Comprehensive Serverless core cloud products

On November 3, at the 2022 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said that a new computing system with the cloud as the core is taking shape, and the software research and development paradigm is undergoing new changes. Serverless is one of the most important trends. Alibaba Cloud will firmly promote the comprehensive serverless of its core products to help customers better realize agile innovation.

We hope that users can do less and gain more. With Serverless, using the cloud is as simple as using electricity. " Zhang Jianfeng said that Serverless makes cloud computing from a resource to a capability. In the future, the cloud will be fully serverless, closer to the "grid" model, and pay according to the number of calls.

Serverless does not use a server. Instead, it fully trusts the server to the cloud manufacturer. It automatically scales according to the size of business traffic. Out of the box, it eliminates maintenance costs and is billed based on usage. Users do not need to care about and manage the underlying IT resources. They just focus on business code and process business according to actual requests.

Relying on the Serverless architecture, the cloud research and development mode is undergoing a fundamental change. From the past centralized R&D, distributed R&D, to the cloud based assembly R&D, software R&D is service-oriented, modular, choreographable, and assembleable. Whether it is 20 million users or 20 million users, the IT architecture based on Serverless can scale adaptively, with automatic capacity expansion at peak second level and automatic capacity reduction at peak valley level.

Based on Serverless products, cloud products have become modular, API based, and service-oriented. It can be assembled, and applications can be built by dragging and dropping. Through process driven and event driven, application construction can be visualized, so as to obtain more powerful application capabilities.

Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud manufacturer in China to provide Serverless computing services.

• FC function computing introduced in 2017 is a FaaS product, which is an event driven fully hosted computing service. Users only need to write code and upload it. Function computing will automatically prepare computing resources, run code in an elastic and reliable way, and provide log query, performance monitoring, alarm and other functions.

👉 Function calculation official website: https://www.aliyun.com/product/fc?

• In 2018, the industry-leading Serverless container service ASK was launched, which is based on the elastic container instance ECI (Elastic Container Instance). It can achieve an expansion of 2000 pods in one minute, reducing the threshold for Kubernetes to use, allowing users to focus more on applications rather than managing underlying infrastructure.

• The Serverless application engine SAE, launched in 2018, is the first application oriented Serverless PaaS platform in the industry. It shields the complexity of the underlying IaaS and Kubernetes, provides a zero code transformation, more cost-effective, and more efficient application hosting solution, and helps users achieve serverless single Web applications, micro service applications, and customized tasks.

• In 2020, the open-source Serverless developer platform, Serverless Devs, will be the first cloud native lifecycle management platform supporting mainstream Serverless services/frameworks in the industry. In September 2022, Serverless Devs officially became the official sandbox project of CNCF and the first Serverless Tool project of CNCF.

• Launched in 2022 by the Serverless Application Center, it is a full lifecycle management platform for serverless applications. Users can quickly deploy and manage applications without additional cloning, building, packaging, and publishing operations before deploying applications.

Gartner, an authoritative analyst, predicted that more than 50% of global enterprises will deploy the Serverless architecture in 2025. From the perspective of application scenarios, in addition to small programs, Serverless is also favored by e-commerce promotion, audio and video transcoding, AI algorithm services, game application package distribution, real-time file processing, Internet of Things data processing, microservices and other scenarios.

Century Lianhua was the first new retail representative to test Serverless. When it was found that the old architecture could not meet the traffic explosion problem, it resolutely put the membership system, trading system, payment system, etc. on Alibaba Cloud function computing. It said goodbye to the expansion of machines to support the general volume of business. The promotion preparation time was shortened from weekly to hourly, the R&D and operation and maintenance efficiency was improved by 30%, and the cost was reduced by 40%. It really turned the promotion activities into normal;

Pumpkin Film, a streaming media platform, was built on Alibaba Cloud from the beginning of its business. It is a typical enterprise "born in the cloud, and grow in the cloud". But with the continuous development of business, the original system architecture gradually exposed many problems. Because of a hot movie, the number of new users of Pumpkin Movie increased by 1 million within one hour. The traffic explosion caused the interruption of website services for a while, and the temporary cloud expansion could not meet the huge traffic in time. We learned from the bitter experience and began to move towards the transformation of Serverless. Based on the Alibaba Cloud Serverless application engine SAE product, we completed the launch of the core application API gateway in three days. On the fifth day, 100% of the traffic was transferred to SAE after the verification. On the sixth to seventh days, we quickly migrated more than 30 systems to SAE. The Serverless architecture upgrade was completed in 7 days. After using SAE, the operation and maintenance efficiency increased by 70%, the cost decreased by more than 40%, and the capacity expansion efficiency increased by more than 10 times.

At present, Alibaba Cloud has more than 20 Serverless products, including more than 20 billion daily calls of AliCloud function computing FC, which effectively supports the 11 million QPS peak over the years. The business growth rate has exceeded 300%, and the overall scale ranks first in China.

In the FaaS platform evaluation report for the first quarter of 2021 released by Forrester, Alibaba Cloud has become the world's top three FaaS leader by virtue of its comprehensive leading function computing product capabilities, which is the first time that a domestic technology company has entered the FaaS leader quadrant.