Container Service for Kubernetes:Comparison between Alibaba Cloud Knative and open-source Knative

Item

Alibaba Cloud Knative

Open-source Knative

References (Alibaba Cloud Knative)

System setup and O&M costs

• Provides a one-click deployment feature.

• The Knative control plane components are fully managed and require no maintenance.

You must purchase resources to build the system. Upgrades and maintenance require manual effort.

Knative

Ease of use

Provides rich features and a comprehensive observability system that is easy to use.

You must build and maintain many components for the observability system. This requires a high level of technical expertise.

• Collect component logs

• View the Knative Service monitoring dashboard

Elasticity

Supports the following scaling features:

• Knative Pod Autoscaler (KPA)

• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

• Reserved resource pools

• Advanced Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (AHPA)

Supports only KPA and HPA.

• Use HPA in Knative

• Automatically scale a Service based on the number of traffic requests

• Use AHPA to implement scheduled auto scaling

Gateway capabilities

Supports open-source gateways such as Kourier, along with Alibaba Cloud product gateways such as Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM).

Supports only open-source gateways such as Kourier and Istio. You must maintain the gateways yourself.

• Use the Kourier gateway

• Use an ALB gateway

Event-driven architecture

Supports integration with EventBridge.

Supports integration only with open-source Knative Eventing.

Use EventBridge for event-driven architecture in Knative

CI/CD

Integrates with Apsara DevOps Flow.

You must build your own CI/CD pipeline.

None

Monitoring and alerts

Monitors metrics such as queries per second (QPS), request latency, and service success rate. You can customize alert rules and receive alerts through multiple channels, such as DingTalk, phone calls, and text messages.

Supports only basic monitoring metrics. You must build your own alerting system.

Configure monitoring and alerts for components

Alibaba Cloud product integration

Deeply integrates with Elastic Container Instance (ECI), Container Registry (ACR), Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS), and Simple Log Service (SLS) for a unified experience across cloud products.

Does not support integration with Alibaba Cloud products.

Use ECI resources