Exclusive interpretation: Alibaba Cloud's layout and strategy for native applications

Author | Yang Li

Interviewee | Ding Yu

Produced by | Leifeng.com Industry Group

At this stage of evolution, cloud native has shortened the digital transformation path for customers. If everything in the cloud native era is based on the customer's perspective, then further decomposition is centered around the customer's business scenario and system architecture, rather than the old way of piling up people and labor. How to correctly guide customers to share the technical dividends of cloud native? Ding Yu, nicknamed Shutong, is an Alibaba researcher and head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform. What he sees and gives may not be the only solution for customers' digital transformation, but it is the optimal solution to a certain type of problem obtained through years of practice at Alibaba Cloud.

Looking back over the past fifteen years, Alibaba's cloud-native practices have grown with the scale of the group's business and the complexity of supported scenarios. Internally, Alibaba Taobao, as the world's largest e-commerce trading platform, brings great technical challenges to its e-commerce business every year on Double 11. Externally, Alibaba Cloud supports 3 million corporate customers worldwide, helping customers solve problems while also paying attention to the development of their business. In fact, the emergence of different problems at each stage is also an innovation engine for Alibaba's own product technology breakthroughs.

If we analyze the changes in Alibaba Cloud's native practices over the past 15 years, we will inevitably come to the following logic: self-developed - self-use - cloud-based and open.

• Phase 1: From 2006 to 2011, Taobao Mall switched from a centralized architecture to a microservice distributed architecture, focusing on solving the problems of high availability and stability.

• The second stage: 2011-2015, we started to invest in containers to solve the problems of cost and operation and maintenance efficiency.

• The third stage: 2015-2019, promoting the full commercialization of product technologies and fully embracing cloud-native standards.

• The fourth stage: From 2019 to the present, from supporting the full cloud migration of the core systems for Double 11 to supporting the full cloud nativeization of the core systems.

It can be said that Alibaba has caught up with two dividends, one is the dividend of Internet economies of scale, and the other is the dividend of cloud computing. Only by constantly solving the problems encountered in these dividends can Alibaba create these products and have the opportunity to fully upgrade the next generation of cloud native technology and continuously feed back to customers.

However, not all companies have the opportunity and time (window period) to access and shape the cloud-native capabilities of their own businesses.

"Before the emergence of cloud native, only companies with extremely strong capabilities could solve this problem. But with the emergence of cloud native, every company can access the cloud and extreme elasticity. This is the release of a universal dividend," said Ding Yu.

Currently, Alibaba Cloud has more than 300 cloud-native products and thousands of solutions, providing all-round capability support for enterprise digital innovation. Container technology is a representative example. Due to its combination with the cloud, it can shield the differences in infrastructure downwards, become a new interface for calling cloud services, and support various products upwards.

So how should we further understand cloud native, and what kind of advanced enterprises can take the lead in practicing cloud native?

Ding Yu, Alibaba Researcher, Head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Cloud Native Application Platform

In this interview, Ding Yu shared with us the evolution of Alibaba Cloud Native over the past 15 years, as well as his observations on the cloud computing field and his thoughts on the future development of the business. There are many lessons for cloud native companies and practitioners. The following is a complete summary of this exclusive interview.

There are too many interpretations of cloud native from the perspective of technology or vendors. This time, we try to look at the changes brought about by cloud native from the perspective of customers.

The market acceptance and implementation maturity of cloud native in the entire industry are increasing. This is due to two intuitive feelings that cloud native brings to enterprises.

• The first is cost and resource optimization. Many companies purchase cloud resources for a month, but may only use them for a week. Companies are not very good at using the cloud and using it flexibly, so they can only trade time for space and buy more time to solve the problem of weak capabilities. However, cloud native solves this problem, allowing users to use it as they please and return it when they are done, which is itself a very strong resource optimization.

During the pandemic last year, online education industry customers increased resource utilization by nearly 50% to 60% with the support of Alibaba Cloud. Customers can manage resources downward and manage AI, big data, databases, audio and video and other tasks upward, and achieve full life cycle optimization through flexible scheduling, hybrid deployment, and full life cycle management of tasks, DevOps, etc.

• The second is the optimization of R&D efficiency. The R&D efficiency of an enterprise often depends on the advancement of its architecture. Cloud native achieves full-stack optimization of release, launch, operation and maintenance, and development tools, improving the throughput of R&D personnel per unit production.

A data shows that Walnut Programming has reduced the operation and maintenance workload by 30% and shortened the average fault location time by 60% by using the cloud-native observability product ARMS.

"We will definitely do one thing, that is, as long as enterprises try it, they will like it and be willing to continue using it. The cloud-native technology and products provided by Alibaba Cloud are very versatile and advanced in the industry, and are on the main line of the development trend of enterprise digital innovation. Although there may be a certain learning cost for enterprise customers, this kind of tangible efficiency improvement and cost reduction is very valuable for the development of enterprises in the next five, ten or even longer years."

