Use registered clusters for centralized management - Container Service for Kubernetes

Register clusters from data centers or third-party clouds into Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform (ACK One) to manage all your Kubernetes clusters from a single control plane—without switching between multiple platforms.

Use cases

Manage Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters and external Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers from the ACK console.
Manage ACK clusters and external Kubernetes clusters deployed on third-party clouds from the ACK console.
Manage ACK clusters that belong to different Alibaba Cloud accounts from the ACK console.

What you can do after registering

After connecting your clusters to ACK One, you can use the following capabilities:

Centralized cluster management: View and manage all clusters and applications in the ACK console. No need to switch between platforms.
Consistent security governance: Use Alibaba Cloud accounts and Resource Access Management (RAM) users to manage role-based access control (RBAC) permissions across ACK clusters, data center clusters, and third-party cloud clusters. ACK One also provides auditing, security inspection, and node risk detection.
Consistent observability: Set up unified logging, monitoring, and alerting across all registered clusters.

Architecture

Register and configure your cluster

Step 1: Create a registered cluster and connect your external cluster

Create a registered cluster in the ACK console and connect your external cluster to it. For details, see Create a registered cluster in the ACK console.

Step 2: Install components based on your requirements

After the cluster is connected, install the components that match your use case:

Hybrid cloud with elastic container instances: See Build a hybrid elastic container cluster and add ECS instances to the cluster and Schedule pods to elastic container instances deployed as virtual nodes.
Security governance: See Security governance for auditing, security inspection, and node risk detection.
Observability services: See Observability services for logging, monitoring, and alerting.