ACK supports continuous delivery, microservices, hybrid cloud, and auto scaling workloads.
DevOps and continuous delivery
ACK integrates with Jenkins to automate the CI/CD pipeline from code commit to deployment. Only code that passes automated tests advances, eliminating manual handoffs.
Example: A team pushes a commit. Jenkins triggers a build, runs tests, and—on success—builds a container image and deploys it to the ACK cluster. Failed tests block deployment automatically.
Benefits:
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DevOps pipeline automation — Automates the flow from code commit to deployment.
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Environment consistency — Delivers code and runtime with the same architecture across all stages.
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Continuous feedback — Provides immediate feedback on every integration and delivery event.
Recommended services: Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and ACK.
Microservices architecture
Microservices deliver high cohesion, loose coupling, and fault tolerance, with governance capabilities provided by Alibaba Cloud products. ACK handles scheduling, orchestration, deployment, and canary releases for microservice applications—so teams can focus on feature work rather than infrastructure.
These capabilities work without modifying application code or configurations.
Example: An e-commerce platform splits checkout, inventory, and notification into microservices. When notification traffic spikes, throttling and peak-load shifting protect other services. Configuration changes go through canary releases, with graceful start and shutdown preventing dropped requests.
Benefits:
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Elimination of risks during application updates — Configuration management, graceful start and shutdown, and canary releases reduce deployment risk.
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Elimination of risks that are caused by occasional issues — Throttling, peak-load shifting, circuit breaking, fault isolation, and degradation protection when traffic spikes or services become unavailable.
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Agile development of microservices with low costs — Expands logically isolated environments without additional servers, eliminating conflicts and enabling faster iteration.
Recommended services: Microservices Engine (MSE), ECS, ApsaraDB RDS, Object Storage Service (OSS), and ACK.
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Hybrid cloud architecture
ACK runs on any infrastructure, so the same container images and orchestration templates work across cloud and on-premises environments. O&M teams manage all resources from a single ACK console.
Example: A financial services team runs its core transaction system on-premises for low-latency processing and mirrors it to the cloud for disaster recovery. During planned maintenance, traffic shifts automatically to cloud nodes. When on-premises capacity is restored, traffic shifts back without application changes.
Benefits:
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Application scaling in the cloud — During peak hours, ACK scales out applications and forwards traffic to additional capacity automatically.
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Disaster recovery in the cloud — Run primary workloads on-premises and use the cloud as a standby environment for failover.
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On-premises development and testing — Build and test on-premises, then deploy to the cloud with the same images and templates.
Recommended services: ECS, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Express Connect.
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Auto scaling architecture
ACK scales workloads in and out based on network traffic. Scale-out events trigger within seconds when traffic reaches a threshold; containers scale in automatically when traffic drops.
Example: A media platform experiences nightly traffic spikes. The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) monitors traffic metrics via CloudMonitor and adds pods within seconds. After peak hours, the cluster scales in, reclaiming idle capacity and reducing costs.
Benefits:
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Quick response — Scale-out triggers within seconds when traffic reaches the threshold.
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Auto scaling — Fully automated scaling eliminates manual intervention errors.
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Low costs — Containers scale in when traffic drops, maximizing cluster resource usage.
Recommended services: ECS and CloudMonitor.
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