Published the Cloud Native Talent Training Cooperation Plan

Cloud computing brings a new software industry structure

"One stage of technology solves one stage of problems, and over the past 30 years, application technology has undergone rapid development.".

From 1995 to 2008, the core demand of enterprises was to solve the problems of small-scale MIS to complex business systems in enterprises, from stand-alone technology to distributed cluster technology (such as CORBA and EJB). In this process, some commercially popular middleware (such as WebLogic, WebSphere, IBM MQ, Spring, and tomcat) was used.

From 2009 to 2018, with the rise of Internet technology, enterprises are more concerned about how to solve the cost and scale expansion issues of business systems supporting billions of users. At this time, the technical architecture has shifted from distributed cluster technology to Internet technology architecture (such as containers, microservices, DevOps, etc.). Open source middleware products (such as Dubbo, RocketMQ, and Spring Cloud) have received attention, and many enterprises have begun to build their own business systems based on open source projects.

Starting in 2019, with the rise of cloud native technology, the demand for digital transformation has become very urgent for enterprises. Enterprises have begun to focus on business agile iteration and data intelligence issues, and cloud native architecture has emerged as the times require. Transforming from internet architecture to cloud native architecture, from comprehensive cloud adoption to innovative applications with a hundred flowers blooming on the cloud, enterprises have begun to use more stable and application oriented cloud native products (such as DPCA+container, container+AI, cloud edge management, multi cloud/hybrid cloud management, aPaaS, functional computing, cloud native technology, CNStack, DevOps, etc.).

Cloud computing is the epitome of previous generations of technology, evolving from enterprise application architecture to Internet architecture, and then to cloud native architecture. Through the four steps of infrastructure cloudization, core technology Internetization, application datalization, and decision-making intelligence, cloud computing helps to promote the digital upgrading of industries. It can be said that cloud computing has brought about a new structural change in the software industry.

Today, cloud native technology has become a necessary skill for developers. Contemporary developers will conduct technology selection and application development based on cloud products. We also see that industry applications are undergoing a comprehensive transformation to cloud native.

In actual production, we can also clearly feel the innovation brought by cloud native development models. Significant changes have taken place in terms of architecture, application delivery, operation and maintenance, scalability, dependencies, and even the organizational culture of the enterprise. IDC predicts that by 2024, the development of the digital economy will spawn more than 500 million new applications, which is comparable to the number of applications that have emerged in the past 40 years. Cloud native technology and development methods make it possible for these massive new applications to emerge in a short time.

In the cloud native era, what is the core competitiveness of cloud products? The foundation of cloud products is to continue to be a representative of advanced productivity, which requires cloud products to have the technical capabilities of a hard core and be able to achieve rapid iterations. For any enterprise, it is difficult for its own system to have such tenacious vitality and competitiveness, as is Alibaba. Therefore, Alibaba will fully switch to cloud native product support in 2020, and achieve container and serverless cloud products in 2021. Alibaba Cloud has fully entered the cloud native era.

Alibaba Cloud has the richest cloud native product family in China

Alibaba Cloud has over 300 cloud products and nearly a thousand technical solutions, including cloud native DevOps, aPaaS&microservices, messaging and event driven, application tools, Serverless architecture, cloud native technology center CNStack, as well as cloud native databases, big data/AI, and video clouds. Cloud original products can provide enterprises with five core values: system stability, resource elasticity, application agility, business intelligence, and security and credibility. It can be said that an enterprise was born in the cloud native era, and can fully build its IT system based on the cloud. Alibaba Cloud can provide the most complete technical solutions and product systems.

The original power of cloud behind thousands of lines and industries

The core system of Shentong Express has been fully migrated to Alibaba Cloud, with an average daily order processing volume of nearly 30 million on the cloud. During peak business hours, the processing efficiency of requests per second has been improved by 30%, resource utilization has been improved by 80%, and costs have been reduced by 50%.

China Southern Airlines has built a business center solution. China Southern Airlines has achieved quasi real-time cloud query for 1.5 million flights and 39 million seats, with an average response time of only 2 seconds for international and domestic flight orders.

This year's Beijing Winter Olympics is the first fully clouded Olympic Games. The cloud origin product family stably supports the core business system of the Beijing Winter Olympics. More than 2.7 billion people worldwide participate in interactions, broadcast more than 6000 hours of content, provide services to more than 32000 staff, and reduce overall cloud energy consumption by 70%.

