To further improve Alibaba’s unified application management architecture, the Chinese cloud provider has since October 2019 been working with Microsoft on joint Open Application Model or OAM.

In OAM project plays pivotal role in upgrading Alibaba’s unified application management architecture and set up the next-generation of PaaS or Serverless architecture. The OAM carries some roles, such as defining Kubernetes applications, as well as serving as a project for encapsulating, arranging and handling various O&M capabilities. Kubernetes team refers to Alibaba’s infrastructure operators.

The OAM has close relationships with Kubernetes as it makes use of API primitives and controllers by the latter. Alibaba uses Kubernetes for making the native PaaS architecture by the latter.

The OAM consists of three key concepts. The first one is components that make up an application, such as microservices, databases and Server Load Balancers. The second one is application O&M traits, like the auto scaling and ingress functions. And the third one is the O&M personnel use application configurations for mixing components and corresponding traits.

In addition to the OAM, what one can’t ignore is the Kubernetes itself. The integral part of the provider’s application management architecture has important features. It can be scaled up to 10,000 nodes, hosts more than 10,000 applications and handles 100,000 application deployments every day during peak hours. The Kubernetes team assists Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes that hosts around 10,000 small-and medium-sized clusters.

There are various other components that contribute to the performance of Alibaba’s technology. Some of them are infrastructure operators, application operators and business developers.

Business developers mostly work with PaaS dan Cl pipelines to manage their applications. They convey business value in code. Their work brings huge value for the company.

On the other hand, application operators offer business developers with expertise in cluster capacity, stability and performance. They assist in configuring, deploying and running applications on a large scale. Most of the application operators utilize PaaS for doing their jobs. The infrastructure operators, application operators and business developers can sometimes find it difficult to cooperate due to lack of standardized protocols for achieving efficient communication. This is where the OAM gives the proper solution for leading a productive application management architecture process and successful operation.

Kubernetes is indeed capable of creating their O&M capabilities as they wish but this doesn’t come without consequences. Application operators, for instance, will find problems on the flexibility of Kubernetes. One common problem happens when using CRDs, such as CronHPA CRD.

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As part of the solutions, Alibaba uses O&M traits to depict and set up discoverable and manageable capabilities on the platform layer. Application operators can use ApplicationConfiguration to configure one of more installed traits for an application. When conflicts happen among traits, the ApplicationConfiguration controller will give solution to that.

Application operators and business developers can’t work separately. Business developers typically need approvals from application operators on their opinions on O&M. In regards to this, Alibaba splits Kubernetes APIs and allows business developers to specify their fields and speak their demands to application operators. In the ApplicationConfiguration components of the OAM, Alibaba includes components that consist of workload description and rewritable parameter list. The latter especially helps business developers specifying the fields that can be overridden by application operators or the system in this parameter list.

In short, ApplicationConfiguration helps application operators or the system comprehending and using the information by business developers. The final result from this is binding O&M capabilities to the component for final O&M.

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