Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

author| Li Xiang Alibaba Cloud Senior Technical Expert

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Abstract: Using cloud native technology to build applications is simple and fast, deploying applications is easy, and running applications scales on demand. Today, cloud native has become the trend of next generation technology development. At the 2019 Hangzhou Yunxi Conference Developer Summit, Alibaba senior technical expert Li Xiang shared the stories of Alibaba's cloud-native technology and developers.

Why Cloud Native?

The essential goal of cloud native is to fully release the dividends brought by cloud computing. Alibaba hopes that developers can use the extremely flexible resource delivery capability on the cloud, and can also use the extremely convenient products and services on the cloud. Alibaba has also been practicing cloud native for several years, and launched the whole station cloud last year. Alibaba hopes that the business can better embrace the cloud and promote cloud native more comprehensively.

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Cloud native brings both technical dividends and business dividends.

In terms of resource efficiency, cloud native brings great improvement to resource efficiency. The use of container, scheduling and other technologies not only improves the deployment density and resource efficiency of the single dimension, but also improves the rationality and utilization rate of the resource allocation of the cluster dimension. In addition, moving the business to the cloud can also take advantage of the cloud's extremely elastic resource delivery capacity, which can not only cope with traffic peaks, but also reduce the cost of using resources.

In terms of development efficiency, the use of platforms such as Kubernetes enhances the ability to automate operations and maintenance, enhances the ability to orchestrate applications and resources, reduces the burden of operations and maintenance, and improves development efficiency. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud is also promoting the evolution of CI/CD system, hoping to accelerate the process of application from completion to launch, improve the stability and certainty of this process, and improve the confidence of developers in iteration. In addition, Alibaba Cloud also hopes to sink the common framework into the infrastructure, so that developers can more easily access and use the platform's capabilities in a multilingual environment, which is represented by the exploration of service grids.

In terms of standards and openness, cloud native can help Alibaba achieve full integration of infrastructure and ecological standards. This can not only introduce new technologies and new ideas in the open source ecosystem into Alibaba's infrastructure, but also polish and temper them using Ali's large-scale scenes and complex businesses, and give back the polished results to the community, so that it can bring more technical dividends to developers. It can also introduce the technology created into Alibaba Cloud to create a complete cloud native product technology family to help developers on the cloud. Start with Kubernetes

When it comes to practicing cloud nativity, you can actually start with Kubernetes, the cornerstone of cloud nativity. There are two main reasons to start cloud native from Kubernetes:

First, Kubernetes can connect to various resource layers downward, both public clouds like Alibaba Cloud and proprietary clouds, so Kubernetes can be used to build hybrid cloud platforms. Second, Kubernetes provides powerful automated operation and maintenance capabilities, orchestration capabilities, and strong scalability, so you can build some vertical platform capabilities on Kubernetes, such as observability, service governance, and no service. Based on these vertical capabilities, it is possible to further build a platform closer to the business, which is also the positioning of Kubernetes itself as a "Platform for Platform."

Alibaba's scale

Alibaba is huge, with more than 10 clusters, more than 100,000 nodes, and more than a million containers. So, can open source technologies and open source projects withstand Alibaba's volume? Can it withstand the test of double 11 peak scale?

Alibaba firmly believes that it must build an ecology with the upstream. Ali does not want to just go to Fork.

Kubernetes, and want to temper and build Kubernetes, so there are three strategies:

The first strategy is to track and simulate the load of its own business, and apply the results of tracking and simulation to Kubernetes cloud native system for testing. The second strategy is to continuously optimize the scale problems found in the testing process and feed back to the upstream, so that the whole community benefits and thus promotes the development of cloud native domain. The third strategy is to continuously push the community to accept these scalable capabilities, and Alibaba has customized its own scheduler and controller to meet its own business scenarios. Kubernetes 1.16 and etcd 3.4

In the recently released versions of Kubernetes 1.16 and etcd 3.4, Alibaba and Ant Financial Services have also made a lot of contributions together, increasing the data storage scale of a single machine by 50 times and the scale of a single cluster node by 3 times, which can fully meet the needs of a company of Alibaba's size in the double 11 scenario. This year's 618, Ant Financial Services has verified Kubernetes cluster, in the upcoming double 11, Ali will verify Kubernetes cluster again. If Alibaba can use Kubernetes as the cornerstone of cloud nativity, I believe 99.9% of enterprises can trust Kubernetes and cloud native technology.

