Exploring Serverless Practices in Tencent Cloud Microservices

This article is a written version of the talk "Tencent Cloud Microservices: Exploration and Practice of Serverless" delivered by Han Xin, Technical Director of Tencent Cloud Microservice Product Center, at ServerlessDays China 2021.

1. Why Enterprise‑grade Development Needs Serverless

Four main reasons are highlighted: (1) improved development efficiency – functions dramatically shorten the time from code commit to production; (2) reduced infrastructure cost – pay‑as‑you‑go eliminates idle servers; (3) operation‑free – developers no longer need to manage servers for internal tools; (4) flexible scaling – serverless removes the need for manual traffic throttling and allows databases and other back‑ends to scale without cost constraints.

2. Position of Serverless in the Microservice Landscape

The speaker outlines three pain points of traditional microservices: high O&M cost, difficult deployment (gray‑release, version routing), and low resource utilization. Serverless addresses these by eliminating environment concerns, simplifying application onboarding, providing full‑lifecycle management, offering elastic foundations (combined with K8s), and enabling rapid, fine‑grained scaling based on business metrics rather than just CPU/memory.

Observability is also discussed – serverless must still provide logs, tracing, and diagnostics despite abstracting away servers.

3. Real‑world Serverless Architecture in Tencent Cloud

The talk describes the TEM (Elastic Microservice) platform built on Tencent Cloud EKS, which offers a plug‑in, standards‑based service platform. Key features include stateless application support, multiple deployment modes (including Dapr for stateful services), event‑driven architectures, and a unified API gateway.

Components such as databases, message queues, and caches are abstracted as resources that can be attached to environments on demand, enabling zero‑maintenance, auto‑scaling, and visual management.

4. Serverless in the Middleware Domain

Serverless is applied to message queues, separating storage and compute. Traditional queues suffer from performance caps, limited topic counts, and storage bottlenecks. By leveraging Pulsar’s storage‑compute separation and integrating it with Tencent Cloud services (COS for cold storage, containers on EKS for brokers), the solution achieves unlimited performance, millions of topics, and linear storage scaling.

The speaker concludes by emphasizing the benefits of Serverless for developers (language‑agnostic, focus on business logic), for operations (auto‑scaling, high availability across zones), and for enterprises (cost reduction, agility).