What is Container Service for Kubernetes? - Container Service for Kubernetes

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) (ACK ) is one of the first services to participate in the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program in the world. ACK provides high-performance containerized application management services to allow enterprises to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications and efficiently deploy containerized applications in the cloud. This topic introduces ACK and describes different types of ACK clusters.

Introduction

ACK provides multiple types of clusters, including ACK managed clusters, ACK Serverless clusters, and ACK Edge clusters.

Cluster type	Description	References
Container Service for Kubernetes	ACK Pro clusters are developed based on ACK Basic clusters. ACK Pro clusters provide all benefits of ACK Basic clusters, such as fully-managed control planes and control plane high availability. ACK Pro clusters also provide enhanced reliability, security, and schedulability and are covered by SLAs that contain compensation clauses. ACK Pro clusters are ideal for large-scale businesses in production environments and enterprises that require high stability and security.	What is Container Service for Kubernetes?
ACK Serverless	A serverless container service. In ACK Serverless clusters, you can deploy containerized applications without the need to purchase nodes, maintain nodes, or plan the node capacity. Pay-as-you-go fees are charged based on the CPU and memory resources requested by the applications that you deploy. ACK Serverless clusters are compatible with Kubernetes and can help you easily get started with Kubernetes. You can focus on application development instead of worrying about the infrastructure.	What is ACK Serverless?
ACK Edge	ACK Edge is a cloud-edge coordination solution intended for edge computing. ACK Edge clusters are standard, secure, and highly-available Kubernetes clusters and are integrated with cloud virtualization, storage, network, and security capabilities. ACK Edge clusters can simplify your cluster O&M work and allow you to focus on containerized application development and management.	What is ACK Edge?
ACK Lingjun	ACK Lingjun clusters are Kubernetes clusters developed based on Intelligent Computing LINGJUN with fully-managed and highly-available control planes. In ACK Lingjun clusters, Lingjun nodes serve as worker nodes.	What is ACK Lingjun?
Cloud-native AI suite	A cloud-native AI technology and product solution that uses ACK as the base. The cloud-native AI suite can be used to centrally manage heterogeneous resources and is compatible with standard Kubernetes environments and APIs. You can run key components in the cloud-native AI suite to manage and maintain resources, schedule AI jobs, scale applications, accelerate data access, orchestrate workflows, integrate big data services, manage the lifecycle of AI jobs, and manage AI artifacts. The cloud-native AI suite also targets key steps in AI development pipelines, including AI dataset management, AI model development, training, and evaluation, and inference services.	Cloud-native AI suite overview
Distributed Cloud Container Platform for Kubernetes (ACK One)	ACK One is an enterprise-class cloud-native platform intended for hybrid cloud, multi-cluster, distributed computing, and disaster recovery scenarios. ACK One can connect and manage Kubernetes clusters deployed in any region or on top of any infrastructure, including cloud, edge, and data centers. ACK One provides a consistent management experience and Kubernetes-compatible APIs to allow you to centrally manage and maintain computing, storage, networks, security, monitoring, logs, jobs, applications, and traffic.	ACK One overview
ACK Distro	The Kubernetes distribution released for heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments. You need to manually manage ACK Distro clusters. You can deploy ACK Distro clusters in on-premises environments, third-party cloud platforms, or personal computers. As a downstream service of ACK, the update of Kubernetes versions supported by ACK Distro is consistent with the update of Kubernetes versions supported by ACK.	ACK Distro overview

Benefits

Compared with self-managed Kubernetes clusters, ACK clusters are not only compatible with Kubernetes but also have enhanced Kubernetes capabilities in terms of applications, networks, storage, and security to help you greatly reduce cluster O&M costs. The following table compares self-managed Kubernetes clusters with ACK clusters.

Comparison item	Self-managed Kubernetes cluster	ACK cluster
Cluster management	You need to manually deploy and develop clusters. You also need to develop a management system.	You can easily create clusters in the console based on GPU-accelerated instances and Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Bare Metal instances. You can also deploy your cluster across zones to ensure high availability. Provide OS images that are optimized for containerized applications and support Kubernetes versions and Docker versions with high stability and enhanced security. Support multi-cluster management and cluster federation management. You can also deploy your cluster across zones to ensure high availability.
Application management	You need to develop a management system.	Support canary releases and blue-green deployment. Support application monitoring and scaling. Provide a built-in application marketplace that allows you to deploy applications with a few clicks by using Helm, and provide service catalogs to simplify cloud service integration.
Network management	You need to use network plug-ins from the community for adaptation. You need to develop a management system.	Provide high-performance network plug-ins that are optimized by Alibaba Cloud for virtual private clouds (VPCs) and elastic network interfaces (ENIs), boasting 20% increased performance compared with common network solutions. Support access control and traffic throttling for containers.
Storage management	You need to develop a management system.	Support Alibaba Cloud disks, local disks, Apsara File Storage NAS (NAS), CPFS, and Object Storage Service, and provide standard CSI drivers. Support automatic volume creation and migration.
O&M management	You need to manually manage and maintain control planes.	Support quick update to the latest Kubernetes version, cluster component lifecycle management, and manual scaling and auto scaling. Provide a high-performance log collection agent and a variety of log dashboards. Support fully-managed Prometheus monitoring systems with built-in dashboards. The control planes of ACK Pro clusters are fully-managed, highly-scalable, and deployed across zones to improve high availability. Control plane observability is also provided to allow you to monitor control planes.
Security management	You need to develop a security system.	Support image scanning and image signing. Support container runtime security check. Support Secret encryption. Support Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS) security hardening for operating systems and OS Security Hardening.
Service guarantee	You need to build a dedicated team. No service-level agreement (SLA) guarantee is provided.	The ACK team provides technical support to ensure the stability and security of your ACK clusters. ACK is one of the largest public cloud container services in China. It has been tested within Alibaba Group on a large scale. Alibaba Cloud has passed the Kubernetes certification tests and becomes a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Alibaba Cloud was recognized as the top performer among Chinese Internet enterprises in Forrester Research Reports 2019. Alibaba Cloud is the only Asian cloud service provider that was recognized as a leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management. ACK Pro clusters are covered by SLAs that contain compensation clauses.

Introduction

Benefits

References