Application Operations and Delivery

In addition to the cloud-native cornerstone Kubernetes, Alibaba also hopes to promote a comprehensive upgrade of the overall infrastructure, hoping to transfer the dividends of cloud-native technology to higher levels.

An important application in infrastructure is delivery and operation and maintenance. In the past, the delivery and operation and maintenance for virtual machines were very complex, and different enterprises had their own operation and maintenance modes and methods, which may be manual or semi-automatic. Even in the same enterprise, the operation and maintenance methods were different. Cloud native advocates a unified platform and unified concept, hoping to realize automatic operation and maintenance, so it is very important to build a unified application model and unified application architecture layering.

Therefore, Alibaba is also working with the community to advance the application of delivery and operation layered models in the cloud native domain. In addition, this concept has been implemented on a large scale within Ali. At present, it has promoted the comprehensive upgrade of 4 application management product lines within Ali towards cloud native, and built more than 100 applications. Ali believes that this application structure is very meaningful and valuable, so he also established an application delivery field group with CNCF, and Zhang Lei of Ali serves as the contact chairman of the group, hoping to advance this project together with the community.

service grid

In the cloud-native domain, the system at the higher level is the service grid. The advantage of service grid lies in its strong multilingual support capability, which can reduce the difficulty of business connection service governance and make it easier to achieve unified infrastructure upgrade. In real practice, Service Mesh will also face some challenges, such as how to support more protocols, whether it can be used well in large-scale scenarios, whether the data link and service plane are stable enough, etc.

In order to solve the above challenges faced by Service Mesh, Alibaba and Ant Financial took the lead in deciding to choose a system compatible with the community and polish it in the cloud native system inside Alibaba and Ant Financial. This year 618 Ant Financial Services has completed the verification of SOFAMosn on the core system. In the upcoming Double 11 this year, Alibaba and Ant Financial Services will launch Service Mesh on a large scale in the core system. At the same time, they will feed back the results of their own technology evolution to the upstream in time. Together with the community, Service Mesh will be transformed from a very advanced technology into a very stable and reliable technology, and Service Mesh service will be launched in Alibaba Cloud. It enables developers on Alibaba Cloud to easily use service grid technology.

FaaS

FaaS is a technology and concept that developers love, and it can greatly improve development efficiency, allowing developers to fill code directly with responsive patterns. At the same time, FaaS can help you achieve automatic expansion and contraction, and when you encounter problems, it can also help you automatically recover, eliminating the trouble of operation and maintenance.

But FaaS itself has several problems:

The first problem is how to find a programming model that can accommodate both different businesses and complex business logic. The second problem is how to provide operational and resilient automation capabilities without adding additional overhead.

Alibaba hopes to test the extreme flexibility and extreme start-up time of FaaS services in this year's Double 11. Ali will also feed back the research results of FaaS to the upstream and Alibaba Cloud in time to provide greater convenience and dividends for the majority of developers.

Open Source Community Contributions

Alibaba and Ant Financial have made great contributions to the cloud native domain of the core open source community, and there are core maintainers in etcd, Kata Containers, Containers and Dragonfly. In addition to these projects, we will continue to contribute to other areas of cloud native such as Kubernetes, hoping that through our efforts, cloud native will become a stable and reliable technology and become the foundation of IT in the future.

Leading Developers to Cloud Native

Alibaba has deep roots in China's open source community and developer community, and has been running many open source projects before. Alibaba hopes to use its own soil to lead Chinese developers to a cloud-native model.

Dubbo

Dubbo is one of the most popular microservice engines among developers in China. Recently, Ali donated Dubbo to Apache Foundation, hoping that it can become a more open and standard microservice engine, hoping to build this engine with the community and developers.

