From Internet Middleware to Cloud‑Native & Serverless: Alibaba’s Evolution Roadmap

On September 26, at Alibaba Cloud’s Yunqi conference in Hangzhou, experts shared insights on internet middleware.

Evolution of Internet Middleware

Li Xiaoping, chief architect of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Middleware, described how the massive scale of Chinese internet users created challenges of serving hundreds of millions simultaneously, prompting rapid technological advancement. Alibaba’s middleware matured into the Aliware Internet PaaS and middle‑platform model, enabling fast industry replication and business innovation.

Key benefits include:

Business scale: supports massive traffic and capacity.

Stability: achieved through throttling, degradation, gray releases, and high redundancy.

Elasticity: minute‑level instance creation and rapid deployment.

Challenges remain, as illustrated in the accompanying diagram.

Looking forward, Alibaba embraces cloud‑native technologies, focusing on:

Container and Kubernetes for easier application release and cluster management.

Service mesh for multi‑language microservice architectures.

Serverless (FaaS + BaaS) models.

Cloud‑native brings high performance and availability, simplified programming models, and improved observability and security.

Value is reflected in three areas:

Development: DevOps, GitOps, metadata‑driven services, language‑agnostic frameworks, and service‑oriented programming.

Deployment: unified public, private, and hybrid cloud models, eliminating environment differences and enabling gray releases.

Runtime efficiency: automatic resource allocation, isolation, orchestration, scaling, self‑healing, and separation of infrastructure and application operations.

Alibaba’s reference architecture for cloud‑native middleware is shown below.

Alibaba Serverless Architecture Evolution

Xu Xiaobin presented the evolution of Alibaba’s online application Serverless architecture.

Key business characteristics:

Online services are latency‑sensitive, with a single request triggering dozens to hundreds of distributed calls.

Application startup times can reach hundreds to thousands of seconds.

Java remains the dominant language.

Serverless technology is divided into three layers:

Runtime & Framework: GraalVM, Spring Cloud Function.

DevOps: Knative.

Resource: Firecracker.

Industry trends include the dominance of FaaS despite limitations, Java’s challenges with cold‑start times (addressed by GraalVM), the rise of open‑source Serverless components like Knative, and the rapid development of lightweight security sandboxes.

The main difficulty is allocating resources, starting applications, and ensuring availability within milliseconds, enabling multiple applications to share machines efficiently.

Alibaba uses multi‑level elasticity and snapshot technologies to achieve this, balancing 1:1 and 1:N snapshot strategies.

The overall Serverless architecture diagram is provided.

Internet Middleware Empowering Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Enterprise cloud migration experiences were shared, highlighting Alibaba Cloud’s microservice hosting platform EDAS.

Alibaba Cloud’s enterprise‑grade internet architecture is illustrated below.

EDAS integrates configuration management, throttling, load balancing, traffic control, service registration/discovery, and security. Compared with open‑source stacks (Dubbo, SkyWalking, Sentinel, Narcos), EDAS offers out‑of‑the‑box capabilities such as zero‑cost full‑link tracing, dynamic throttling configuration, and real‑time configuration push.

Additional distinctive EDAS features are shown in the diagram.

Full‑link gray release capabilities were discussed, including traffic marking for pressure testing and a lane‑based gray deployment model that automates application gray releases without manual configuration.

Alibaba Cloud Fully Supports SkyWalking

SkyWalking, an Apache top‑level open‑source APM framework, is supported by Alibaba Cloud via OpenTracing compatibility, allowing seamless integration of SkyWalking probes without managing underlying Elasticsearch.

Enhanced functionalities cover monitoring, diagnosis, analysis, and alerting.

Reflections

The speaker concludes that internet middleware is transitioning to cloud‑native middleware, embracing Kubernetes, service mesh, and Serverless—particularly challenging for Java due to startup speed. Alibaba’s cloud products integrate many components; EDAS combines distributed service frameworks, load balancing, configuration centers, distributed tracing, container technologies, and stability features such as elastic scaling, throttling, and unified switches. SkyWalking’s Java probe mode offers convenient extensibility, with Alibaba Cloud adding tag aggregation, upstream/downstream topology, and other service‑level enhancements.