Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Author | not interested in Aliyun Senior Technical expert

Guide: the two lines of user demand and cloud development have promoted the rise, development and large-scale application of cloud native technology. This article mainly discusses what is cloud native application, what are the elements of cloud native application, what is Serverless computing, and how Serverless simplifies technical complexity to help users cope with rapidly changing needs and achieve flexible and highly available services, which are illustrated by specific cases and scenarios.

Nowadays, all kinds of industries are talking about digital transformation, especially the new retail, media, transportation and other industries. Digital business form has become the mainstream, gradually replacing the traditional business form. In other industries (such as industrial manufacturing), although the business form of enterprises is not in the form of digital, but under the concept of digital twinning, making full use of data technology to optimize production and operation is also becoming a research hotspot and industry consensus.

Enterprises carry out digital transformation from the four aspects of means of production, production relations, strategic planning and growth curve:

Means of production: data becomes the most important means of production, demand / risk changes at any time, and enterprises are faced with great uncertainty; production relations: data-centered, fixed production relations not based on processes and rules, network effects make production relations cross time and space constraints, and multi-connection modes give birth to new businesses and species; strategic planning: based on data decision-making, quickly deal with uncertain business environment Growth curve: digital technology brings the ability to reach a large number of users and can bring breakthrough growth.

Looking at the evolution trend of cloud from the perspective of cloud service providers, in the era of Cloud 1. 0, the cloud infrastructure is its theme. Using cloud hosting model, applications on and under the cloud remain compatible, and traditional applications can be migrated directly to the cloud. The core value of this approach lies in the flexibility of resources and low cost. After the massive computing power provided by the infrastructure, how to help users make better use of computing power and accelerate the speed of enterprise innovation has become the core competence of the cloud.

If you are still building basic applications on the server, then the cost of research and development will be very high, and it will be very difficult to manage, so there is Cloud 2.0, which is the era of cloud natives. In the cloud native era, cloud service providers provide rich hosting services to help enterprises digitally transform and innovate. Users can build applications based on various cloud services like building blocks, which greatly reduces the cost of research and development.

Cloud native application elements

There are three key elements of cloud native applications: micro-service architecture, application containerization and Serverless, and agile software delivery process.

1. Micro-service architecture

Single architecture and micro-service architecture have their own characteristics, and their main features are compared as shown in the following figure. Generally speaking, the single architecture is quick to get started, but difficult to maintain, and the micro-service architecture is difficult to deploy, but it is more independent and agile, so it is more suitable for cloud native applications.

Single architecture VS micro-service architecture

two。 Application containerization and Serverless

Container is the most popular way of code encapsulation at present, with the help of K8s and its ecological capabilities, it greatly reduces the difficulty of managing the entire infrastructure, and containers provide excellent flexibility and portability in terms of program supportability. more and more users begin to use containers to encapsulate the whole application. Serverless computing is another form, which does a lot of end-to-end integration and cloud service integration, which greatly improves the efficiency of research and development. However, the compatibility of traditional applications is not as flexible as containers, but it also brings a lot of cleanliness. Users only need to focus on the coding of business logic and focus on the innovation of business logic.

3. Agile application delivery process

Agile application delivery process is a very important element, which mainly includes process automation, focusing on functional development, rapid discovery of problems, and rapid release.

Serverless calculation 1. Ali cloud function calculation

Serverless is a new concept, but its connotation has existed for a long time. The first cloud service of Aliyun or AWS is object storage, which is actually a Serverless service in the storage domain; in addition, Serverless refers to a product system, not a single product. At present, most of the new features or products launched by cloud service providers in the industry are in the form of Serverless. Aliyun's Serverless product system includes computing, storage, API, analysis and middleware. At present, the cloud product system is being Serverless.