Alibaba now has new expectations for Apache Dubbo, hoping that Apache Dubbo can become a more cloud-native microservices framework. Therefore, in Apache Dubbo's future evolution path, there are three specific goals:

The first goal is to hope that Apache Dubbo as an RPC framework can better integrate with Service Mesh, and to some extent thin Apache Dubbo, sinking some capabilities onto Service Mesh. The second goal is to make Apache Dubbo more standard, interoperable with other ecosystems, able to support HTTP/2, able to integrate into gRPC, Spring Cloud, Kubernetes systems, and provide developers with more choices. The third goal is to improve the observability of Dubbo itself, support OpenTracing, etc., so that distributed systems built on Apache Dubbo can have higher operability. Nacos

Nacos is a project that Alibaba opened up last year and quickly received widespread praise after opening up. There are currently over 8000 Stars on GitHub, and dozens of companies have implemented Nacos in production. Nacos itself supports the registration of huge microservices within Alibaba. Nacos was developed to be simple and easy to use, providing a very simple set of APIs for developers to use HTTP or DNS for service discovery. Alibaba hopes that Nacos can become a bridge between the traditional microservice framework and the cloud-native microservice framework, so it also hopes that Nacos can register both traditional services and cloud-native services, so that the services on both sides can achieve interoperability. This will help Alibaba and the majority of developers smoothly and stably evolve from the traditional service governance model to the cloud-native service governance model.

Apache RocketMQ

Apache RocketMQ is also an open source messaging system from Alibaba that aims for low latency, high reliability, and high stability. Apache RocketMQ has also received praise from developers in China, and Apache has been held in major cities this year.

RocketMQ Developers spontaneously organize Meetup. In addition, Alibaba Cloud also provides a rich family of messaging products, and their kernel is Apache RocketMQ.

In the future, Alibaba also hopes that Apache RocketMQ can be further integrated into the cloud native. Apache RocketMQ is expected to be more flexible, able to scale up and down automatically, and easier to deploy and maintain. So Alibaba is now working on Apache RocketMQ Operator, hoping to make it easier to integrate Apache RocketMQ into the Kubernetes ecosystem. In addition, Alibaba also hopes that Apache RocketMQ will be more open and standard, and is currently promoting the OpenMessaging standard protocol, hoping to make Apache RocketMQ compatible with Cloudevent system and become a bridge to Serverless.

ElasticDL

Deep Learning is a field that developed at the same time as Cloud Native. Deep Learning has high requirements for two things:

The first thing is resource efficiency, Deep Learning requires a huge amount of computing power to do Training. The second thing is that Deep Learning has very high requirements for the iterative efficiency of models and tuning parameters, and the process from model training to online requires automation.

Therefore, Deep Learning can be perfectly integrated with cloud native. It can reasonably allocate heterogeneous resources within the cluster to Deep Learning framework by using the capabilities of containers and scheduling. It can also provide automatic deployment and operation and maintenance capabilities promoted by cloud native to Deep Learning.

Learning, shorten the end-to-end online time of Deep Learning model and enhance the core competitiveness of AI.

ElasticDL is a new generation of cloud-native AI learning platform just released by Ant Financial Services. Its architecture is based on the native Kubernetes system, so it has strong fault tolerance and elastic scheduling capability. ElasticDL supports the new TensorFlow 2.0 framework and hopes to lead AI developers to the next generation of machine learning. In the future, ElasticDL will support more AI models, making it more powerful and better integrated into cloud native systems and Kubernetes systems.

Cloud Native Technology Open Course

In addition to contributing to open source technology, Alibaba believes that the promotion of knowledge and ideas is also very important. Therefore, at the beginning of this year, Alibaba launched a cloud-native technology open class jointly produced with CNCF, which currently serves more than 10,000 developers. Subsequently, Alibaba will also text the content of the course, so that everyone can use scattered time to read. In addition, Alibaba is also working on cloud native technology manuals, hoping to interview some small and medium-sized companies and Internet companies to discuss their practices in the cloud native field. Alibaba hopes not only to provide you with conceptual knowledge, but also to provide practical help.

Cloud-Native and Open Source Meetup

Finally, Alibaba is also holding a lot of cloud-native and open-source related Meetup, hoping to use such activities to close the distance between Alibaba and offline developers, listen to the voice of developers, and understand the needs of developers for the community. It also hopes to promote offline interaction among domestic developers, enhance mutual understanding, and jointly promote the landing and development of cloud native fields in China.

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