ACK Pro clusters provide all benefits of ACK Basic clusters. For example, control planes are highly available and managed by Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). In addition, ACK Pro clusters feature higher reliability, security, and schedulability and are covered by SLA terms for compensation. ACK Pro clusters are suitable for enterprises that require higher security and stability for large-scale workloads in production environments. This topic describes the scenarios, features, and billing methods of ACK Pro clusters and ACK Basic clusters.
Scenarios
Internet enterprises: These enterprises deploy their business in large-scale production environments and require business management with high stability, security, and observability.
Big data computing enterprises: These enterprises deploy large-scale data computing services, high-performance data processing services, and other services that require high elasticity. These services require clusters with high stability, high performance, and high efficiency.
International enterprises that run their businesses in China: These enterprises prioritize security and services that provide SLAs with compensation clauses.
Financial enterprises: These enterprises require SLAs that include compensation clauses.
Features
Managed control planes with high reliability: The management of large-scale clusters is supported. etcd is a reliable store for disaster recovery and data restoration. etcd uses cold backups and hot backups to ensure data availability for ACK Pro clusters. Key metrics are collected for you to gain insights from control components. This allows you to detect potential risks.
Clusters with higher security: By default, etcd uses encrypted disks in the control plane. In the data plane, kms-plugin is installed to encrypt Kubernetes Secrets. ACK provides security management for this type of cluster. The advanced security management feature allows you to inspect containers in the running state and enable auto repairing.
Smarter pod scheduling: kube-scheduler is integrated to provide more powerful pod scheduling capabilities. You can use various scheduling algorithms, and use enhanced pod scheduling capabilities in scenarios where large-scale data computing or high-performance data processing is required.
SLA guarantees: ACK Pro clusters are covered by the SLA that supports compensation clauses. A level of 99.95% uptime is guaranteed for the cluster API server.
Billing rules
For more information about the billing rules of ACK Pro clusters, see Billing.
Comparison
The following table compares ACK Pro clusters and ACK Basic clusters.
Category | Feature | ACK Pro cluster | ACK Basic cluster |
Cluster size | N/A | Up to 5,000 nodes by default. To increase the quota, go to Quota Center and submit a ticket. | Up to 10 nodes for each new cluster. Existing ACK Basic clusters can be updated to ACK Pro clusters. |
SLA | N/A | 99.95% (supports compensation) | 99.90% (does not support compensation) |
API Server | Custom parameter settings |
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Availability monitoring |
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etcd | High-frequency cold backups, high-frequency hot backups, and geo-disaster recovery |
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Observability metrics |
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Kube Scheduler |
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Security management | The advanced security management feature that supports data encryption. For more information, see Use KMS to encrypt Kubernetes Secrets. |
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Managed node pool |
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References
For more information about how to migrate workloads from an ACK Basic cluster or ACK dedicated cluster to an ACK Pro cluster, see Hot migration from ACK Basic clusters to ACK Pro clusters and Hot migration from ACK dedicated clusters to ACK Pro clusters.