Related reading: Quickly generate thumbnail images, and Serverless supports event broadcasting to lock in highlights of the Winter Olympics

NetEase Cloud Music is a national level app that builds an elastic and highly available audio and video processing system based on functional computing FC, which increases the business landing speed by 10 times, and enables image caching in seconds, greatly reducing operation and maintenance costs.

Related reading: Netease Cloud Music Audio Video Algorithm's Serverless Exploration Road

Introducing Open Source Projects into Engineering Practice Training

Over the years, Alibaba Cloud has contributed more than 2700 open source projects to top global foundations, covering multiple fields such as big data, cloud computing, AI, middleware, containers, and Serverless. With over 30000 contributors and over a million GitHub Stars, Alibaba Cloud ranks first in the contribution of the Chinese enterprise open source community GitHub.

Some open source projects have become de facto standards in this field, such as Dubbo, which has become the most influential and widely used open source microservice framework in China; RocketMQ is the first Apache top level project of Internet middleware in China, and it is also the first open source middleware project in China all the year round. These open source projects are an excellent shortcut for teachers and students to resonate with industrial technology at the same frequency, and are very suitable for introduction into teaching to train students' engineering practical abilities.

Last year, Alibaba Pingtouge opened up the Dark Iron RISC-V series of processors, as well as a series of tools and system software, as well as the Dragon lizard operating system and the cloud native database PolarDB. Open source projects in these communities are very valuable for cultivating high-level talents in integrated circuits, operating systems, and databases.

From an industry perspective, in the cloud native era, there are also new requirements for the skills of computer talents. Developers should focus on cloud native technologies that represent the innovation trend in the cloud computing field, based on a sub model of cloud native technology capabilities that includes the following six dimensions.

• Technical architecture design capabilities: Compared to the requirements of traditional architecture design for developers, "cloud based" architecture design, which is based on multi cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, is a key difference in technical architecture design capabilities, and is also the core of improving developers' capabilities in the technical architecture design dimension in all cloud practice.

• Technology stack coverage capability: Based on the cloud based technology architecture, the presentation of technology stack capabilities will be primarily service-oriented.

Platform framework application capabilities: Developers will encounter various types of frameworks in the process of practicing on the cloud, whether it is cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, middleware, storage, database, or other emerging technology platforms, to avoid reinventing the wheel and accelerate the development process.

• Life cycle management capability: Software and hardware development life cycle management on the cloud not only involves the collaboration of development environments and the management of development elements, including various development resources, but also requires effective empowerment of various processes, tools, operations, and environments, while organically adapting to different technical and business scenarios.

• Development language use ability: With the deepening of cloud practice, developers will have more and more opportunities to carry out relevant work in different technical fields, and the ability to use different development languages that meet the requirements of relevant fields, including traditional general programming languages, emerging general programming languages, and domain specific languages, will also become the advantages and even necessary skills of developers, Therefore, "diversification" will become the most important point that developers need to grasp in the development language usage dimension.

• Technical field support capabilities: Cloud native collaborative support for different emerging technology fields lays the foundation for cloud platforms to platform driven innovation in different business fields, while business fields related to different emerging technologies also have different requirements for development skills, development methods, and development speed.

Strengthen industry-university-research cooperation to jointly cultivate talents in the digital era

It is precisely because of the higher requirements for talent skills that strengthening cooperation between industry, university, and research has become very important. Currently, the epidemic has accelerated the digitization process of the entire society. In the future, more enterprises will migrate to the cloud and use big data and artificial intelligence technologies to achieve digital transformation and upgrading. This requires a large number of talents in cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence related fields to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation and upgrading.

The fields of cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence involve a wide range of disciplines, including virtualization, networking, efficient operation and maintenance, data science, data processing, data security, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and other technologies. While accumulating technology, it also requires skilled personnel to deeply understand the industry, such as new retail, new manufacturing, new finance, and the Internet of Things, in order to turn cutting-edge technologies into productivity and better empower the industry. Only through deep integration of industry, university, and research can it be possible to achieve technological empowerment. Alibaba Cloud benefits from the dividends of talent in the era. We hope to continuously strengthen cooperation with universities in production, education, and research to jointly cultivate outstanding talents in the digital era.

