ACK One is a distributed cloud container platform that is provided by Alibaba Cloud. ACK One allows enterprise users to manage cloud-native applications in hybrid cloud, multi-cluster, distributed computing, and disaster recovery scenarios. You can register external Kubernetes clusters that are deployed in all regions or on all types of infrastructure with ACK One. In addition, ACK One is compatible with the API of open source Kubernetes. This allows you to centrally manage and maintain computing resources, networks, storage, security, monitoring, logs, jobs, applications, and traffic. This topic describes the features, benefits, and use scenarios of ACK One.

Benefits

  • ACK One provides a unified web interface and is compatible with the API of open source Kubernetes. You can centrally manage and maintain computing resources, networks, storage, security, monitoring, logs, jobs, applications, and traffic.
  • ACK One can automatically scale cloud resources to handle traffic fluctuations. You can also set ACK One to scale cloud resources at a specified time. This improves the cost-effectiveness of your business.
  • Backup center is an out-of-the-box feature provided by ACK One to protect applications and application data. This feature allows you to migrate an application together with the application data across regions. You can also use this feature to deploy an application on multiple servers for high redundancy.
  • ACK One can distribute applications, schedule jobs, and manage network traffic across all regions. This helps enterprises build a secure, standardized, and advanced IT framework for cloud-native applications based on business architecture and data management requirements.
  • ACK One allows you quickly deploy enterprise-class products or components that are verified by Alibaba Cloud in large-scale scenarios in Kubernetes clusters. This allows you to enhance security, improve scheduling efficiency, and accelerate AI computing and big data computing.

Features

ACK ONE
  • Consistent management: ACK One allows you to manage Kubernetes clusters that are deployed on the cloud, at the edge, and in data centers in a centralized manner. This ensures consistent user experience when you manage cloud-native applications in different environments based on the Alibaba Cloud standard of best practices. You can carry out security measures and cost-saving plans in a centralized manner.
  • Intelligent scheduling: ACK One allows you to manage the scheduling and distribution of jobs and job quotas for different tenants in multi-environment scenarios in a centralized manner. This improves resource utilization, enables data exchange between heterogeneous data sources in different regions, and accelerates AI computing and big data computing.
  • Data backup and disaster recovery: ACK One allows you to back up, restore, and migrate data. This enables cross-region cluster redundancy and ensures service continuity based on an active-active application architecture.
  • Security and compliance: ACK One provides security policies for applications in hybrid cloud and multi-cluster scenarios. ACK One performs inspections to detect configuration risks and security vulnerabilities.
  • Application distribution: ACK One provides a distributed application delivery system that allows you to deploy applications across regions or clusters. This way, the applications can be accessed from the nearest access points in all regions.
  • Traffic management: ACK One allows you to manage north-south and east-west traffic in multi-cluster and multi-region scenarios based on the Alibaba Cloud standard of best practices. ACK One also provides a managed Service Mesh (ASM) module that manages the traffic to microservices. This feature is compatible with Istio.
  • Marketplace: This feature provides Alibaba Cloud services and cloud-native components that are verified by ACK One. You can deploy the services and components to a region or cluster with a few clicks.

Scenario 1: Register an external cluster in a data center to the cloud

Scenario 1
Description:
  • Self-managed clusters in data centers: ACK One allows you to connect a data center to the cloud and share resources.
  • On-demand resource and application scaling: ACK One can scale out resources and applications in the cloud during peak hours to balance the traffic load on the self-managed cluster.
  • Cloud disaster recovery: ACK One allows you to back up your business to the cloud for disaster recovery.
  • Improved observability: ACK One allows you to enable monitoring, log collection, and event collection for self-managed clusters. This ensures consistent O&M experience for clusters that are deployed in data centers and on the cloud.
  • Enhanced security: ACK One allows you to enable auditing, inspection, and node risk detection with a few clicks.
  • Application development and testing in a data center: ACK One allows you to develop and test applications in a data center, and then release applications in the cloud.

Scenario 2: Multi-cluster management

Scenario 2.png
Description:
  • O&M of resources in multiple regions: ACK One allows you to manage the connections, permissions, configurations, and ciphertext files in clusters that are deployed in different regions.
  • Distribute workloads to multiple clusters: ACK One can automatically schedule jobs to multiple clusters. Various types of jobs are supported, such as Spark jobs, Kubernetes Jobs, and TensorFlow training jobs.
  • Set quotas for tenants in multiple clusters: ACK One allows you to set quotas for tenants that belong to different clusters.
  • Set permissions for tenants in multiple clusters: ACK One allows you to set permissions for tenants that belong to different clusters.
  • Application distribution: ACK One allows you to deploy an application to multiple clusters at the same time by using blue-green releases and canary releases. ACK One allows you to roll back the application to a specific version.
  • Traffic control: ACK One allows you to distribute traffic to multiple clusters and use traffic policies to regulate the distribution.

Scenario 3: Data backup and disaster recovery, zone-disaster recovery, and cross-region disaster recovery in hybrid cloud environments

Scenario 3
Description:
  • Deploy applications to the cloud: ACK One allows you to back up and restore applications across regions and from a data center to the cloud. This helps you deploy your business to the cloud in an efficient manner.
  • Disaster recovery: ACK One allows you to back up stateful applications across regions and from a data center to the cloud. ACK One also allows you to configure backup policies and restoration policies. This allows you to continuously back up your applications to the cloud to enhance the availability of your business.
  • Disaster recovery: ACK One provides scheduled data backup and geo-disaster recovery for applications and data in the cloud and data centers.
  • Active geo-redundancy: ACK One allows you to build a disaster recovery system by deploying three data centers across two zones. This feature is compatible with Kubernetes and helps ensure the high availability of your business.

Scenario 4: AI and big data computing, coordinated resource scheduling in registered clusters, and job scheduling across clusters

Scenario 4.png
Description:
  • Develop AI algorithms: ACK One provides comprehensive management of AI jobs, quotas, and observability.
  • AI training: ACK One supports topology-aware scheduling and a wide variety of job scheduling policies. This allows you to improve training efficiency. ACK One supports compute-storage decoupling, which significantly accelerates distributed training jobs. ACK One supports cross-cluster scheduling of various types of jobs, such as Spark jobs, Kubernetes Jobs, and TensorFlow training jobs.
  • AI inference: ACK One supports GPU sharing, which can improve GPU utilization by 300%. ACK One can automatically scale resources that are deployed on the cloud and in data centers.
  • Intelligent CPU scheduling: ACK One supports intelligent CPU scheduling and non-uniform memory access (NUMA) awareness based on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal instances.

Scenario 5: Cross-region application distribution

Scenario 5.png
Description:
  • Deploy applications across clusters: ACK One allows you to deploy an application to multiple Kubernetes clusters in a versioned and declarative manner.
  • Hot upgrade and rollback: ACK One allows you to perform hot upgrades and rollbacks for applications without the need to redeploy the applications.
  • Canary release: ACK One allows you to deploy an application to clusters in different regions and implement canary releases of the application.

Scenario 6: ACK Anywhere can use ACK One to manage all Kubernetes distributions that comply with the compatibility tests, such as ACK Distro

Scenario 6.png
Description:
  • Data center deployment: You can use ACK Distro to manage data centers and use ACK One to register and manage ACK Distro clusters.
  • Consistent O&M experience: ACK One ensures consistent O&M experience for clusters that are deployed on the cloud and in data centers