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Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh:Add a cluster to an ASM instance

Last Updated:Aug 27, 2026

After you add a cluster to an ASM instance, you can use the traffic management, fault handling, unified monitoring, and logging features of ASM to improve system reliability and security, manage and monitor service interactions, and improve observability.

Prerequisites

Note

(Recommended) Add a cluster that resides in the same VPC as the ASM instance. To add a cluster that resides in a different VPC from the ASM instance, use Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) to connect the VPCs. For more information, see Disaster recovery across multiple ACK clusters in different VPCs (connect VPC networks by using CEN).

Add a cluster with VPC connectivity to the ASM instance

Clusters with VPC connectivity include:

  • Clusters that reside in the same VPC as the ASM control plane.

  • Clusters that reside in a different VPC from the ASM control plane, but whose networks are already connected by using a method such as CEN.

Procedure

  1. Log on to the ASM console. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Service Mesh > Mesh Management.

  2. On the Mesh Management page, click the name of the ASM instance. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Cluster & Workload Management (Data Plane) > Kubernetes Clusters. On the page that appears, click Add.

  3. On the Add Kubernetes Cluster page, select the clusters that you want to add, and then click OK.

    • (Recommended) If your application services run in a single cluster or in multiple clusters within the same VPC, click Filter out Kubernetes clusters that are in the same VPC as the ASM instance first, and then select the cluster that you want to add from the cluster list.

    • Make sure that the proxy containers that run in the cluster that you want to add can access the Istio Pilot address exposed by the ASM instance. If the ASM instance does not expose a public Istio Pilot address, make sure that the address is accessible over the VPC.

  4. In the Note dialog box, click OK.

After you add the cluster, go to the Instance Information > Base Information page. The Status of the ASM instance changes to Updating. The update takes a few seconds, and the duration varies based on the number of clusters that you add. Then, click Refresh in the upper-right corner of the page.

The Status of the ASM instance changes to Running. On the Kubernetes Clusters page, view information about the added cluster.

When you no longer need a cluster in an ASM instance, you can remove the cluster from the instance. On the Kubernetes Clusters page, select the cluster that you want to remove and click Remove. Then, in the Confirm dialog box, click OK.

Warning

After you remove the cluster, the cluster can no longer use the service mesh. Proceed with caution.

Add a cluster without VPC connectivity to the ASM instance

ASM supports three methods for adding a cluster that does not have VPC connectivity to the ASM instance:

Connect VPCs by using CEN

To connect VPCs by using CEN, see Use an Enterprise Edition transit router for secure traffic communication and connect the VPC of the ASM instance to the VPC of the cluster. Then, follow the steps in Procedure to add the cluster to the ASM instance.

Connect VPCs by using PrivateLink

To connect VPCs by using PrivateLink, see Use PrivateLink to manage network connectivity between control plane and data plane clusters across VPCs.

Connect over the Internet

Make sure that public network access is enabled for the cluster that you want to add. Then, see Associate an EIP with or disassociate an EIP from the control plane of an ASM instance to enable public network access for the ASM control plane, and follow the steps in Procedure to add the cluster to the ASM instance.

References