Ali Cloud Serverless computing platform function calculation, there are four features:

Seamless integration with the cloud: various services in the cloud are seamlessly integrated with functional computing through an event-driven way. Users only need to pay attention to the development of the function, and the trigger of the event is completed by the service provider. Real-time auto scaling: the elastic scaling of function calculation is automatically completed by the system, and the speed is very fast. Users can use this ability in online applications. Sub-second measurement: sub-second measurement provides a complete on-demand measurement, resource utilization can reach 100%; high availability: function computing platform has done a lot of work to help users build highly available applications.

So, how does Ali Cloud function do the above four points? The product capability of Ali Cloud function computing is shown in the following figure. First of all, the function computing product is a product based on Alibaba's infrastructure services, and a large number of optimizations have been made to the computing layer on it. Then developed a large number of capabilities and tools in the application layer, based on the above product capabilities, to provide users with complete solutions in a variety of scenarios, in order to have the whole excellent function computing product. Functional computing is a very basic cloud product of Aliyun. Many products and functions of Aliyun are based on functional computing. At present, Ali Cloud function Computing has provided services in 19 regions around the world.

Ali Cloud function Computing Product capability

2. Serverless helps users simplify the complexity of highly available design and implementation of cloud native applications

The high availability of cloud native applications is a systematic project, including many aspects, and it takes a lot of time and effort to build a complete high availability system. So how does Serverless computing help users simplify the complexity of highly available design and implementation of cloud native applications? As shown in the following figure, the points to be considered in building a high availability system include the infrastructure layer, the runtime layer, the data layer, and the application layer, and each layer has a lot of work to do to achieve high availability. Function calculation is mainly from the fault tolerance, flexibility, flow control, monitoring four aspects have done a lot of work to achieve high availability, the following picture of the blue dotted frame corresponding to the functions are implemented by the platform, users do not need to consider. Although the platform has done some work to simplify the difficulty of the user's work, the blue solid frame still needs the user's attention, and the orange solid frame represents some of the functions that the user is responsible for. Combined with the functions provided by the platform and part of the energy input of users, it can greatly reduce the difficulty for users to build a high availability system.

Function calculation is highly available

Function calculation is optimized in many ways to help users build a highly available system. The following figure shows the ability of function computing in disaster recovery in availability zones. As can be seen from the figure, the function calculation has done the corresponding load balancing, which greatly improves the disaster recovery capacity.

Function to calculate disaster recovery in multiple availability zones

The following figure shows the asynchronous processing of events by function calculation. The processing pipeline mainly includes three links: event queue, event distribution and event consumption, each of which can be horizontally scaled. One of the key points is that the distribution of events needs to match the downstream consumption capacity. In addition, by specifying different amounts of computing resources for different functions, users can easily dynamically adjust the consumption speed of different types of events. In addition, the error retry logic can be customized, and there is back pressure feedback and flow control, which will not overwhelm the next service when a large number of requests are generated in a short period of time.

Asynchronous processing of function calculation events

In the observability of function calculation, log collection and query functions are provided. In addition to the default simple log query function, advanced log query is also provided, which makes it more convenient for users to analyze logs. In the aspect of indicator collection and visualization, function calculation provides rich capability of index collection, and provides views such as standard indicators and overview information, which makes it more convenient for users to carry out operation and maintenance work. The following figure is a schematic diagram of application delivery. In the whole process of application delivery, an agile application delivery process can be built only if every link is done well. Its core is automation, and only when automation is achieved, can the efficiency and agility of the entire pipeline be improved.

▲ Agile Application delivery process

The following figure shows the specific tasks of the automated application delivery pipeline in each link. What needs to be paid attention to is to achieve the infrastructure, namely the code, in order to define the template and set up the application running environment automatically, so as to realize the automatic continuous integration and so on.

Automated application delivery pipeline

After achieving the automatic delivery of the application, it is very helpful to the whole R & D efficiency. In Serverless applications, Aliyun provides a variety of tools to help users implement infrastructure, namely code. A good capability of Serverless's model is that different parameters can be passed into the same template to generate definitions of different environments, and then manage these environments automatically.

