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

Author | Zhao Yuying

As the top open source community in the cloud native domain, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Cloud Native Foundation, hereinafter referred to as CNCF) recently announced the establishment of Application Delivery SIG (Application delivery Domain Group). What will be the responsibilities of this new group? What new impacts will it bring to the cloud native domain? In this article, InfoQ conducted an exclusive interview with Zhang Lei, a senior technical expert from Ali.

On September 12, 2019, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Cloud original Foundation, hereinafter referred to as CNCF) announced the official establishment of Application Delivery SIG (hereinafter referred to as App Delivery SIG) on its official website. Zhang Lei, a senior technical expert from Ali and a senior member of the Kubernetes community, and Alois Reitbauer, chief technology and strategic innovation officer of software intelligence company Dynatrace, were co-elected as the first co-chairman of the SIG with VMware senior expert Bryan Liles. On the same day, Yahoo Finance and other foreign media also carried out simultaneous reports on this news.

CNCF App Delivery SIG

According to reports, the CNCF domain group is a core mechanism for the operation of the CNCF fund. Chris Aniszczyk, chief technology officer of CNCF, said in an official statement that "CNCF domain groups play a vital role in the expansion and development of cloud native communities, and they are helping the entire ecosystem to gain an in-depth understanding of best practices in these technology areas and work closely with CNCF TOC (Technical Oversight Committee) to identify sustainable open source projects or help them make up for their deficiencies." After the establishment of App Delivery SIG, CNCF currently has jurisdiction over three domain groups, namely App Delivery SIG, Security SIG and Storage SIG.

At the community level, the CNCF domain team will be responsible for "coordinating and connecting concerns, end users, and open source projects in the corresponding technology domain in a visionary way." In terms of organizational structure, domain teams are usually led by recognized technical experts in the field and report to the CNCF TOC.

The newly established CNCF App Delivery SIG, the Chinese full name is CNCF application delivery domain group. This domain group is the first application-centric domain group officially established by the CNCF Foundation. At a time when the ecological core of cloud computing is rapidly focusing on "cloud native applications", this group has been praised by the community as "the most valuable domain group in CNCF". After the establishment of the domain group, the Serverless working group (Serverless Working Group) originally in CNCF will also be placed under the application delivery domain group.

With regard to the mission of the CNCF Application delivery area team, the team's TOC contact, Michelle Noorali, an engineer from Microsoft, pointed out in an official article:

With the application delivery domain team, we want to identify and address the key aspects and core issues of the application delivery lifecycle, while optimizing the application architecture in the cloud native scenario. The team will also work on important collaboration in the application delivery ecosystem, working with the entire community to identify and correct the gap between application management open source project practice and theory, and to promote the standardization of application delivery tools and processes. We look forward to the CNCF Foundation working more closely with application development and operation engineers.

It is worth mentioning that in the previous impression, most of the CNCF Foundation's main concern groups were infrastructure technicians. But after the establishment of the Application delivery Domain Group, the CNCF Foundation is working more closely with application developers and application operators.

Future planning

For this newly established domain group, what it will do in the future is of great concern to developers in the field of cloud computing. Zhang Lei said: first of all, the domain group will gradually establish and promote the "cloud native application management and standard delivery system". Cloud native application management and delivery is an important technical field that has rapidly become the focus of the new generation of cloud computing technology with the increasing maturity of cloud native technology. In the current technological ecology, Kubernetes is building a universally accepted and standardized application infrastructure layer; Serverless provides an efficient scheduling and resource management model; and Service Mesh further defines the non-intrusive service governance mechanism between applications. These capabilities, which we uniformly call "platform level capabilities", are also the main areas of concern of the CNCF Foundation. This time, the CNCF application delivery domain team focuses on the technical architecture and evolution direction of the "application management layer" above the "platform layer". This layer is also the value focus of cloud computing ecology in the future.