The generation gap between university computer education and industry, education, and research. After investigation, we have found that there is a disconnect between computer education and talent cultivation in universities and the development of industrial technology.

On the one hand, the iterative speed of information technology in the Internet era has greatly accelerated, and college teachers are relatively far from industrial practice, making it difficult to master new technologies in a short time and precipitate them into new teaching courseware.

On the other hand, colleges and universities generally lack cloud computing experimental environments and experimental cases targeting big data in Internet settings, and building such experimental environments and cases specifically for teaching requires a large investment. Even if teachers use open source software to build such environments, there are significant differences between real cloud computing and big data business environments, resulting in students often completing credit tasks, But I still feel confused about new industrial technologies.

In the cloud native era, computer education needs to change with the cloud

Alibaba Cloud calls for computer education to change with the cloud. The Ministry of Education launched a new engineering construction plan in 2017. I believe its essence is to enable talent cultivation to adapt to the digital transformation of the modern technology industry as soon as possible, and cultivate high-quality talents with digital skills for the development of the digital economy. Therefore, recognizing the technical support system behind the digital economy and grasping the talent skills requirements for the development of the digital economy are the key to the success of current education reform.

In this sense, with the increasingly prominent core position of cloud in the wave of information technology revolution and digital economy, as well as the evolution of a new type of computing system with cloud as its core, the knowledge system of computer education in universities should also expand with the cloud, and the training mode of engineering practical ability of computer talents should also change with the cloud.

Therefore, we call for and propose to incorporate cloud computing into the core knowledge system of various disciplines in the new engineering discipline, introduce the distributed architecture and cloud native architecture of the cloud into professional courses in the computer and software fields, replacing the traditional curriculum system that focuses on "single computer principles and applications", so that students can establish a "operating system" level understanding of the cloud, and fully carry out cloud based practice to experience cloud To learn how to use the cloud in the senior stage, and then to learn and practice how to build a cloud system in the graduate stage, the entire process can rely on various cloud resources provided by enterprises such as Alibaba Cloud, or make full use of open source projects in the open source community to comprehensively improve students' engineering literacy towards the cloud era.

Cooperate with university teachers to build demonstration courses of integration of production and teaching

In fact, in the past two years, under the guidance of the Ministry of Education, Alibaba Cloud has established a collaborative education project between the Ministry of Education and Alibaba Cloud industry and education, and has cooperated with university teachers to build a batch of industry and education integration demonstration courses, attempting to extend cloud computing and cloud native knowledge to existing courses. Alibaba Cloud also provides many product lines of free resources to support teaching practices.

The construction results of all these demonstration courses are open to all universities in the form of open source sharing. In order to better support teaching reform and talent cultivation, Alibaba Cloud will share and promote 20 years of technological savvy in the form of white papers, books, and textbooks. We are also actively seeking cooperation with universities to support teachers in preparing curriculum supporting textbooks for different student audiences.

High quality training of escort computer talents

In terms of cloud resources, we have taken advantage of our cloud platform's technical advantages and invested 3 billion yuan in ECS free computing power through the Feitian Acceleration Program. Many college teachers and students have received their first cloud server for free to do teaching research, experiments, and papers on ECS. Currently, more than 100000 students from 2200 colleges and universities have benefited from this project.

Alibaba Cloud's developer community also specifically provides three cloud labs that can support different computer courses. Through cloud labs, we have also opened many experience halls for different technologies and shared many industry practice cases. Because behind the cloud lab is Alibaba Cloud's industry-level cloud base, students can immerse themselves in the same cloud environment as future enterprise production, experience the elasticity, stability, high availability, security, and other characteristics of the cloud, and hone their cloud based engineering practice skills, thereby achieving a seamless and smooth transition in the future and becoming more qualified for their jobs.

Digitalization is the greatest certainty in the next 10 years. The modern world will run on software, which requires very high standards for developers. The era calls for better developers.

Today, Alibaba Cloud officially announced the cloud native talent training cooperation plan. We will cooperate with 200 universities, launch industry-university collaborative education projects, hold developer salons, teacher training, programming competitions, and other forms to cultivate 100000 new student developers for the society within three years, allowing students to fully experience the technological dividends of the cloud native era, and better create value and serve the society.