You can register clusters that are deployed in data centers or on a third-party cloud to Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform (ACK One). This way, you can build hybrid clusters and manage clusters in a centralized manner. This topic describes the features and use scenarios of registered clusters.

Features

Your daily operations and maintenance work may involve Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters, self-managed Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers, and Kubernetes clusters deployed on third-party clouds. If you have the following requirements for managing multiple clusters that are deployed in a multi-cloud or a hybrid cloud environment, we recommend that you register the clusters to ACK One.

  • Hybrid cloud elasticity: You want to add VMs, physical servers, and serverless computing resources in the cloud to registered clusters. ACK One provides multiple scaling and scheduling policies based on ack-co-scheduler. You can use these policies to enable priority-based scale-out and on-demand scale-in of resources in the cloud and data centers. You can also use these policies to manage the ratio of replicated pods in the cloud and data centers, and enable on-demand scale-in of node pools that run GPU-accelerated training jobs.
  • Centralized management of ACK clusters and self-managed Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers: The ACK console provides consistent O&M experience and security governance capabilities that allow you to centrally manage ACK clusters and self-managed Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers. For example, the ACK console provides a unified logging, monitoring, and alerting system, and supports unified authorization management of Alibaba Cloud accounts, Resource Access Management (RAM) users, and RAM roles. This allows you to centrally manage all your clusters and applications.
  • AI and big data capabilities: ACK One provides topology-aware CPU scheduling and enables non-uniform memory access (NUMA) awareness to improve computing efficiency by 30% to 40%. ACK One supports GPU sharing and scheduling to improve GPU utilization by 300%. ACK One allows you to scale and centrally manage heterogeneous resources in the cloud and data centers. ACK One is integrated with Fluid to provide unified and accelerated access to distributed cache in a hybrid cloud environment. Fluid accelerates data access by about 10 times and reduces bandwidth usage by 90%.
  • Data backup and disaster recovery: ACK One allows you to back up, restore, and migrate data to the cloud. This ensures service continuity.

Scenario 1: Hybrid cloud elasticity

scenario1

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.
  • Multilevel resource scheduling: ACK One allows you to configure multilevel resource scheduling policies. For example, you can prioritize computing resources in data centers over cloud computing resources during pod scheduling.

Scenario 2: Centralized management of ACK clusters and self-managed Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers

scenario2

Centralized cluster management: You can centrally manage clusters and applications in the ACK console. This saves the need to switch between multiple cloud platforms when you manage different clusters and applications.

Consistent observability services: ACK One provides a consistent logging, Prometheus monitoring, and alerting system for ACK clusters and Kubernetes clusters in data centers.

Consistent security governance: ACK One uses Alibaba Cloud accounts and RAM users to centrally manage the role-based access control (RBAC) permissions of ACK clusters, external Kubernetes clusters in data centers, and Kubernetes clusters in third-party clouds. In addition, ACK One provides auditing, security inspection, and node risk detection capabilities.

Scenario 3: Hybrid cloud data backup and disaster recovery

scenario31

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.
scenario32

Disaster recovery for your business: ACK One supports multi-replica disaster recovery for applications deployed across data centers and clouds.

Scenario 4: AI and big data capabilities

scenario4

Description:

  • Intelligent CPU scheduling: ACK One supports intelligent CPU scheduling and NUMA awareness based on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal instances.
  • 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.
  • ACK One can automatically scale resources that are deployed on the cloud and in data centers.
  • Distributed data caching in a hybrid cloud environment: ACK One is integrated with Fluid to provide unified and accelerated access to distributed cache in a hybrid cloud environment. Fluid can accelerate data access by about 10 times and reduces bandwidth usage by 90%.