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

In 2020, affected by the epidemic, everyone's life will be difficult. However, if you compare Internet companies with traditional enterprises, you will find that the latter has been invisibly crushed. Why is the pressure of traditional enterprises or industries more intense? More affected by the epidemic? If the root search is not required, the answer is actually very simple. In the final analysis, it is that the enterprise information technology can not keep up with it, and the supporting capacity of IT infrastructure and architecture is insufficient, which causes enterprises to lose their core competitiveness in the digital torrent. Therefore, after the epidemic, digital transformation will become a required course for enterprises, while cloud native applications will become the customs clearance password for enterprises to unlock the digital transformation. So, the question is, what are cloud native applications?

The changing origin of the cloud

At first, many people thought that cloud native applications should meet several important features, such as micro-service-oriented architecture, self-service agility, API-based collaboration and so on.

In 2015, Google led the establishment of the Cloud native computing foundation (CNCF), which believes that the definition of cloud native (Cloud Native) should include three aspects, namely, application containerization, micro-service-oriented architecture and application support container scheduling.

In 2018, with the continuous growth of cloud native ecology, almost all the major cloud computing providers have joined the CNCF Foundation. At this time, cloud natives have been redefined, that is, true cloud native technologies should help organizations build and run resilient applications in new dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Representative technologies of cloud natives include containers, service grids, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative API. These technologies can build loosely coupled systems that are fault-tolerant, easy to manage, and easy to observe. Combined with reliable automation, cloud native technologies enable engineers to easily make frequent and predictable major changes to the system.

From this perspective, the cloud native concept has been in a state of continuous change and development, and no one can accurately define how it will evolve in the future. So, why don't we jump out of the concept of cloud natives and think more about what problems cloud natives can solve.

We can see that traditional industries always mentioned new manufacturing, new retail, new logistics and new technologies in the past, but now they are new infrastructure. In fact, they are essentially the same. They are all changes in the production mode brought about by the digital transformation of enterprises. In the future, enterprises will place more emphasis on personalized development. The most direct result of this change in application requirements is the adjustment of IT infrastructure. Whether your IT system is agile enough is the important value of cloud native existence, and it is also the problem that needs to be solved most.

Make the Internet of everything possible

"the practice of Internet enterprises in cloud native has taken the lead, and there are a lot of landing applications. However, with the maturity of cloud native technology, traditional industry enterprises have also begun to try to use cloud native application technology, including banking, telecommunications, energy, manufacturing enterprises, and begin to do relevant deployment to build core platforms through cloud native."

Xu Yuan, an architect of Intel data center products, believes that cloud natives are moving towards a period of rapid development because of several of the most important changes. First, the changes brought about by technological innovation, including AI technology, 5G technology, etc.; second, some changes have taken place in consumer habits and consumption patterns; third, the industrial structure is changing. In fact, the application of cloud in the Internet industry was the earliest, and it was also to cope with the rapidly changing market. For traditional industries, if they want to remain invincible in the rapidly changing market competition, they must make full technical preparations before major changes take place.

However, how to jump out of the cloud native complex technology vortex and find a solution that better meets the enterprise application scenario?

"first of all, the technical architecture of the enterprise and the entire IT platform should adapt to the cloud native technology; second, it is necessary to change the previous organizational structure, including development process, operation and maintenance process, organizational composition and personnel training, knowledge accumulation, and so on, to meet the needs of modern business environment." Xu Yuan stressed that in the cloud native era, the modern IT architecture is very different from the traditional IT platform, requiring a large number of fine-grained deployments, including the use of micro-service architecture.

As for the relationship between cloud native and micro-service architecture, DevOps, containers, and K8S technology? How to adjust the corresponding infrastructure? Lin Xiaoyin, solution architect of pre-sales Systems Engineering Department of Dell Technology Group, and Zhang Lijun, Enterprise Technology Strategy architect of Dell Technology Group, analyzed the current situation of cloud native development and related countermeasures from the perspective of Dell Technology.

First, in the cloud native environment, steady-state IT and sensitive IT tend to merge with each other. In the past, many people thought that Oracle, Microsoft SQLServer, and SAP ERP suites all belonged to the traditional steady-state IT category, but now Oracle and SAP are also embracing cloud nativism. The Oracel database is already running in the container; SQLServer can run not only under Windows, but also in Linux-based containers; SAP is also containerizing the ERP suite.

Second, IaaS and PaaS integrate with each other. Under the traditional IT architecture, virtual machines and containers belong to two separate bodies, but now the boundary between the two is being broken. VMware modern solution can integrate Iaas and PaaS, host relatively steady-state applications through virtual machines, deal with more sensitive applications through containers, and enable businesses in the two worlds to communicate with each other.

Third, the line between public and private clouds is becoming blurred. In the original private cloud model, it involves a lot of software, hardware and services, and the construction cycle is relatively long; but now, more and more manufacturers are promoting integrated solutions, which greatly speed up the deployment of private clouds. In some ways, there is a preference for hybrid cloud solutions. For example: AWS launched Autotools, Microsoft launched AzureStack, domestic Tencent, Ali also have similar solutions.

Fourth, in the past, the cloud native was more used in some peripheral, non-core applications, for non-production environments, but now, more and more industry users deploy cloud native applications in the production environment, and slowly migrate their core applications to the cloud native direction.

Fifth, hybrid clouds and cloudy clouds have gradually become a mainstream trend. It has become the consensus of most people that no cloud can dominate the world. Some workloads can be placed in public clouds, but some workloads are more suitable for private clouds, so we need to create a multi-cloud environment that can be interconnected.

The biggest difference between cloud native and traditional applications is that it is mainly used in non-internal systems of enterprises, which is a kind of external application of B2C model. Therefore, in the coming period of time, there will still be some business running on virtual machines or bare metal, this is an era of symbiosis.

The key points of cloud primary landing

So, how to choose when landing to a specific business scenario? If enterprises want to cut into the cloud native track, where should they start? In fact, there is no unified path! Some companies start from the development department, some companies start from the operation and maintenance, while others are imported from the architecture design side of the entire platform. Different enterprises should combine their own business conditions and choose according to the development stage and business characteristics of the enterprise.

Xu Yuan gives several examples of the landing problem of the original cloud. For example, customers in the financial industry have their own development teams. Generally, the way to open cloud native will start from the development department, start with micro-services, containerization and Serverless, and then gradually promote it. Manufacturing companies, for example, generally do not have their own development team, and are more likely to obtain cloud native applications from third-party software buyers. And, in addition to applications, there are big data, artificial intelligence and many other data processing platforms, these platforms themselves have been cloud original biochemistry. Just like the deep learning framework tensorflow, which is widely used in the industrial field, there is a project combined with kubernetes, called Kubeflow, and many customers land in this way. In addition, there are some government customers who directly implement and deploy in the cloud native way when building new platforms.

Generally speaking, under the traditional application architecture, the network traffic is mostly north-south, but in the era of cloud native platform, it will become east-west, which exerts great pressure on the whole data transmission, storage and computing. In order to make the data move faster, store more, adapt more widely, and help enterprises quickly move towards the cloud native era, Intel, Dell Technology Group, Wave Group and so on have launched a series of solutions and related products.

It can be predicted that in the process of accelerating the digital transformation of enterprises in the future, cloud native will certainly become the basic application of modern business, and its breadth and depth will far exceed the virtualization of that year, and eventually become a solid base for the modernization of enterprise applications.

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