Technology inventory: Technology Evolution and Future Trend Outlook of cloud native Middleware

author ： Hu weiqi ( Baimu )

Zhang Yong, chairman of Alibaba's board of directors and CEO, shared at the yunqi conference

In the past few years , With the rapid development of cloud native technology ecology , Middleware technology is also evolving forward in line with this general trend , If we want to talk about the general direction of middleware evolution , I think it's Yunyuan biochemistry , But for middleware , There are two meanings .

The first is the middleware's own architecture and the cloud origin of runtime . As we all know, there are basically stateful applications between middleware , Throughout IT Architecture plays a very central role , about IO、 performance 、 The requirements for stability are very high , Therefore, the capacity management of middleware has always been 、 deliver 、 Operation and maintenance 、 Disaster recovery is a difficult problem in the industry , But as the cloud native technology system matures , Now the middleware is in the cloud , With cloud native technology , First of all, it solves the problem of its own elasticity and toughness , Secondly, based on K8s + Operating base of container , Solved the operation and maintenance of middleware 、 Delivery issues .

The second is the cloud prototype that developers use middleware . Today's cloud native middleware , Usually, the BaaS or SaaS The form of , It helps users shield the differences of the underlying operating environment and the complexity of operation and maintenance , Users through standardized API You can complete the call to the middleware , The advantage of this form is that middleware is gradually infrastructure , Developers can pay more attention to business development , So as to improve the overall development and operation and maintenance efficiency of the enterprise .

Cloud native middleware and local middleware PaaS Whether there are essential differences between middleware ？

Let's talk about it , We just need to understand the nature of cloud computing and cloud Nativity . Now the industry has basically reached a consensus on the definition of cloud native , Let's not talk about it here , Combined with the characteristics of middleware , Cloud native middleware and local middleware PaaS The essential difference of middleware lies in flexibility 、 stability 、 High availability 、 Security 、 Use cost, etc .

elastic ： Cloud native technology system brings good extension mechanism and elastic architecture to middleware , Then, with the help of massive resources on the cloud, we can realize the elastic capacity expansion and contraction of middleware on demand , So that users do not need to prepare relevant resources in advance , There is no need to worry about whether the capacity meets the business needs .

stability ： In terms of stability , We need to analyze the factors that affect the stability of middleware , It mainly includes hardware 、 operating system 、 The Internet 、 Storage 、 Operations etc. , Take advantage of the complete IaaS and PaaS Ability , It can efficiently build a high-quality stability guarantee system for Middleware in various fields , This cannot be achieved by local middleware .

High availability ： In terms of high availability , This is the inherent advantage of cloud computing and cloud native , Remote disaster recovery with multiple computer rooms 、 Multi link network support 、 Complete observable system and diagnostic ability , It can be said that cloud native middleware can provide high availability , It can make users no longer worry about the impact of business continuity caused by middleware .

Security ： As we all know, last year in Java A very significant loophole has been found in the field , But in fact, this is only one case , The software we use 、 System , Including middleware , There is no way to avoid vulnerabilities or bug, For cloud native middleware , Our requirements for vulnerability repair efficiency , It's the highest priority , Users do not have to bear the potential data and system risks caused by vulnerabilities .

Use cost ： The cost here is a generalized cost , Including resource costs 、 Labor cost 、 Time cost, etc , With cloud native middleware , Users no longer need to pay attention to the release of middleware 、 upgrade 、 A series of affairs with high personnel investment, such as operation and maintenance , There is no need to pay for the vacancy rate of resources , Take message oriented middleware as an example , We can often see , The number of messages pushed by many enterprise users , The amount of messages in peak and low periods of business can vary hundreds or even thousands of times , With the resilience of the cloud , Customers no longer need to worry about the waste of resources during the business downturn , Save a lot of cost .

2021 What important progress has been made in the field of Middleware in ？

Accelerate the output of Middleware in different environments with the help of cloud native technology base ： The coverage of cloud native technology ecology is becoming wider and wider , Under the general trend of distributed cloud and borderless Computing , Middleware is also accelerating the output to different environments , Like different CPU Architecture platform , In the past, middleware mainly ran in X86 Architecturally , But as the ARM The rapid development of architecture , Now a large number of middleware can support running ARM Architecture . in addition , Middleware is also beginning to apply to different computing sites , Like edge computing , Especially in more subdivided field and regional edge areas .

Middleware is becoming more and more service-oriented 、 Transparency ： Middleware through BaaS and SaaS Form sinks the basic ability , Enabling light weight 、 Agile cloud native applications , Solve the problems of user efficiency and cost , This is also in line with the developer's expectations for cloud and cloud original development .

Open source and business are more closely integrated ： The cloud native technology kernel is developed around open source , With the continuous advancement of the original biochemical process of middleware cloud , The development of open source middleware is becoming more and more active , On the one hand, it can accelerate the combination of middleware and cloud native Ecology , On the other hand, we can also see that under such a trend , Middleware is becoming more and more open , It will gradually launch standards based on open source in various segments , The promotion of open source standards will push cloud services to be more standardized , The ultimate benefit is the majority of middleware developers and users .

Alibaba cloud's native middleware has to make technological breakthroughs ？

Software and hardware cooperate to improve middleware performance ： The constant iteration of software , With new hardware features , Is the most efficient way to release technology dividends , This year, Alibaba cloud has made a multi-directional layout and attempt in this regard , At present, software and hardware collaborative optimization can be used as message oriented middleware MQ The whole brings 20% The comprehensive performance of , At the gateway and Service Mesh In some scenes of , The processing efficiency of requests is improved 260%, The improvements brought about by the evolution of these technologies , Alibaba cloud has provided cloud native middleware users with cloud services , For example, in the service grid ASM and MSE And other products have been revealed based on Multi-Buffer Performance realization of technology TLS The acceleration of .

