This topic describes the release notes for Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) and provides links to the relevant references.
Background information
Container Service for Kubernetes supports the following Kubernetes versions: 1.26, 1.24, and 1.22. For more information about how ACK supports Kubernetes versions, see Support for Kubernetes versions.
Container Service for Kubernetes supports the following operating systems: Alibaba Cloud Linux 2, Alibaba Cloud Linux 3, Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 Arm, Alibaba Cloud Linux UEFI 2, ContainerOS, CentOS 7.9, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server Core, and Version 2004.
August 2023
Product | Feature | Description | Region | References |
ACK | Backup plans in ACK backup center optimized | Fuzzy search is supported for backup tasks in the ACK console. Backup tasks can be sorted based on creation time. In addition, backups and backup plans can be cloned. | All | |
ACK Serverless | SidecarSet controller added to ack-virtual-node to use DaemonSet features | The SidecarSet controller is added to the ack-virtual-node component to inject sidecar containers into pods on virtual nodes by using SidecarSets. This allows you to inject containers into client pods as sidecar containers to use DaemonSet features, such as log collection and monitoring. | All | No impact on workloads |
Cloud-native AI suite | Dynamic MIG partitioning supported by GPU scheduling | Multi-instance GPU (MIG) and dynamic partitioning are supported by GPU nodes with the required label after you install the cloud-native AI suite ack-ai-installer in an ACK managed cluster. Each node reports the maximum number of GPU instances that the node supports. Each container can apply for only one GPU instance. | All | Labels for GPU-accelerated node scheduling and methods for changing label values |
Notebook images supported by AI Developer Console | ack-ai-dev-console is an AI Developer Console component provided by the cloud-native AI suite. commit-agent and ack-commit-ctl are added to AI Developer Console to allow you to save notebooks on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances as images and use these images to restore notebooks. | All | ||
ack-fluid 1.0.3 released | The ack-fluid component is a distributed dataset orchestration and acceleration engine provided by the cloud-native AI suite. ack-fluid 1.0.3 supports privileged FUSE sidecar containers. This version also fixes the out of memory (OOM) issue for the JuiceFSRuntime controller, issues related to the auto recovery feature of FUSE, and the residual resource issue for runtime upgrades. | All | ||
ack-kube-queue 0.2.0 released | ack-kube-queue is a job queue component provided by the cloud-native AI suite. ack-kube-queue 0.2.0 allows you to enable blocking queues for a single queue and can re-add TensorFlow jobs and PyTorch jobs to a queue when these jobs time out. This version also allows you to add Argo workflows to a queue and limit the number of jobs that can leave a queue at a time. In addition, the log that records dequeue failures is optimized. | All | ||
Distributed Cloud Container Platform for Kubernetes (ACK One) | SLB instance management with cloud controller manager (CCM) supported by registered clusters | The CCM allows you to use basic services of Alibaba Cloud, such as Classic Load Balancer (CLB), in ACK. You can install the CCM in registered clusters of ACK One to manage Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances. | All | none |
Custom DNS servers supported by registered clusters | Self-managed DNS servers can be specified for elastic container instances in registered clusters. | All | none | |
Application migration to ACK One GitOps in an automated manner | onectl can be used to migrate applications to ACK One GitOps in an automated manner. Application Center is no longer updated and will be progressively discontinued. You can use onectl to migrate applications from Application Center to ACK One GitOps in an automated manner. | All | Use onectl to migrate applications to ACK One GitOps in an automated manner | |
Public access to Argo CD | Public access to Argo CD can be enabled to allow you to use Argo CD to deliver or access applications from the ACK One console. | All |
July 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
ACK Standard clusters renamed as ACK Basic clusters | ACK Standard clusters are renamed as ACK Basic clusters. The following clusters are affected: ACK manage clusters, ACK Serverless clusters, and ACK Edge clusters. The corresponding parameter in API operations remains unchanged. ACK Basic clusters are only for personal use and testing purposes. Use ACK Pro clusters in production environments. | All | |
ALB Ingress controller v2.9.0-aliyun.1 released | ALB Ingress controller v2.9.0-aliyun.1 is released. | All | |
Terway 1.5.5 released | Terway 1.5.5 is released to support elastic network interfaces (ENIs) filters. | All | |
GPU-accelerated node diagnostics supported by Container Intelligence Service | GPU-level GPU diagnostics are supported by ACK clusters. You can collect basic GPU metrics to troubleshoot issues. | All | |
