Understanding Technical Middle Platform: What It Is and What It Is Not

This article discusses the construction of microservices and middle platform (中台) architecture in enterprise IT systems. The author clarifies common misconceptions about what a middle platform is NOT: it is not merely a collection of technology components, not just service governance capabilities, not simply adding business functions, and not equivalent to Cloud Native implementation alone.

The author argues that a true middle platform should be business and organization-oriented, enabling rapid response to business changes, improving efficiency, enhancing innovation capabilities, and optimizing talent and organizational structures.

The article then focuses on technical middle platform construction, dividing it into six key areas:

1. Container Cloud and Virtualization : Requires cluster management and scheduling, network solutions, service orchestration, logging, storage, application management, monitoring, image registry, CI/CD integration, and a user-friendly UI interface.

2. Microservice Framework and Management Console : A complete microservice product should include both technical capabilities (service registration, discovery, load balancing, circuit protection, routing, communication) and comprehensive service governance (application lifecycle management, visual governance, deployment, distributed transactions, flow control, monitoring, service contracts, tracing, grayscale release, service degradation).

3. Technical Components : Rather than simply stacking components, the focus should be on capability abstraction, standardization, and providing easy-to-use services with multi-tenant capabilities.

4. Public Basic Services and Technical Services : Including user permission services, business configuration services, notification services, data analysis services, caching services, distributed ID services, message queues, and distributed task scheduling.

5. DevOps and AIOps : DevOps should be value-driven, focusing on culture, organization, and process improvement rather than just toolchain implementation. AIOps leverages AI for digital operations and intelligent operations maintenance.

6. Efficiency : Establishing a platform efficiency team to continuously improve team and project efficiency through regular review and optimization.