W52 - Front-end Safety Production Seen from D2

I recently skimmed through D2, where for the first time this year they introduced a special track on frontend production security. They shared some of Alibaba’s thinking and practices in the field of production security, which sparked some insight and gave me a clear sense of the direction for iterating production security infrastructure.

They divide the system’s construction from 0 to 1 into three stages: single-point production security protection, independent multi-pipeline production security protection, and a systematized frontend production security protection.

Our current state on that scale corresponds to the end of the first-stage push, roughly at position 0.3. We are basically in the single-point protection phase with Raptor online monitoring, plus a few complementary protection strategies that are not yet standardized or user-friendly and yield limited benefit — for example, static code scanning, engineering style checks, and coverage reports.

We need to fill capability gaps in UI automated regression, canary monitoring, intelligent problem diagnosis, and automated fault recovery. Completing these will bring us roughly to the third stage.

The third stage connects the various protection strategies, systems, and platforms into a comprehensive production security environment. For example, it addresses the disconnect between frontend and backend releases, strengthens coordinated canary deployments, and enables full-link load testing; leverages Cloud IDE to capture developer behavior data in production and better integrate the entire development pipeline; and, through automated collaboration with testing, increases the proportion of code that can skip manual testing, thereby improving efficiency.

In short, the guiding principle of production security remains the same: use machines and mechanisms to protect people.