Reduce the evolution cost of microservices in the cloud native era

The overall popularization and generalization of a technology will inevitably go through the process of standardization, and micro service technology is no exception. At the 2022 Cloud Habitat Conference, Ding Yu, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's intelligent cloud native application platform, released the microservice engine MSE 3.0, which reduces the evolution cost of microservices in the cloud native era by providing an open standard, easy integration, easy expansion, stable and reliable registration and configuration center, microservice governance, and cloud native gateway.

Standardization of registration configuration center, pursuit of stronger performance and higher stability

In 2018, after Alibaba opened a series of microservice components such as Nacos, Sentinel and Seata, domestic microservice developers had a choice of microservice open source technology stack in addition to Spring+Netflix, which also accelerated the popularization and implementation of microservice technology.

Today, in the field of registration and configuration center, Nacos has occupied more than 50% of the market share [1], becoming the de facto standard in this field. Today, the first core capability of Alibaba Cloud's micro service engine MSE 3.0 is the registration and configuration center. Compared with mainstream open source solutions such as Nacos, the performance of MSE has been improved by 40%, and it helps customers achieve exceptional service autonomy by providing 70+monitoring indicators and health detection.

Helian Health is a SaaS enterprise in the medical and health industry. Through MSE registration and configuration center, the performance of the open-source registration and configuration center has been improved by 50%, which has solved the scalability problem in the rapid development of business, and guaranteed the stability of the experience business of more than 200 cities and 2000 hospitals across the country to exceed 99.99%.

Standardized microservice governance, pursuing to reduce release risk and shorten construction cycle

Open source lowers the threshold for building microservices and accelerates the settlement of microservices, but it also faces new propositions.

Microservice architecture carries more and more online businesses, and calls between services are more and more complex. However, the more complex the relationship is, the more small technical problems are likely to be amplified, resulting in large online failures. Especially in the process of software release, the risk introduced is more uncontrollable. Microservice governance can reduce or even avoid the stability problems encountered in publishing and managing large-scale applications.

However, the heterogeneity of language and service frameworks will increase the cost of microservice governance exponentially. First, each open source framework and protocol has different definitions and capabilities for microservice governance. Second, everyone's governance models and rules are also different. The proportion of developers using multiple microservice frameworks or RPC frameworks has reached 24% [2]. OpenSergo, which is open source this year, aims to reach a consensus between different microservice frameworks and communication protocols and form a service governance specification.

The second core capability of MSE 3.0, a microservice engine, is microservice governance. It originates from Alibaba's 10+practical experience, follows OpenSergo's microservice governance specifications, and helps customers eliminate 80% of software change risks, improve development and testing efficiency by 50%, and shorten the implementation cycle of microservices by 30% through lossless online and offline, full link grayscale, traffic protection and other technical means.

Zhijing Technology is an Internet enterprise in the textile industry. It has access to MSE's micro service governance capabilities without modifying any code. Based on the isolation capability of the development environment, the construction time of the test environment was reduced from days to minutes, the implementation cycle of microservices was shortened by 30%, and customers were accelerated to build a digital intelligent integrated service platform for textile and clothing vertical integration.

Cloud native gateway standardization, pursuing stronger performance and higher security

Before the popularity of K8s, the gateway's entrance traffic was decentralized and the demands were different. There were multiple forms of traffic gateway, API gateway, microservice gateway, and integrated gateway, and the standards were not unified. They were all built and maintained independently; K8s unifies the communication specification of the gateway through Ingress, which makes it possible to build and manage traffic gateways and microservice gateways in a unified way. Therefore, the next generation gateway - cloud native gateway was born. At the same time, after the gateway entrance is unified, the construction complexity increases, and there are higher demands on unified management, performance, stability and security.

The third largest capability of MSE 3.0 is the cloud native gateway. We have integrated the traffic gateway, microservice gateway and security gateway into one. We have also upgraded the architecture, and upgraded the instance level protection to the routing level protection. The overall performance is 90% higher than that of traditional gateways.

Ferry Interactive focuses on innovation and research and development in the field of mobile marketing. It needs to handle 100 million+fan interactions every day, as well as 40000+offline stores and 30 million+monthly mobile payments. It has high requirements on the performance and stability of the gateway access layer. A zero trust architecture was built through the MSE Cloud native gateway, which greatly improved the security of the business entrance. With the integration of software and hardware, the performance was improved by 90% and the response time was reduced by 50%.

Although the cloud native gateway is good, there are many open source or commercial different technology types. Therefore, MSE decided to open source the cloud native gateway to provide a standardized, highly integrated, scalable, and hot updated cloud native gateway, named Highness, which not only follows the Ingress standard, but also implies high performance.

Higress originates from the practice of Alibaba's internal e-commerce, trading and other core production scenarios, follows the Ingress/Gateway API standard, integrates traffic gateway, microservice gateway and security gateway, and on this basis, expands service management plug-ins, security plug-ins and custom plug-ins, highly integrates K8s and microservice ecology, including Nacos registration and configuration, Sentinel current limiting and demotion capabilities, It also supports the ability of hot update such as rule change taking effect in milliseconds.

MSE has gone through more than three years and developed to 3.0, which is also the rapid popularization process of domestic microservices. From the initial requirements of microservice construction, to solving the problem of microservice implementation from 0 to 1, to the governance requirements of microservice, to solving the problem of managing microservice well, to the requirements of K8s unified gateway entrance, to solving the original problem of microservice. MSE 3.0 helped customers solve these problems of microservices at the right time.