IP-aware pod scheduling and topology-aware pod scheduling supported by the ACK scheduler |
| All | No impact on workloads |
Backup plans in ACK backup center optimized | Namespaces can be selected by excluding specific namespaces. Backup plans can be created and copied. | All | |
Serverless Kubernetes (ASK) renamed as ACK Serverless | ASK is renamed as ACK Serverless and ASK clusters are renamed as ACK Serverless clusters. ACK Serverless clusters are billed based on uptime in seconds and support auto scaling within a few seconds. You do not need to maintain clusters and nodes when you use ACK Serverless clusters. | All | |
KServe supported by ACK Serverless clusters to accelerate the deployment of AI models | KServe is a machine learning model service framework developed based on Kubernetes to provide simple Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs) to allow you to deploy one or more trained models to a model service runtime. For example, you can deploy TFServing, TorchServe, and Triton models. You can deploy the KServe component in ACK Serverless clusters with a few clicks. This component provides out-of-the-box model services to help you build custom model service runtimes. | All | |
Fully-managed core components supported by ACK Serverless clusters to simplify O&M | The following components are fully managed in ACK Serverless Pro clusters: the Kube scheduler, CCM, Kube controller manager, Kube API server, and CoreDNS. These components do not occupy your resources, which greatly reduce the complexity of cluster maintenance. | All | |
Preemptible instance creation accelerated for ACK Serverless clusters | ACK Serverless allows you to create instances of up to one million CPU cores within one hour to handle large numbers of concurrent jobs, such as Spark jobs. This reduces the waiting time of the jobs in the queue and guarantees sufficient computing power in big data scenarios where computing and storage are decoupled. | All | |
ack-kube-queue 0.1.12 released |
| All | No impact on workloads |
ack-fluid 1.0.2 released | ack-fluid is a distributed dataset orchestration and acceleration engine provided by the cloud-native AI suite. The following new features are supported by ack-fluid:
| All | No impact on workloads |
Registered cluster creation and management with onectl | onectl can be used to create registered clusters, connected registered clusters to external Kubernetes clusters, configure permissions, and install components. | All | |
Using registered clusters to allow external Kubernetes clusters to use CPU and GPU resources provided by serverless ECI | Registered clusters can be used to allow external Kubernetes clusters in data centers to use CPU and GPU resources provided by serverless Elastic Container Instance (ECI). | All |
June 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
ACK cluster updates to Kubernetes 1.26 supported | The Kubernetes version of ACK clusters can be updated to 1.26. | All | |
Network diagnostics supported by Container Intelligence Service | Container Intelligence Service supports network diagnostics based on Skoop to improve O&M capabilities. | All | |
Capabilities of ACK backup center enhanced | The capabilities of the ACK backup center are enhanced. The following new features are added:
| All | |
New ACK scheduler version released | The following new features are added to the new ACK scheduler version:
| All | |
Cloud-native AI suite supported by ACK Serverless Pro clusters | ACK Serverless clusters can provide reliable, O&M-free, and highly elastic environments for AI, machine learning, and big data workloads. You can install and activate the cloud-native AI suite in ACK Serverless Pro clusters with a few clicks to improve the availability and performance of your applications. Arena is an efficient tool to submit and manage jobs that use mainstream AI computing frameworks. Fluid provides data elasticity and data preloading to support serverless scenarios. These features can improve the efficiency and performance of AI, machine learning, and big data workloads deployed in ACK Serverless clusters. | All | |
Acceleration of access to PVs and hostPath volumes with Fluid in hybrid cloud environments | JindoRuntime is a Fluid runtime engine developed by the Alibaba Cloud E-MapReduce (EMR) team based on JindoFS. JindoRuntime provides dataset management and caching for Fluid. JindoRuntime can cache data stored in Kubernetes hostPath volumes and persistent volumes (PVs) to accelerate data access. In hybrid cloud environments, you can use PVs to mount any self-managed storage systems, such as CephFS, or use hostPath volumes to mount self-managed storage systems. This helps accelerate access to the self-managed storage systems. | All | |
DeepSpeed jobs supported by Arena and DeepSpeed distributed training best practices available | DeepSpeed is an open source deep learning optimization software suite that provides distributed training and model optimization to accelerate model training. The cloud-native AI suite uses Arena to support DeepSpeed jobs. You can use Arena to quickly submit DeepSpeed distributed training jobs and use TensorBoard to view these jobs in a visualized manner. | All | |
