Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

What are the key issues and challenges of building an enterprise-level PAAS cloud platform? in view of this problem, this article introduces the corresponding analysis and solutions in detail, hoping to help more partners who want to solve this problem to find a more simple and easy way.

As enterprises actively go to the cloud, new and diversified needs and characteristics are also shown, from the previous single construction of private cloud to the bold use of public cloud plus private cloud hybrid cloud architecture, or from multiple cloud vendors to purchase heterogeneous resources of multi-cloud architecture, enterprise cloud architecture is gradually changing to hybrid clouds, multi-clouds and other more complex systems The great pattern of the coexistence of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is emerging.

How to centrally manage and control the multi-cloud resources and hybrid cloud resources of enterprises, and how to solve the problems of operation and maintenance management in the increasingly complex cloud environment, the construction of PAAS cloud platform is becoming more and more important. The deeper an enterprise is in the cloud, the more urgent the demand for cloud computing management platform will be, and the most important thing is to build a correct and sustainable enterprise PAAS cloud platform.

For enterprises, the ultimate goal of cloud computing is to better carry the operation of applications and serve the business, so the planning and design of enterprise cloud computing start from the application characteristics. Generally speaking, enterprise applications have the following characteristics:

First, the application system is complex and the degree of standardization is low: the different business forms of the enterprise determine the complexity of the application system. At the same time, due to the long development cycle of enterprise information construction, it is difficult to form a unified standard in terms of bearing hardware, technical architecture selection and R & D norms.

Second, the volume of the system is large: the business scale determines that the volume of the information system of large enterprises is often large, and the business form is complex.

Third, high security requirements: large enterprises often have higher requirements for core data protection, regulatory compliance and service security.

Fourth, service classification: the information systems of large enterprises also show the characteristics of classification in terms of reliability, stability, performance, cost and other aspects of service requirements due to different bearing services.

Sharing, agility and innovation are the biggest changes in the construction of enterprise information in the Internet era. The development of enterprise PAAS cloud platform has also entered an in-depth stage, whether to take into account the new and old different applications or to rebuild the next generation of applications based on the new architecture platform is a topic that we must consider.

First of all, enterprise PaaS is a three-dimensional platform of point, line and surface. The point is the application of the upper layer, the line is the end-to-end process running through the enterprise, and the surface is the basic service of the platform that supports the continuous interweaving and evolution of the application and process. The core features of enterprise PaaS are mainly reflected in two aspects, one is the management of application life cycle, the other is the support for the construction of enterprise application scenarios. In terms of application life cycle management, the application form of enterprises is constantly changing and evolving in terms of building applications, deploying applications, operation and maintenance, upgrading applications, and clearing applications. From the support of building enterprise application scenarios, process, data, integration and mobility are the highest frequency and headache in the construction of enterprise application scenarios. Unclear requirements and rapid business changes are also the most common problems in reality. Different scenarios require different technical capabilities, and the degree of intensification of these capabilities also determines the efficiency and cost of operation and maintenance developed in the cloud architecture. When many external cloud vendors encounter complex scenarios in enterprise applications, the cost, efficiency, and quality will be greatly reduced, because simply improving programming capabilities and development efficiency will not solve these problems.

Second, the capabilities of different suppliers of enterprise-level PaaS are different, so it is necessary to learn from each other and refine the operation.

1. PaaS platforms launched by IaaS manufacturers include giant platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google abroad, and platform giants such as Aliyun, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud and Jinshanyun in China. This kind of PaaS can basically provide traditional basic support software services such as OS, database, middleware, virtualization, container and all kinds of API, and provide complete support services. the biggest feature of this kind of PaaS is that it has more and more functions, but it is not vertical and fine enough to be close to the traditional enterprise.

2. PaaS platform transformed by traditional infrastructure software providers. For example, foreign Oracle, IBM, Redhat, VMware, EMC and other databases, middleware, system software, virtualization, storage giants are the leading manufacturers in this field. Domestic Huawei, tide, Lenovo, Ziguang, users. They have a wide range of corporate customers and have launched their own PaaS platform to provide services to customers. They do not provide large and comprehensive application infrastructure services, and often only provide corresponding PaaS services according to the strong parts of their traditional software, such as Oracle's database cloud service and Huawei's enterprise cloud service.

3. The PaaS platform provided by the traditional integrated application software giants. SAP is the representative of foreign brands, user friends, Kingdee, Neusoft is the representative of domestic brands. In the traditional PC software era, they are committed to creating a "revolutionary platform" through which the research and development of ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications can be realized. They hope to develop a general platform that can bring revolutionary changes to all kinds of enterprise application development: to achieve all kinds of development quickly, well and at low cost, especially the customized demand development of enterprises. But at present, their disadvantage is that the platform wants to carry too much content, want all kinds of enterprise applications to achieve rapid research and development through the platform, its objective effect is often met with greater challenges.

In fact, according to the characteristics of their own business, enterprises need to optimize the PaaS capabilities provided by different suppliers, integrate and share their strengths and weaknesses, decouple business from supporting software environment, decouple general business from customized business, and build modular and diverse platform support capabilities.

Third, the cost and efficiency of enterprise PaaS. Usually people will often say that enterprise applications are too complicated. The complexity here has several meanings: first, the interface interaction, rules and permissions are complex and changeable; second, the relationships and controls between data are complex

Third, the lack of standardized information construction, the introduction of a new application, there are a large number of heterogeneous systems to be integrated, while adding a system island; fourth, the process may be simple or complex, but there are great differences between enterprises and enterprises. Fifth, do not want to be solidified applications hinder enterprise innovation, hope that applications can be quickly adjusted and created to support management and business innovation, but the management is too rigid and closed.

