ACK One's multi-cluster gateway is a solution for application disaster recovery and north-south traffic management in hybrid cloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. It helps you quickly implement zone-disaster recovery or geo-disaster recovery for hybrid cloud and multi-cluster applications. Instead of configuring ingress rules separately in each cluster, you define routing rules once on the Fleet instance and let the gateway distribute traffic across all clusters — with millisecond-level fallback when a cluster becomes unhealthy.
Two gateway types are available: ALB multi-cluster gateways and MSE (Microservices Engine) multi-cluster gateways. Each type targets different deployment topologies and protocol requirements.
Architecture
How it works
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Create an AlbConfig or MseIngressConfig resource on the ACK One Fleet instance. This provisions an ALB or MSE multi-cluster gateway.
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Create an Ingress on the Fleet instance and configure routing rules.
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The multi-cluster Ingress controller reads those rules and routes incoming traffic to backend servers across all managed clusters.
Key capabilities
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Fully managed and O&M-free — no gateway infrastructure to operate or maintain.
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Reduced gateway sprawl — one region-level Layer 7 gateway serves multiple clusters instead of one gateway per cluster, lowering cost.
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Centralized routing — configure forwarding rules for all clusters in one place on the Fleet instance.
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Cross-zone high availability — the gateway is designed for zone-level high availability (HA) from the ground up.
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Millisecond-level fallback — if a backend server error occurs in one cluster, traffic is smoothly redirected to healthy backends with no noticeable interruption.
Choose a gateway type
Answer the following questions to identify the right gateway type:
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Do you need cross-region traffic management? ALB supports it; MSE does not.
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Are your on-premises or third-party cloud clusters using overlay networks? ALB supports both overlay and underlay networks; MSE supports underlay only.
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Do you need HTTP/2 or gRPCS? MSE supports HTTP/2 and gRPCS; ALB does not.
If your answer to question 1 or 2 is yes, use ALB. If your workloads are confined to the same VPC or same region and you need HTTP/2 or gRPCS, use MSE.
The following table compares the two gateway types in detail.
| ALB multi-cluster gateway | MSE multi-cluster gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment scope | Cross-zone, cross-region, hybrid cloud, cross-cloud | Same VPC (default); cross-VPC in the same region via Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) |
| Supported scenarios | Active zone-disaster recovery; active geo-disaster recovery; hybrid cloud and active cross-cloud disaster recovery (underlay and overlay networks); weight-based traffic splitting; header-based routing to a specified cluster | Active zone-disaster recovery or active-standby disaster recovery; hybrid cloud or cross-cloud disaster recovery (underlay networks); weight-based traffic splitting; header-based routing to a specified cluster |
| Network requirements | Cross-region: connect networks using CEN; node and pod CIDR blocks must not overlap. On-premises or third-party cloud clusters: connect using Express Connect circuits. | Same-VPC clusters: no extra setup. Cross-VPC (same region): connect using CEN; node and pod CIDR blocks must not overlap. |
| Limitations | No cross-region restrictions. | Cannot deploy across regions. On-premises clusters using overlay networks and third-party public cloud Kubernetes clusters are not supported. |
| Backend protocols | HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC, QUIC | HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, gRPC, gRPCS |
| Billing | ALB billing | Billing overview of common instances |
What's next
After choosing a gateway type, set up the gateway and configure traffic routing for your clusters:
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Create an ALB multi-cluster gateway
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Create an MSE multi-cluster gateway