decouple business according to the microservice architecture, the number of microservice applications will gradually increase, the calling link will become longer and longer, and the calling and dependency relationship between services will become more complex.

In this process, if we do not properly govern our microservices, the complex dependency relationships between microservices can amplify even smaller technical issues, resulting in efficiency and stability issues that may far outweigh the structural dividends brought by the microservice architecture itself. After enterprises achieve a certain degree of microserviceization, microservice governance is a stage that enterprises must inevitably face.

Further increasing the complexity of microservice governance in cloud native scenarios

With the gradual deepening of the process of enterprise microservices, the cloud origin of microservices has gradually entered the deep water zone. In the process of deepening microservices, everyone has also gradually realized the complexity of microservice governance. Below, we will briefly divide the problems that microservice governance needs to solve into three aspects, namely efficiency, stability, and cost.

efficiency

In the development phase, what we need to consider is how to enable locally developed applications to effectively deploy cloud based business for joint debugging after the business application is deployed to the cloud. Usually, our microservices cannot fully deploy a complete system locally, so locally developed applications are only a small part of the entire microservice link. This includes the need for our traffic to be easily guided from the cloud to the local for development and debugging, or for us to easily call cloud deployed microservices for joint debugging locally. After microservices were launched into the cloud, it became more difficult than before to conduct development and debugging in one's own computer room.

In terms of online operation and maintenance, we usually need to make frequent changes to microservices, which usually lead to a series of problems. For example, publishing during peak hours during the day usually leads to a loss of business traffic, and our R&D personnel have to choose to make changes during the low peak hours of late business.

Microservice frameworks typically introduce the logic of service governance, which is often relied on by business code in the form of SDKs. Changes and upgrades to these logic require each microservice business to modify the code, resulting in significant upgrade costs.

After entering the cloud native system, the cloud native system mainly based on Kubernetes emphasizes flexible scheduling between clusters, with POD as the unit for arbitrary scheduling resources. After being scheduled, the IP of POD will also change accordingly, and traditional governance strategies will face the problem of failure. How to make the service governance system more suitable for the cloud native system is also a problem that we need to solve.

stable

Stability is greater than anything else. After microservices are deployed to the cloud, high business availability is a problem that we must solve, so it is usually deployed in multiple availability zones in the same region. Of course, our business not only needs to ensure high availability in the same region, but also needs to consider ensuring high availability when there are problems in one region. At this point, we need to consider achieving dual activity in the same city or even multiple activities in different regions, which is a problem that we need to consider.

The calls between microservices also need to be more secure and trustworthy. The recent emergence of numerous security vulnerabilities also reflects that there are still many security issues exposed during the current cloud phase. After each security vulnerability appears, the upgrade of middleware SDK is also a problem that has troubled the business for many years; At the same time, some sensitive data, even with a lot of permission control at the database layer, may cause sensitive data leakage if microservices are maliciously aggregated due to being granted higher data access permissions. The invocation between microservices needs to be more reliable and trustworthy.

cost

When our business is facing rapid growth in traffic, there is an urgent need for rapid resilience and supplementing more resources to carry the peak of our business; When we enter the low peak of our business, we also hope to reduce capacity and save resources. Therefore, the fast and flexible elasticity mechanism provided by cloud products is an urgently needed ability after microservices are launched into the cloud.

The Challenges of Self developed Micro Service Governance

Calling Technology has considered self-developed microservice governance, and Calling Technology architect Tang Changzheng has also participated in Dubbo's open source community. The research and development of microservice governance is not very difficult for Calling Technology, but self-developed microservice governance components still have the following essential cost issues.

High access costs

High maintenance costs

Single function, inflexibility, and low scalability

• Poor locatability

Although the previous article discussed Calling Technology, it is not just about Calling Technology. These issues are all faced by cloud enterprises when considering how to implement microservice governance.