ARM-based nodes supported by ack-kube-queue | ack-kube-queue is a Kubernetes queue component provided by the cloud-native AI suite. ack-kube-queue works with the scheduler and quota system to allow you to manage queues, schedule jobs based on priorities, and use elastic quotas. ARM-based nodes are supported by ack-kube-queue to optimize the management and scheduling of AI, machine learning, and batch computing workloads on ARM-based nodes. | All | |
Application migration to ACK One GotOps supported by ACK One | ACK One allows you to migrate applications from Application Center to ACK One GitOps. ACK One GitOps manages open source Argo CD, provides a dedicated console domain name, and integrates Alibaba Cloud account single sign-on (SSO) to support multi-cluster application delivery. | All | |
Policy management supported by registered clusters | Registered clusters provide a variety of policy governance rules and a powerful console based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) and the gatekeeper admission controller to ensure the security of registered clusters. | All | |
ACK One multi-cluster GitOps best practice released | The ACK One GitOps best practice demonstrates how to use the out-of-the-box GitOps features to release, update, and roll back multi-cluster applications. In addition, GitOps can be used together with Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines and used to manage user permissions. | All |
May 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
Kubernetes 1.26 supported by ACK | Kubernetes 1.26 is supported by ACK. You can create ACK clusters that run Kubernetes 1.26. | All | |
csi-compatible-controller supported by ACK | The csi-compatible-controller component allows you to use FlexVolume and CSI in the same ACK cluster and migrate from FlexVolume to CSI by changing the type of volumes mounted to the applications in the cluster. | All | |
Creating elastic container instances from specified ECS instance types supported by ACK Serverless clusters | ACK Serverless clusters allow you to create elastic container instances from specified ECS instance types. These elastic container instances support multiple processors and can help you reduce the instance cost by 40% compared with the previous generation instances. In addition, you can purchase savings plans through annual subscriptions to reduce the cost by 10% when handling unexpected traffic fluctuations. | All | |
Cost insights supported by ACK Serverless clusters | Cost insights are supported by ACK Serverless clusters. Cost insights allow you to analyze the cost of elastic resources in terms of clusters, namespaces, and applications, and perform fine-grained cost prediction and locate the root cause. This feature can help IT asset administrators optimize resource allocation and billing methods and make cost governance much easier. | All | |
Blocking queues and strict priority scheduling supported by ack-kube-queue | ack-kube-queue allows system administrators to customize job queue management and improve the flexibility of queues.
| All | |
Visual Studio (VS) Code notebooks supported by cloud-native AI suite | The cloud-native AI suite allows you to create VS Code notebooks to develop and debug machine learning algorithms, and submit these algorithms to ACK clusters for model training. The cloud-native AI suite allows you to set up an AI development environment by deploying open source JupyterLab, custom Juypter notebook images, or custom VS Code notebook images in your ACK cluster, and integrate the configurations of the cloud-native AI suite with the permission management system of ACK. | All | |
Enabling and redirecting to GitOps supported by ACK One | ACK One supports the GitOps feature. You can enable or disable the GitOps console on the master instance page of the ACK One console. A hyperlink is also provided to redirect you to the GitOps console. | All | |
GitOps control plane logs and audit logs | ACK One allows you to view the control plane logs and audit logs of GitOps. You can view these logs on the master instance page of the ACK One console. | All | Enable the collection of the control plane logs and audit logs of GitOps |
April 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
Simultaneous deletion of Log Service projects and clusters | When you delete a cluster, you can specify whether to delete the Log Service project used by the cluster at the same time. Important A Log Service project includes multiple Logstores. After the project is deleted, data in the Logstores is also deleted. Proceed with caution. | All | |
ACK scheduler 4.1 released |
| All | |
Fluid control plane component monitoring | Fluid is a Kubernetes-native distributed dataset orchestration and acceleration engine that serves data-intensive applications, such as big data applications and AI applications, in cloud-native scenarios. ACK allows you to install the Fluid monitoring component on Prometheus instances of Managed Service for Prometheus with a few clicks and use the out-of-the-box dashboards provided by Managed Service for Prometheus to monitor the control plane components of Fluid. | All | |