Therefore, whether the enterprise PaaS can achieve the lowest cost and the best efficiency requires the enterprise to make real efforts to unify the ideological and standardized construction, at the same time follow the openness and standards, optimize the process and simplify management, and constantly innovate and solve these development problems sustainably.

Fourth, standard and openness. The construction of enterprise PaaS platform is like building blocks, standard and openness are the most important. There are two key points in the design of technical architecture: one is to evaluate the compatibility, scope of application and best practices of all kinds of technical architecture in advance in the setting phase, and to avoid the design that can not be integrated in the choice of technology stack. Second, for the application of technology, especially open source technology, we should choose the basic functions that are universal, standard and widely used as far as possible, and do not strongly rely on some advanced functions that are difficult to integrate and whose future development direction is not clear enough. Only in this way can we develop steadily.

The standard opening of enterprise cloud environment specifically, there are two dimensions: internal and external. In order to achieve standards first internally, the openness of the technical architecture should be fully considered from the beginning of the design. With the deepening of applications and the expansion of scale, single technology architecture and closed technology architecture will lead to manufacturers' technology binding and functional features can not meet the SLA needs of all kinds of enterprise applications, and there will be many limitations in the evolution of technology architecture. At the same time, automation and intelligence are the inevitable choice for cloud computing environment to achieve unified management and control of resources, and standardization is the most important foundation of automation and intelligence. Therefore, the design and construction of cloud environment needs to be standard first. in the aspects of hardware configuration, virtualization cluster configuration, container cluster configuration, network configuration, service configuration, development specification and micro-service specification, the corresponding standards are formulated according to business bearer requirements and resource control requirements, and gradually supplemented and improved in the process of construction and operation. The other dimension is the opening of standards to the outside world. The platform construction of cloud computing is a process of continuous improvement and continuous integration. Open and standard design specifications help to introduce new technical architecture and functional modules, continuously accumulate the ability of precipitation platform, and construct the ecological environment with cloud platform as the core.

Fifth, the migration and change of application development. Generally speaking, migration to a cloud environment is often a process of application redeployment, while migration to a PaaS or SaaS environment requires a resplit, architecture redesign and reconstruction of the application system. Many application systems PaaS is to make better use of containers, micro-services and other technologies and concepts, to achieve flexibility and agility, to meet the needs of software services. In this process, micro-service splitting is the key and difficult point. The lack of a good micro-service design specification and governance framework will lead to the disorder of micro-service management and operation, resulting in the so-called "entropy of micro-service". The split and design of micro-services need to follow the overall design principles of high cohesion and low coupling, and should be fully considered in the process from many aspects, such as synchronous asynchronism, data sharing, decentralization, decentralization, standardized interface and technology-independent design. On the other hand, the SaaS of the application makes the relationship between the user and the product closer and more sticky, which expands the life cycle value of a single user. At the same time, these applications are for multiple customers, centralized management and authorization, which can effectively reduce the cost of production management and improve the efficiency of enterprise operation and management.

Sixth, cloud security protection. Since the birth of cloud computing, security has been criticized for two main reasons: first, cloud computing emphasizes the sharing of resources, network accessibility and automation of management and control. Once problems occur, it is extremely prone to the risk of error spread and expansion. Second, the technical architecture of cloud computing is more complex than the traditional application technology stack, and the introduction of new technologies brings new security risks, so it is necessary to build a trusted cloud environment by means of protection. An important theoretical basis of cloud security is the zero trust architecture proposed by John John Kindervag in 2010, based on which a series of theories have been derived and developed, including: no point in the architecture is trustworthy; there is always a threat to internal and external networks; location is not a trusted condition; all devices, users, and traffic need authentication and authorization. The protection strategy needs to be dynamically calculated and adjusted. Based on this, the working idea of security protection in cloud computing is to provide full-stack three-dimensional protection to the cloud computing technology stack. generally speaking, it includes data center infrastructure, hardware equipment, network, virtualization and virtualization management, operating system, container, micro-service, development framework, data, management platform and application. Among them, we need to focus on network security protection, which is also the most complex and risk-prone key point. according to the network technology architecture adopted in the cloud computing environment, it should be carefully designed in many aspects, such as security domain, access control, flow control, encryption, monitoring and so on.

The seventh is to build a platform with a variety of service capabilities, specifically, "thick platform, thin application". On the one hand, in the process of platform construction and evolution, universal capabilities are formed in the process of enterprise informatization, enriching the platform service catalogue; on the other hand, it helps to achieve the precipitation and sharing of data assets, form a data closed loop, and promote the digital transformation of enterprises. The key to the construction of the platform is the refinement and abstraction of service capabilities, that is, to achieve different levels of "decoupling", the decoupling of hardware and application system will form an infrastructure cloud (IaaS), the decoupling of business and supporting software environment will form a platform software cloud (PaaS), and the decoupling of general business and customized business will form the so-called "business platform".

Finally, there is multi-cloud management. By building multiple clouds, enterprises can achieve unified management of public and private clouds, cross-regional deployment of business systems, cloud disaster preparedness of key data, response to short-term cloud outbreak business requirements, overall high availability and performance requirements, cloud service providers' advantages / cost-effective service selection, cost sharing and optimization capabilities. However, the biggest problem brought by multi-cloud is heterogeneous services, multi-activity also means that there must be a lot of data synchronization, bandwidth, delay, data consistency, there are great challenges, management costs will also go up. Therefore, priority can be given to the construction of the same city and different places in a single cloud, so that the basic level is isomorphic, and you can better focus on business disaster recovery and double-live construction.

This is the answer to the key questions and challenges of building an enterprise-level PAAS cloud platform. I hope the above content can be of some help to you. If you still have a lot of doubts to be solved, you can follow the industry information channel for more related knowledge.

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