ACK Edge is a cloud-edge integrated collaboration and managed solution provided by Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). This solution allows you to manage resources and applications at the edge in the cloud. This topic describes the prerequisites, quick start process, and quick usage methods of ACK Edge clusters to help you get started.
Usage notes
Before you use an ACK Edge cluster, you must understand the following information: announcements and updates, release notes, usage notes, instructions on high-risk operations, and supported regions.
Item | Description | References |
Announcements and updates | Product updates and announcements of ACK Edge clusters. | |
Release notes | The release notes for ACK Edge clusters, Kubernetes versions, OS images, runtimes, and components. | |
Regions | The regions supported by ACK Edge clusters. | |
Supported time zones | The time zones supported by ACK Edge clusters. | |
Usage notes and instructions on high-risk operations | Before you use ACK Edge clusters, we recommend that you read the usage notes and learn the risks that may arise when you use ACK Edge clusters. | |
Limits | The limits when you use ACK Edge clusters, such as capacity limits and quotas. |
Quick start
ACK Edge clusters allow you to manage edge computing resources in the same Kubernetes cluster. You can also migrate existing cloud services to edge Kubernetes clusters. This improves the O&M efficiency of edge resources and services and ensures stable business operations. You can use the following methods to quickly get started with ACK Edge clusters.
The following figure shows the quick usage process of an ACK Edge cluster:
Environment preparation
Step | Description | References |
| Before you create an ACK Edge cluster, you must confirm the network environment on which the cluster and nodes depend, and the selected network plug-in. | |
| You must activate ACK Edge before you can create an ACK Edge cluster. If ACK is not activated, you cannot create clusters. | |
| You can create an ACK edge cluster in the ACK console, by calling API operations, or by using Terraform. | |
| ACK Edge clusters allow you to manage multiple types of resources, including nodes in data centers, Elastic Compute Service (ECS) nodes in different regions and cloud vendors, and Edge Node Service (ENS) nodes. Before you can use the related features, you must add edge nodes to ACK Edge clusters. |
Features
Type | Feature | Description | References |
Edge scalability | Network autonomy of edge nodes | You can configure edge node autonomy to ensure that applications on an edge node can still run as expected when the edge node is disconnected from the cloud and no application pod is evicted or migrated to other edge nodes. | |
Application management | In edge scenarios such as multi-region nodes and on-premises data centers, you can use YurtAppSets and DaemonSet update models to improve application management capabilities.
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Cross-region communication | If cloud-edge resources are not in the same network domain, you can use the cross-region communication component Raven to implement efficient cloud-edge O&M in multiple regions. | ||
Offline O&M | If you configured edge node autonomy, the cloud control plane cannot make O&M changes to the edge business. In an emergency, you can use offline O&M tools to perform O&M operations on the business on the offline node. The operations that you can perform include business rollback, resource configuration change, and business configuration modification. | ||
Elastic Cloud Resource | Elastic capabilities of ECS nodes and elastic container instances and ACS instances | When on-premises resources are insufficient, ACK Edge clusters can quickly scale out nodes in the cloud. ACK Edge clusters support the elasticity of ECS-based node pools in the cloud and elastic instances and ACS-based instances. | |
Cloud Capability Sinking | Observability | ACK Edge clusters are seamlessly integrated with monitoring, logging, and Node Problem Detector (NPD) capabilities to ensure the stability of edge services. | |
Cloud-native AI suite | In AI scenarios, ACK Edge clusters and the cloud-native AI suite provide the AI suite console, GPU sharing and scheduling, KServe, and Fluid acceleration. | ||
Image Acceleration | You can use image acceleration to accelerate image pulling and reduce the application deployment time. ACK Edge clusters support on-demand image loading and P2P image loading. | ||
Security management | You can use cloud security capabilities to improve the security governance efficiency of cloud resources and business applications. ACK Edge clusters support cluster auditing, custom Subject Alternative Names (SANs) of the API server certificate, Secret encryption, and RAM Roles for Service Accounts (RRSA). |