Multi-tenant access control supported by ACK One GitOps | You can configure multi-tenant access control for ACK One GitOps to manage the permissions of different roles and mitigate potential security risks. | All |
March 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
vSwitch configuration supported in the Terway settings | vSwitches can be added or removed in the ACK console. You can add or remove vSwitches when you modify the terway-eniip component on the Add-ons page of the ACK console. | All | Increase the number of pod vSwitches in a cluster that uses the Terway plug-in |
NAS or CPFS client I/O operation troubleshooting through CNFS dashboards supported | Container Network File System (CNFS) dashboards can be used to troubleshoot issues related to I/O operations on clients and locate the pods that cause the issues. For example, you can troubleshoot frequent I/O operations that may slow down the system and high bandwidth usage on clients. | All | |
RAM user permission management supported by ACK One | Resource Access Management (RAM) users can be authorized to access and manage the master instances by using administrator accounts of master instances of Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform (ACK One). | All | |
Automatic application updates supported by ACK One GitOps Image Updater | Automatic application updates are supported by ACK One GitOps Image Updater. You can configure ACK One GitOps Image Updater to monitor image updates in Container Registry and automatically trigger application updates when new image versions are pushed to Container Registry. This allows you to build a GitOps pipeline based on third-party CI systems to automate application delivery. | All | Use ACK One and Container Registry to build a GitOps pipeline to automate application delivery |
Metering method and pricing solution updates for the cloud-native AI suite | The metering method and pricing solution of the cloud-native AI suite are updated to improve metering accuracy and apply tiered pricing. The 50% discount for the cloud-native AI suite ends at 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on April 1, 2023. Beginning 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on April 1, 2023, you are charged for using the cloud-native AI suite. | All | |
ack-fluid 0.9.7 released | ack-fluid 0.9.7 is released. ack-fluid is a cache accelerator that is included in the cloud-native AI suite. Some known issues are fixed and security is reinforced in ack-fluid 0.9.7. | All | |
Advanced features supported for gang scheduling | Advanced features are supported for gang scheduling, such as the GangGroup feature. ACK Pro clusters support gang scheduling to enable job scheduling in all-or-nothing scenarios. When you use gang scheduling, some jobs may use different roles. Using only one PodGroup to manage the pods of all roles cannot meet the requirements of different roles on the min-available resource. If you create multiple PodGroups for the roles, the pods of the roles cannot be scheduled in one batch. To resolve this issue, you can use the GangGroup feature to manage multiple gangs as a group. The job can be run only when the number of pods that are scheduled reaches the value of the min-available parameter for each role. In addition, gang scheduling retries can be controlled by claiming a matchpolicy. | All |
February 2023
Feature | Description | Region | References |
Custom parameters supported by kubelet | Kubelet configurations can be customized to manage the behavior of nodes. ACK allows you to customize the kubelet configurations of nodes in a node pool. After the modification is complete, the new configurations immediately take effect on existing nodes in the node pool in batches and are automatically applied to newly added nodes. | All | |
Service diagnostics supported by AIOps | The Service diagnostics feature is supported by AIOps. You can use this feature to troubleshoot CLB issues related to billing methods, certificates, reuse of CLB instances, CLB quotas, and anomaly events. | All | |
Cloud disk type configurable | The type of cloud disks mounted to your application can be changed. Assume that you have created a standard SSD for your application. If your application requires a higher IOPS, you can upgrade the type of the disk from standard SSD to enhanced SSD (ESSD). | All | |
Disks of the cloud_auto type supported by dynamically provisioned volumes | In addition to disks of the cloud_efficiency, cloud_ssd, cloud_essd, and available types, disks of the cloud_auto type can also be mounted as dynamically provisioned volumes. | All | |
Alibaba Cloud accounts supported for logging on to the Argo CD UI or Argo CD CLI | By default, ACK One GitOps supports single sign-on (SSO) when you use RAM users to log on to the Argo CD UI or Argo CD CLI. After you log on to the ACK One console by using an Alibaba Cloud account, you can use SSO to log on to the Argo CD UI or Argo CD CLI without entering a username and a password. | All |
Historical releases
For more information about ACK release notes before 2023, see Historical release notes (before 2023).