Cloud based native reconfiguration middleware brings a performance leap ： stay 2021 year 6 month , Alibaba cloud has released the open source registration and configuration center Nacos 2.0, A new design combined with the original concept of cloud 2.0 framework , Significantly improve performance 10 times , The kernel is abstracted hierarchically , Implement plug-in extension mechanism , Support 10w Level instance size , And support the service grid ecosystem ; meanwhile , Alibaba cloud provides the corresponding cloud products synchronously on the cloud MSE Register configuration center .

​​Nacos 2.0 Performance comparison and pressure test before and after upgrading ​​

​​ Year end gifts | Nacos Star 2W+ Looking back and looking forward to ​​

Middleware capabilities are highly integrated ： In the field of gateway , Alibaba cloud integrates traffic gateway and service gateway , Launched cloud native gateway , It can reduce the user's use cost and maintenance cost by half ; In the field of information , Alibaba cloud launched the message 、 event 、 Streaming integrated messaging platform ——RocketMQ 5.0, Cloud evolution focused on message infrastructure , Post processing scenarios focusing on the message domain , Support message streaming and light Computing , Help users to calculate and analyze messages nearby , And will embrace Serverless and EDA.

​​ Alicloud message queue RocketMQ 5.0 New upgrade ： news 、 event 、 Stream fusion processing platform ​​

What are the main parts of current middleware ？

The definition of generalized middleware is very broad , Like news 、 Microservices 、 gateway 、 database 、 Integration platform, etc , All belong to the category of middleware , Here I'll briefly talk about the news 、 Micro services and other fields ：

Message middleware ： With big data 、AI High speed development of , The development of message middleware focuses on the business message field that online applications and microservices paid more attention to in the past , It began to gradually tilt to the field of big data and stream computing , stay 2021 year 9 In June, Alibaba cloud launched Apache RocketMQ 5.0-preview, This version begins to redefine message oriented middleware , Put the news 、 event 、 Stream integration platform , As the main development direction in the future , It has also received a positive response from community developers ; in addition , cloud 、 edge 、 End to end integrated message collection 、 transmission 、 Processing platform , It will also be the key layout direction of message oriented middleware in the future .RocketMQ These new features will take the lead in Alibaba cloud MQ The products are introduced to the outside world .

Microservice Middleware ： Here we are talking about micro services in a broad sense , Including the rapidly developing Service Mesh,Service Mesh By separating the control surface and data , It's really solving the problem of business code release efficiency 、 Decoupling 、 There are good benefits in multilingual support , But at the same time, the architecture complexity increases 、 End to end delay escalation problem , These problems hinder Service Mesh Mass production goes online , Therefore, the current technology development trend mainly focuses on solving these two kinds of problems , For example, based on eBPF And other technologies to improve transmission efficiency 、proxyless New architecture scheme, etc , Alicloud service grid ASM Products are also being explored eBPF Performance optimization and introduction gRPC Proxyless And Sidecar Pattern fusion processing ; In the field of traditional micro Services ,Spring Cloud、Dubbo And other very mature open source frameworks are still the main choice for microservicing , But we also see that with the continuous expansion of the use scale of micro Services , At present, how to make good use of 、 There is a growing need to manage micro Services , Service governance 、 Distributed transactions 、 Zero trust will become the focus of the next development , Alibaba cloud has launched MSE Cloud products , The past years of accumulation in the field of middleware and microservice governance will be exported as a service .

​​ Alibaba cloud MSE Cloud native gateway helps SKECH easily deal with dual 11 Great promotion ​​

2022 The development trend of Middleware in ？

Over the past few years, Alibaba cloud has promoted the cloud prototype of middleware, which has proved that , In the age of cloud Nativity , Middleware still plays a vital role , And in the new scene 、 The new frontier 、 In the new form, we constantly push through the old and bring forth the new .

New scene ： As more and more diverse computing loads and data are moved to the cloud , Especially the big data that has developed rapidly recently 、 Flow calculation 、AI Wait for the new scene , It is bound to put forward new requirements for middleware ;

The new frontier ： According to the Gartner forecast , To 2025 year , There will be 50% Our enterprises use distributed cloud , Distributed cloud has become the next generation of a large number of enterprises IT The first choice of Architecture . In this context , cloudy 、 A hybrid cloud 、 Cloud edge integrated application delivery will become the core demand , On the one hand, middleware needs to have its own delivery and deployment in the distributed cloud scenario , On the other hand , Middleware needs to solve the problem of business data flow in distributed cloud scenario ;

New form ：Serverless Will become the mainstream form of the next generation of cloud computing , Under such a trend , Middleware will also be developed from the current BaaS and SaaS form , Gradually Serverless Form evolution .

The above is taken from InfoQ Exclusive interview with Hu weiqi, a senior technical expert of Alibaba cloud , On the basis of the original content, add relevant references and extended reading , Facilitate developers to better understand .

The authors introduce ：

​ Hu weiqi （ flower ： Baimu ）, Alibaba cloud senior technical expert , Middleware technical director , He has been in charge of e-commerce resource scheduling system in Alibaba 、 Resource elastic scaling system 、 Container project 、 Edge container services, etc .​