Prior to this, Alibaba Cloud has achieved two "30%" improvements through cloud-native technologies and products, namely, increasing R&D efficiency by 30% and reducing IT costs by 30%. It hopes to empower millions of companies to carry out cloud-native transformation through its own practice.

In the process of interacting with customers from various industries, Ding Yu was deeply touched:

"The advantages of cloud-native will bring obvious changes to customers, but this change is not what customers care about most. Customers are more concerned about how to achieve business success and help themselves achieve digital transformation. These are the core issues. Alibaba Cloud will start from this perspective and provide corresponding product solutions based on customer needs. These are essentially cloud-native systems, but the product forms and levels will be different."

As mentioned above, Alibaba proposed and completed the full cloud migration of its core systems in 2019, and proposed cloud nativeization of its core systems in 2020, fully supporting the group's Double 11 promotion through cloud native products. Cloud native is not something that can be achieved overnight, especially for a large system like Alibaba. It is a gradual process, but we will quickly see the changes brought about by cloud native in some emerging businesses.

For Alibaba, the final state of cloud native will probably be a 28 state, that is, at least 20% will still be self-built, and 80% of the business will be cloud native, but it will not achieve 100% cloud native.

The reason is that in the era of enterprise cloud migration, IaaS cloud migration is more about it. Under the scale effect, the cost of cloud computing can be as low as water, coal and electricity. From self-built computer rooms to rental services, enterprise customers can directly feel the significant reduction in costs. However, at the PaaS level, different roles and scenarios, tools and services are involved, and the differences of PaaS begin to stand out, such as enterprise development tools, operation and maintenance tools, enterprise cloud management platforms, and internal IT systems. For a long time, this part has not been fully cloud-native.

Alibaba's business is very large, and if full cloud native means a lot of customized services, this is not the best solution. Achieving 80% cloud native in the future actually represents Alibaba's determination to invest in cloud native technology, and it can even waste some costs to solve the problem of legacy assets.

In 2016, Alibaba achieved 100% containerization, replacing the original business construction method with a new generation of containerization. This is unique among Internet companies.

In comparison, the biggest advantage of many emerging forces in the cloud-native era may be that they do not have the legacy asset problem that Alibaba faced 20 years ago, so it is much easier for them to achieve 100% cloud-native.

Take the retail industry as an example. The competitive situation in this industry determines that enterprises must be at the forefront, actively embrace digital transformation methods, use data to drive business, open up connections with customers, and realize store management and marketing digitization.

New businesses such as omni-channel marketing in the retail industry are often 100% cloud-native, but for some existing business segments, companies may not have much motivation, energy, and ability to achieve cloud-nativeness.

Ding Yu mentioned, "We need to recognize a contradiction. We can solve the core business digital transformation problems of enterprises, but we cannot provide a set of solutions to meet the needs of all enterprise systems. Cloud native is not a panacea that can help enterprises solve all problems."

All industries will have certain demands for the advanced productivity brought by cloud native, but whether that day comes or not still depends on the maturity of the industry and customers.

Containers + Kubernetes have become a new interface for cloud computing, which can support upstream businesses including emerging loads such as big data, AI, blockchain, and edge computing. From this perspective, cloud native is industry-neutral and is determined by the characteristics of scenarios and technology platforms.

But this does not mean that different customers have the same needs for cloud-native technology applications. In fact, different industries have obvious differences in their acceptance and preferences for solutions.

For example, offline physical industries such as government, enterprises, and finance prefer platform-level PaaS products, hoping for a good experience, low barriers to entry, high stability, and iteration; while Internet companies are less receptive to PaaS, and prefer modular, assemblable, with a certain degree of flexibility and openness. Such companies often have strong technical capabilities and also have their own ideas of control.

In addition, Internet companies have a clear preference for Serverless. Serverless significantly moves the cloud interface upward, reducing the energy consumption of developers. Within Alibaba Group, business units such as Xianyu and AutoNavi were the first to use Serverless technology before Alibaba Group.

"It's hard to say which business will come to the forefront. All businesses have the same desire for new technologies, but different business segments will try new areas and products based on their own capabilities and stages."

In terms of concepts, cloud native did not have a roughly standard definition until around 2013, and was further interpreted by CNCF in 2018. But in fact, Alibaba Cloud also has its own understanding of cloud native.

In Alibaba Cloud's view, cloud native can be understood in a narrow sense or a broad sense. In a narrow sense, cloud native comes from containers, and an enterprise's IT architecture must be combined with the cloud to have better advantages. The advantage of cloud native is that it can give full play to the capabilities of the cloud and take advantage of the cloud to build a flexible, scalable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-maintain system.

At the same time, the cloud itself is also changing and upgrading. For example, the upgrade of the Shenlong server and the coordinated optimization of the hardware and software with the container have greatly improved the performance and elasticity indicators; the combination of database and cloud native can run the database on the container, separate storage and computing, and realize elastic and automated operation and maintenance of the database.

