I am delighted to share my extensive experience from over a decade of working at Alibaba Cloud, where I witnessed the rapid growth of several major services such as Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, and Alibaba Cloud itself. During this period, I founded the Apache RocketMQ project and contributed 80% of its codebase. My passion for coding has been a driving force throughout my career.
In my journey of providing open-source ecosystem products like Apache RocketMQ, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and MQTT as cloud services, I encountered significant challenges. These included difficulties in multi-tenant isolation, large fault domains, and high costs associated with dedicated resources. These issues primarily stem from the fact that systems like RocketMQ and Kafka were designed around 2010 with physical servers in mind, which inevitably leads to hitting hardware limits such as IOPS and storage capacity.
Today, cloud platforms have transformed these physical constraints into highly flexible resources that can be scaled by simply calling an API. Motivated by this evolution, my team and I have reimagined Kafka and RocketMQ using a cloud-native and cloud-first approach. Our goal is to provide developers with a next-generation messaging and streaming platform that offers on-demand usage, zero maintenance, and optimal cost efficiency.
Currently, my team and I are fully committed to our new project, AutoMQ. We are dedicating all our efforts to ensure its success.