The application delivery domain team will work with the entire cloud native community to build an efficient, standard, and reliable delivery and connectivity system between "applications", "end users" and "platform layers". This idea runs through the declaration cycle of application delivery, and we can express it through a standard hierarchical structure (cloud native application hierarchical model):

Under this model, there is clear layering and collaboration between "application definition", "application deployment and delivery", and "application instance management". For example, "blue-green deployment" focuses on the concept of application deployment and delivery, while K8s Deployment (or K8s Operator) is responsible for providing the next layer of application instance management capabilities, which are interlinked but not coupled. This hierarchical concept is missing from the entire cloud computing ecology at present. The hierarchical model of cloud native applications will become an important theoretical basis for the subsequent evolution of cloud native application delivery ecology to the direction of "standardization", "plug-in" and "separation of responsibilities". At the same time, it will also make the "third-party application" ecology based on K8s Operator unified management into cloud native applications and delivered to the management system.

Second, cloud native application delivery best practices and architecture paradigms. The application delivery domain team will work with the cloud native open source community to gradually abstract and extract the corresponding best practices, basic paradigms, reference architectures and project examples of each layer under the above "cloud native application hierarchical model" system. at the same time, sort out and summarize the application management projects in the mainstream open source community. In the end, all this content will be presented to the entire ecology in the form of a "White Paper on CNCF Cloud Native Application Architecture".

Finally, promote the evolution of cloud native application delivery ecology to a hierarchical and standard architecture. On the basis of the above theory and practice, the application delivery domain team will work with the community and ecology to promote the gradual evolution of the open source project of mainline application management to a hierarchical, unified and standard direction. In addition, the domain team will continue to further identify and incubate open source projects under this system, and assist cloud native users and developers in type selection and architecture reference by developing the "Cloud Native Application delivery Ecological Guide (Cloud Native App Delivery Lanscape)". All these are expected to make the end users of the cloud native community really the biggest beneficiaries of the application delivery domain group.

Practice of Alibaba Cloud Native Technology system

As an important participant and promoter of CNCF and cloud native technology ecology, Alibaba practices cloud native technology system in a large number of Internet-level scenarios.

In 2011, Alibaba began to evolve to native cloud technologies such as containers, with the initial goal of enhancing the utilization of resources, and then began to explore the direction of scheduling and storage to gradually improve the reliability and stability of resources. On this basis, Alibaba began to find ways to improve business stability and build platform-independent application delivery capabilities, through technologies and concepts such as Kubernetes and container design patterns to promote the robust and elegant landing of cloud native in Alibaba. After switching the entire platform to Kubernetes, Alibaba is currently promoting the opening of the application management system of the entire economy, achieving application automation and self-healing on the basis of a unified architecture, improving monitoring and operation and maintenance, and enabling Kubernetes to achieve the best interaction with the application platform. Integrate with the community, introduce the new technologies of the community into Alibaba's internal practice to help the community land, and contribute the internal excellent technological achievements to the community, making the entire Alibaba Cloud native technology stack more open.

It is important to point out here that application delivery is not equal to CI/CD.

CI/CD focuses on R & D efficiency and agile practices, while cloud native application management and delivery technology is the cornerstone and basic component of building an application-centric infrastructure. In fact, advanced cloud native application delivery technology is the technical basis for better practice of CI/CD. For example, KubeCon's open source OpenKruise project in Shanghai in 2019 is actually a capability of the Application Automation & Operation layer in the "Cloud Native Application layering Model". With the valuable technical support provided by Kruise for the whole application delivery system, such as in-place upgrade (Inplace Upgrade), it is possible for Alibaba to deliver stateful applications in the "Singles Day" scenario, and to build a CI/CD system on this basis has become a reality.

After the establishment of the CNCF Application delivery Domain Group, Alibaba will work more closely with the CNCF Foundation to actively try to practice the "cloud native application management and standard delivery system" in the dual scenarios of the Internet and cloud products, and on the other hand, will further participate in the open source community of cloud native application technology.

Concluding remarks

The establishment of the CNCF Application delivery Domain Group can be seen as an important milestone in the ecological process of cloud native technology. It indicates that the focus of cloud computing ecology is gradually rising from the infrastructure layer to the "application layer", the core value point of cloud native technology. "Cloud native application hierarchical model", "cloud native application standard delivery" and "cloud native application architecture" will also become keywords for the follow-up work of the application delivery domain team.

At the end of the interview, Zhang Lei concluded: with the rapid development and popularization of cloud computing technology, the concept of application management and architecture based on the assumption that "software is born naturally on the cloud and grow on the cloud" is rapidly taking root in the hearts of the people. the establishment of this application delivery domain group is a true portrayal of the trend that "the value of the cloud is returning to the application itself".

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