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

Ten years ago, many enterprises still regarded cloud computing as a distant future technology, but today, few people will question the importance of "going to the cloud."

However, in the process of popularization of cloud computing, many problems have also been encountered. For example, because of its high professionalism, certain learning costs, and the differences between cloud service vendors, some enterprises have become powerless to go to the cloud. Then came Cloud Native. It is understood that cloud native, as a new technology concept born in the era of cloud computing, has been sought after by the industry in recent years, mainly because cloud native can make the deployment of applications and infrastructure faster, so that enterprises can enjoy the elasticity and flexibility of cloud with lower technology costs.

Ding Yu, head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Container Platform, said in an interview with 21st Century Economic Report recently that in the past seven or eight years, cloud native technology has developed rapidly and has many relatively mature technologies. Cloud native has reshaped the entire software lifecycle and is building cloud-era software in a more open, standard way.

Containers in the age of cloud computing

Specifically, cloud nativity is typically represented by technologies such as containers, service grids, microservices, and Serverless, among which container technology is considered to be the cornerstone of cloud nativity.

Yi Li, R & D director of Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes Engine, told reporters that the rise of container technology originated from the open source docker in 2013, which is an application virtualization technology. For example,"if the physical machine is a single-family house and the virtual machine is a townhouse, then the container is a container house. Yi Li further said,"The reason why the container is described as a container house is that compared with single-family villas and townhouses, container houses can be arranged with many rooms in high density, and the internal design can also be personalized. When building, only cranes are needed to carry container rooms. "

In fact, the value of container technology is also reflected in agility, elasticity and portability. From an application architecture perspective, container technology can easily support microservices architecture to modernize applications and be more flexible to respond to changes and elastic expansion. At the same time, container technology can greatly improve the efficiency of software development and accelerate iteration. According to Yi Li, containers can help software development delivery efficiency increase by 10 times, which means that enterprises can iterate faster and with lower trial and error costs. The container's second-level elastic expansion and contraction capacity can save enterprises 50% of computing costs, which plays a very critical role in dealing with traffic peaks such as Double Eleven. In addition, at the infrastructure level, the portability of container technology can help enterprises more easily move to and from the cloud, allowing applications to migrate dynamically between their own data centers and the cloud.

Based on the above characteristics, container technology is also deeply loved by enterprises. Gartner reports that 75% of global enterprises will use cloud-native containerized applications in production by 2022. In the future, with the further development of container technology, it will further promote the transformation of enterprises from traditional infrastructure-centric to application-centric IT architecture. Giant Plus Cloud Native Ali began to lay out container technology dating back to November 2011 and commercialized since December 2015, providing Kubernetes Engine and container mirroring services.

As a nine-year witness to Double 11, Ding Yu participated in the whole process of evolution and upgrading of Double 11 technical architecture. Therefore, his understanding of container technology is deeper than others. Ding Yu told 21st Century Business News that Alibaba has been fully containerized since 2011 and has achieved 100% containerization very early. Based on unified scheduling and mixed deployment after containerization, Double 11 can save 75% of the cost, which is a very obvious technical dividend for any company.

According to its introduction, Alibaba is vigorously promoting and applying cloud-native technology internally, and in the next two years, Alibaba's industry will run 100% on the public cloud in a cloud-native manner.

In addition, when facing external enterprises, Alibaba Cloud has also built a relatively rich cloud native product matrix, covering more than 20 products in eight categories, involving underlying infrastructure, data intelligence, distributed applications, etc. It is understood that Siemens, Sina Weibo, unexpectedly home, Thunder, Guotai Junan (17.890, -0.18, -1.00%), Tianhong Fund, etc. are Alibaba's cloud native customers.

As a chaser, Tencent Cloud (Cloud) has also begun to make great efforts in cloud native technology. In June this year, Tencent Cloud (Cloud) and Kuifang Cloud released four cloud native technology products in one breath, including enterprise-level Kubernetes Engine Platform TKE, Kubernetes Engine Grid, Serverless 2.0, One-stop DevOps, etc.

According to Liu Ying, vice president of Tencent Cloud, these cloud-native technology products have been verified in many scenarios such as Internet business, traditional business and government-enterprise business, which can help enterprises quickly migrate from traditional architecture to cloud-native architecture, and at the same time, it can also help enterprises quickly build "cloud-born" applications from scratch.

At present, Tencent Cloud (Cloud) has built a cloud-native application orchestration platform with many functions in the cloud-native field. It is reported that the platform includes Tencent Cloud (Cloud) Kubernetes Engine platform TKE, development and operation platform Tencent Hub, microservice management tools, no service suite, as well as big data and artificial intelligence solutions based on the above products.

Zou Hui, director of PaaS products of Tencent Cloud (Cloud), said that the native application layout platform of Tencent Cloud carries hundreds of millions of containers in internal training, supporting the operation and upgrading of many mass-level businesses. Meanwhile, the platform has also been applied in external fields such as Internet, e-commerce, finance, government affairs and smart retail.

Gartner estimates that by 2020, 50% of legacy apps will be transformed in a cloud-native way. At present, the trend is that in addition to the Internet industry, more and more traditional industries, such as manufacturing, real estate, etc., as well as government departments are embracing cloud native technology, which will also be a huge market with both opportunities and challenges for cloud service providers.

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