Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Always consider yourself a developer.

because of a deep love for technology.

This article is compiled from the on-site shorthand of the first developer ecology summit of Hangzhou Yunqi Conference in 2018. Bi Xuan, the developer in charge of Alibaba System Software Division, Middleware Division and R & D Efficiency Division, shared his understanding of software development in Alibaba for more than ten years.

I joined Alibaba on the last day of 2007 and have been a developer for more than a decade. Of course, I admit that writing code has been rare in recent years, but development work has been with me for many years. Over the past ten years, I have had a lot of contact with open source, and Alibaba has had a lot of interaction with the open source ecosystem.

| In Alibaba, the three projects I have the most contact with

The first project is HSF, Alibaba's own internal microservice framework, and the other to achieve similar functions is Dubbo, I believe many developers present have been exposed to Dubbo. HSF and Dubbo are both very important products for Alibaba to implement microservices.

After HSF, I made a second open source product at Alibaba called HBase. At that time, we introduced overseas HBase to Alibaba, supported a large number of Alibaba businesses, and cultivated multiple committers to jointly promote the development of HBase.

In 2011, Alibaba started the container project, then the internal code name T4, last year began to open source this project, named Pouch Container, we hope that Pouch Container open source can better promote the development of the entire container technology.

Ali is using all kinds of open source products in the industry, and at the same time, it also opens up the technology accumulated by Ali and contributes to the whole ecosystem, so that the open source ecosystem can accelerate innovation at the technical level. For us, open source means that all developers can participate in defining the architecture of the entire software together.

Whether it is Alibaba or other companies, their own open source projects originated from their own needs and judgments on future technology trends. However, this level is relatively narrow. If more developers from different industries can participate in open source work together, then the products of the whole open source ecosystem can be better applied to various industries. At the same time, open source projects are greatly enhanced in innovation and utility because of demand from various industries. So open source is about getting all developers involved and accelerating software and architecture upgrades.

| Share two famous stories in the open source world

The first is Linux, which many people know. In the field of operating systems, only Microsoft had a large number of users on Windows before, but Windows was a closed-source system, so most people could not transform the operating system according to their own needs and innovation points. But Linux's open source gives developers the opportunity to participate and design an operating system that is more suitable for their industry, their enterprise, and their business. This is what Linux means to society as a whole.

Linux has gained 99% market share in supercomputers, it has more than 20 million lines of code, and more than 1500 companies are redeveloping Linux. Obviously, this is not something that can be achieved by one company alone, but more because of the more than 15,000 developers behind it. Of course, Alibaba is also involved in the evolution of Linux, which will bring great opportunities for underlying software innovation.

The other is that these years are particularly hot, I believe many developers have also been exposed, it has become the first choice for most developers in the container field in just one or two years, he is Kubernetes. Google established the CNCF Foundation on the basis of Kubernetes, with the aim of enabling more developers to participate in CNCF's work and jointly define Cloud Native standards. With this standard, all enterprises can have a good combination with the cloud, and at the same time do not need to bind, can do better switching, which is very helpful for all companies.

CNCF recruited many companies to participate in software definition, and Alibaba also participated in many of them. We propose the standard of OpenMessaging, hoping that with the help of the standard, developers can better use the messaging engine, and all the products behind it do not need to be bound to any manufacturer, nor do they need to be bound to any product. I think this is what CNCF wants community members to promote, so that developers can develop applications that have Cloud Native features.

| Open source products gradually become the mainstream of technical architecture selection

In fact, looking back, developers now find that when choosing a technical architecture, the trend of open source products becoming the mainstream choice of technical architecture selection is becoming more and more obvious. We are increasingly using open source in all scenarios. When Alibaba made the system architecture transformation in 2007, although there were some excellent open source products outside, to meet Ali's own large-scale business needs, high performance requirements and high stability requirements, it would be found that many open source products were very difficult to adapt. At that stage, although many enterprises will also use open source, in the end, they will still develop a product by themselves. The reason is also because some open source products at that time did not cope well when faced with more complex business scenarios.

However, from the development trend in recent years, we believe that the quality of open source products has become higher and higher, and many open source products are not only used to support small scenarios as before, but can provide great help in more complex scenarios. Therefore, this also makes it possible for the developer community to consider using open source products more when selecting technical architectures, and accelerate the implementation process of the entire business through open source.

| give three examples

For example, Dubbo, a popular microservice solution in the industry, has invested more than a dozen engineers in the Dubbo project. After repeated failures and repeated evolution, it has finally been polished into a healthy and stable product. Now, with Dubbo open source, many companies can go the way Alibaba has taken years to go in a very short time, avoiding duplication of wheels, and without investing so many people.

In the field of message flow, in the past, many developers will use Kafka message subscription transmission method and simple real-time data processing method, since Alibaba open source RocketMQ, and became Apache's top project last year, more and more developers began to use RocketMQ as their message engine, so that developers have more choices.

In addition, OpenMessaging, a distributed messaging specification led by Alibaba and co-created with Yahoo, Didi, Streamlio, Weizhong Bank, Datapeline and other companies, officially entered the Linux Foundation last year. This is also the first international standard in the field of distributed computing initiated globally in China, helping developers to more efficiently develop message distribution and streaming applications across heterogeneous systems and platforms.

Finally, like the more popular big data field, you can see that Hadoop many years ago, Spark and Flink are very important open source products used to meet various needs in the big data field. In fact, there are many columns that are not listed, such as TensorFlow in the AI field and so on. More and more companies are moving away from purely commercial products and building their own software architecture through a variety of open source products. Because more and more open source products have enterprise-level capabilities similar to commercial products, they are constantly being polished and evolved to meet various business scenarios of enterprises.

| Developers define the future of software

The theme of the summit is the future of developer-defined software. What does this mean?

As more and more developers join the open source ecosystem, open source products will better address common technical needs across industries. When it can solve more and more technical requirements, it can allow enterprises to focus on business and concentrate resources on business development, which will have a very good acceleration effect on the innovation of the whole business.

Now Alibaba has more than 400 open source products, I hope Alibaba can open source more products in the future, but also hope that more developers can participate in it, and we can better define the future of the whole software together, so that all developers can focus more on the business and accelerate the process of innovation of the whole business.

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