This topic describes the background and features of the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solution provided by Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes.
Background
Cloud hosting is already the trend of the future. However, some enterprise customers opt for multi-cloud or hybrid cloud solutions out of concern about data sovereignty and security. The differences in infrastructure capabilities and security architectures among different cloud environments can lead to barriers between the enterprise IT architecture and operations and maintenance systems. This increases not only the complexity of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud implementations, but also operations and maintenance costs.
In the cloud-native era, Kubernetes-led technologies shield the differences between infrastructures and usher in the arrival of application-centered, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. This promotes application lifecycle management and resource scheduling in a unified manner in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
Features

- Unified cluster management
External Kubernetes clusters deployed in on-premises data centers or other clouds can be registered to the Container Service console for unified management. The Container Service console supports features such as security management, application management and monitoring, and logging in a unified manner.
- Unified scheduling and auto scaling
Supports auto scaling based on a unified resource scheduling framework. Helps customers make full use of computing resources and achieve auto scaling to handle sudden traffic spikes.
- Unified service governance
Supports client access based on locality, workload failover, and canary release based on ASM. This enables applications deployed among multiple clusters and across regions to support scenarios such as cloud disaster recovery and multi-region active-active architecture.