The cloud has literally transformed the way technology is implemented.

In a broad sense, the connotation of cloud native may be richer. It is born from the cloud, changes for the cloud, is born on the cloud, and grows on the cloud. This practice has far exceeded the significance brought by containerization.

Take the Alibaba Cloud native application platform that Ding Yu is in charge of as an example. Different from the container services and middleware products we previously understood, the cloud native application platform is a rich platform involving multiple role systems. It is neither a container platform nor a PaaS, but it needs to connect to many core third-party SaaS service providers and PaaS service providers, and open compatibility interfaces to customers. Therefore, standards and open source may be one of the directions to improve the future commercialization system.

For example, Alibaba and Microsoft jointly launched a standard specification OAM (Open Application Model) in the community for building and delivering cloud-native applications. Its core concept is "application-centric". The reason is that in the past five years, cloud-native technology has mainly solved problems downward, but now it can support many work tasks upward, but lacks standardization of model management.

It used to be very difficult to commercialize open source, but the situation is different today. A large amount of open source software can provide services on the cloud. Whether it is containers, big data, or audio and video services, applications that meet standard specifications can be developed to reach customers through the cloud.

This approach of embracing open source ultimately influenced the open standards of software and formed the core feature of Alibaba Cloud's native application platform.

There is a saying in Alibaba: “Because we believe, we see.” No matter which direction the final conclusion leads to, the whole process of going all in is actually proving your vision.

Compared with the past, open source has formed a new business path due to the change in the cloud computing subscription model. Currently, Alibaba Cloud has more than 2,600 open source projects with over one million stars, which was unimaginable in the past.

Take the development of container technology as an example. Between 2011 and 2016, many container service providers missed the mark. Alibaba Cloud also replaced its container technology in 2016, choosing Docker, which had become the industry's de facto standard at the time.

This undoubtedly brings us back to a question: when choosing technology, should we develop our own or use open source technology?

For Alibaba, adopting open source or third-party products simply cannot support its scale and volume. If it can support it, the cost is also very high. If the company is self-developed, it will also bring a problem. It may not be easy to recruit people. From language to platform, framework, and architecture, all are self-developed. Talent training is a problem. Talents may not be easy to find jobs after leaving.

So the final point is that there must be standards. This standard can be universal for the industry, so that it is easier to recruit talents, and at the same time, it can absorb external forces, and self-developed products will have the opportunity to be commercialized.

Today, after years of practice, Alibaba Cloud has become a de facto standard for many things (such as Dubbo and RocketMQ), and has also followed industry trends and adopted many industry standards (such as Kubernetes).

Alibaba Cloud has always hoped to develop standardized technologies and connect them with community and industry standards. This will simplify many processes for Alibaba Cloud's customers, and its capabilities will also be the mainstream in the future.

Today, a large number of traditional software vendors, independent software service providers, and channel partners hope to provide more value innovation to end customers through their own transformation and upgrading. In fact, they have no shortage of proven delivery capabilities or good ideas, but the difficulty is that it is difficult to break through themselves in a short period of time when embracing new Internet technologies.

Today, there are both old and new SaaS vendors. The difference is that new SaaS vendors will develop entirely through the cloud because of their pursuit of cost and productivity. These vendors were born after the cloud computing era. If they do not enjoy the dividends of this era, they will not have any advantages compared to the old SaaS vendors, so they should seize the advantages of advanced technology.

Recently, Alibaba Cloud and APM manufacturer Borei Data have started cooperation in the field of observability, leveraging Alibaba Cloud's native technology products to implement Borei's layout of cloud dialing for SaaS delivery products and achieve large-scale development in an Internet-based manner.

Ding Yu mentioned, "Borui hopes to penetrate into the SaaS field with Alibaba Cloud and move closer to cloud computing architecture, because Borui sees that more customers will be on the cloud in the future, and it also hopes to advance into this market quickly. At this stage, it is necessary to bring observability into a new stage of development through concepts, cases, and the foresight of technology."

Although the industry's understanding and practice of cloud native are still uneven at present, Alibaba Cloud hopes to drive more companies to join cloud native through "self-fulfilling prophecy" during the stage of building market awareness of cloud native.

Nowadays, all industries are embracing cloud computing, which requires cloud vendors to continue to consolidate cloud infrastructure including servers, networks, computing, storage, etc., so as to form a very strong technological advantage; at the same time, the digital transformation of enterprises will definitely rely on cloud computing. If you want to obtain the benefits of the cloud, you must rely on cloud native technology.

Under this trend, services such as cloud-native databases, cloud-native big data, cloud-native middleware, and cloud-native security are also quietly changing because of the cloud.

This article is originally written by Leifeng.com, and the author is Yang Li. Please reply "reprint" to apply for authorization. Reprinting without authorization is prohibited.