Considering microservice governance for production applications, microservice frameworks typically introduce service governance logic, which is often relied on by business code in the form of SDKs. Changes and upgrades to these logic require each microservice business to modify the code, resulting in significant access and upgrade costs. At the same time, it is necessary to research and develop governance functions for open-source service frameworks, which means that manpower is needed to manage and operate the components of microservice governance. At the same time, self building will make the functions very close to the business, which also means that the functions will be relatively thin and single, and future scalability will appear weak. At the same time, there are many technical details for implementing full link grayscale, such as dynamic routing, node labeling, traffic labeling, distributed link tracking, and high implementation costs. Due to the complexity of service frameworks such as Dubbo and Spring Cloud, as well as the increasing number of microservices and longer links, the positioning and resolution of related microservice governance issues have become a headache. Diandian Technology stated that with the support of professional teams such as Spring Cloud Alibaba and Dubbo, the deepening of microservices will also become more leisurely.

MSE microservice governance helps enterprises build a complete microservice governance system

MSE service governance provides core capabilities such as full link grayscale, traffic protection, outlier instance removal, canary release, and observable microservice governance in a non-invasive manner. Compared to self built services, MSE provides rich differentiation capabilities, covering the entire lifecycle of microservices in development, testing, and operation states. It seamlessly supports all Spring Cloud and Dubbo frameworks on the market in the past five years, in a more cost-effective manner A more efficient path helps enterprises quickly build a complete microservice governance system on the cloud, effectively improving the development efficiency and online stability of microservice applications.

MSE Microservices Governance Enterprise Version Heavily Released

Alibaba Cloud MSE microservice governance has launched an enterprise version on top of the original basic and professional versions, providing traffic control and fault tolerance capabilities for microservice applications and commonly used gateways. It ensures business stability from multiple dimensions such as traffic control, concurrency control, fuse degradation, adaptive protection, and hotspot prevention and control, helping users cope well with traffic surges or unstable service dependencies.

At the microservice gateway layer, such as Zuul and Spring CloudGateway, users can set rules for entry traffic protection. At the application layer, interface level granularity protection can be implemented, supporting multiple current limiting methods such as single machine current limiting, cluster current limiting, and minute hour current limiting. In addition to the impact of high traffic, problems with third-party services can sometimes lead to longer interface response times and inability to release thread resources. Users can configure fuse rules for weakly dependent interfaces, which automatically fuse when unstable conditions are reached. For non critical interfaces, they can be proactively downgraded in advance to avoid overall unavailability caused by single point service exceptions. In addition, traffic protection supports adaptive system protection, which can set system protection rules based on system resource indicators such as CPU and load to prevent avalanches. At the same time, you can also configure isolation rules for automatically identified slow SQL statements to limit the number of concurrent executions and prevent the database Connection pool from being full and affecting normal calls.

The enterprise version also supports second level monitoring capabilities for indicators such as QPS, response time, exceptions, CPU/load, and provides analysis functions for second level flow and water level distribution in machine dimensions, interface dimensions, and cluster dimensions for these indicators, facilitating users to monitor protection effects and guide rule configuration.

New feature: Application configuration

The MSE Service Governance Center has also added application configuration capabilities to help users dynamically manage configuration items in their code, which can be used in various business scenarios. One is to embed functional switches in the business logic, such as dynamically opening a promotional activity, demoting certain time-consuming operations, etc; Second, the application operation level can be adjusted without application restart, such as online modification log level, specifying A/B Test path, thread pool configuration, etc; The third is the push of complex types of structured content such as List and Map, such as regularly pushing the list of promotional products, and uniformly sending the customer list of discount coupons.

Tail

Micro service governance is a necessary path for deepening enterprise micro services, and MSE micro service governance revolves around continuously polishing and building out of the box governance capabilities of the micro service system; On the one hand, we choose to fully embrace open source, and customers do not need to change the existing architecture of their business. They can be up and down at any time without binding; On the other hand, we aim to productively export Alibaba's years of technological accumulation and best practices to cloud customers.