This topic describes how to deploy alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter in an external Kubernetes cluster in the Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) console. The alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter component collects metrics from your cluster. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) can scale your application pods based on the collected metrics.

Prerequisites

You have connected to an external Kubernetes cluster through Container Service for Kubernetes. For more information, see Register a cluster.

Background information

In Kubernetes, metrics are collected to monitor resource usage and performance. In addition, HPA scales the number of pods based on the collected metrics. To meet diverse monitoring requirements of developers, Kubernetes defines the following APIs: resource metrics, custom metrics, and external metrics.
  • Resource metrics are collected by the metrics-server component. The collected metrics are used to monitor the usage of Kubernetes resources, such as pods, nodes, and namespaces.
  • Custom metrics are collected by ARMS Prometheus. HPA scales application pods based on the collected custom metrics.
  • External metrics are collected through the external metrics API provided by the cloud service provider. These metrics are used to monitor the external environment. For example, you can monitor the queries per second (QPS) to an Ingress and use HPA to scale application pods when the QPS exceeds the scaling threshold.

Procedure

  1. Log on to the ACK console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Marketplace > App Catalog.
  3. On the App Catalog page, click the Alibaba Cloud Apps tab and find ack-alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter.
    In the upper-right corner of the App Catalog page, you can enter ack-alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter into the Name search bar and click the search icon. You can also enter a keyword to perform a fuzzy match.
  4. On the App Catalog - ack-alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter page, select a cluster in the Deploy section to deploy the application.
    Use the default values for the Namespace and Release Name parameters.
  5. On the App Catalog - ack-alibaba-cloud-metrics-adapter page, click the Parameters tab, set the parameters, and click Create in the Deploy section.
    metric adapter
    Parameter Description
    AccessKeyId The AccessKey ID of your Alibaba Cloud account.
    AccessKeySecret The AccessKey secret of your Alibaba Cloud account.
    Region The region where your cluster is deployed, for example, cn-qingdao or ap-southeast-1.
    Note If a leased line is deployed between the cluster and your virtual private cloud (VPC), the leased line is automatically used.