For the delivery and grayscale release of different service versions of the application itself, function computing provides the service version and service alias to provide the corresponding service, and the grayscale release process of the whole application can be simplified to some API operations, which greatly improves the efficiency of the business. Through these capabilities provided by the Serverless computing platform, the automation of the delivery pipeline of the whole software application has been greatly improved.

Function calculation also has a very useful feature-compatibility with stock applications. Through Custom runtime, it can adapt to many popular frameworks and compatible with traditional applications, so that it can easily adapt to the Serverless platform. The console provides a series of services such as application creation, deployment, associated resource management, monitoring and so on.

In addition to function calculation, Serverless workflow can also be used to arrange different application links and different functions, and the workflow can be defined by descriptive language, which can reliably execute each step, which greatly reduces the difficulty of user scheduling for complex tasks.

Application scenario case

There are several typical application scenarios for function computing. One is Web/API back-end service. Aliyun has had a number of successful applications, including Graphite document, Weibo, Century Hualian, and so on.

Another application scenario for function computing is large-scale parallel data processing, such as uploading a large number of pictures, audio, text and other data to OSS, which can trigger functions to do custom processing, such as transcoding, frame capture, and so on. Successful cases in this area include Tiger Pop, focus Media, 100 Interconnection and so on.

Another application scenario for function computing is real-time streaming of data. For example, messages generated by different devices and logs sent to similar services such as message queues can trigger functions for streaming.

The last application scenario is the automation of operation and maintenance, through timing trigger, cloud monitoring event trigger, process scheduling and other ways to call functions to complete operation and maintenance tasks, greatly reducing the cost and difficulty of operation and maintenance. Typical successful cases include Tucson Future and so on.

Tucson Future is an artificial intelligence company focusing on the research and development and application of L4 self-driving truck technology, providing large-scale commercial operation of self-driving truck technology to the world, empowering the global logistics and transportation industry. In the process of road test, a large number of data will be generated, and the processing flow of these data is complex and changeable, even for the same batch of data, different business groups will have different ways to use and deal with them. How to effectively manage different data processing processes and reduce the frequency of human intervention can greatly improve production efficiency.

The characteristics of irregular operation of the road test make the running time and duration of the process scheduling task have great uncertainty, and it is difficult for the local computer room to establish the process management system alone to optimize the machine utilization, resulting in a waste of resources. In Tucson, there are many unitary business processing scripts and applications locally in the future, but they cannot be fully migrated to the cloud because of various restrictions, which also poses a challenge to how to rationalize the use of cloud services.

In view of the above, Tucson will begin to explore the automation of the data processing platform in the future. Ariyun Serverless workflow is billed by the number of times it is scheduled, which has many advantages, such as easy to use, easy to integrate, simple operation and maintenance, and can solve the problems encountered in the above scenarios. It is very suitable for this kind of offline task scenarios that run irregularly.

Serverless workflow also supports the scheduling of local or self-built server room tasks. In the future, Tucson solves the problem of data communication between cloud and cloud by using MNS, a messaging service natively supported by Serverless workflow, so that the original local tasks can be well choreographed and managed.

In addition to scheduling, Serverless workflow also supports the maintenance of the status of tasks and the data generated during execution. In the future, Tucson will efficiently manage the life cycle of each task and the data transmission between them by using the input-output mapping and status reporting mechanism of tasks.

In the future, with the expansion of the business scale, Tucson will continue to optimize the operational efficiency and automation level of the offline big data process in the future. Through various explorations, Tucson will further improve the efficiency of the engineering team and devote more energy and funds to business innovation in the future.

Summary

Serverless workflow is a key part of Aliyun Serverless product system. Through Serverless workflow, users can organize multiple Ali cloud services, such as function computing, visual intelligence platform, or self-built services, into workflows in a simple and intuitive way, and quickly build elastic and highly available cloud native applications.

Since the introduction of function computing in 2017, the service can scale up and down intelligently in real time according to changes in application load, scaling tens of thousands of instances in one minute and ensuring a stable delay. At present, it has supported the key applications of Weibo, mango TV, BGI, Tucson Future, graphite technology and other users to easily cope with the business peak.

Course recommendation

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