acs-virtual-node - Container Compute Service - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

ACS Virtual Node seamlessly extends Kubernetes with the container computing power of Alibaba Cloud Container Compute Service (ACS). This topic describes its components, usage notes, and release notes.

Component overview

Built on the open-source Virtual Kubelet project, ACS Virtual Node extends support for providers and has been significantly optimized to seamlessly integrate Kubernetes with the container computing power of Container Compute Service (ACS). This provides Kubernetes clusters with significant elasticity and removes node capacity constraints. Create pods on demand without planning cluster capacity.

ACS Virtual Node runs application pods as serverless containers, providing elasticity, eliminating capacity planning, and offering an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model. This model is ideal for significantly improving deployment elasticity and reducing computing costs for scenarios such as batch jobs, CI/CD pipelines, Spark-based data processing, and online applications that need to handle traffic bursts.

Usage

For more information about ACS Pod, see ACS Pod Instance Overview.

Release notes

July 2026

Version	Date	Description	Impact
v2.18.1	July 28, 2026	Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where ACS compute wake-up occasionally failed. Fixed an issue where PodNetworking did not take effect in ACS clusters.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.17.5	July 27, 2026	Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where ACS compute wake-up occasionally failed. Fixed an issue where PodNetworking did not take effect in ACS clusters.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.18.0	July 10, 2026	New Features: Added support for in-place restart of ACS pods. Added support for ACS compute in the Hangzhou region of Alibaba Finance Cloud. Added support for local disks on reserved nodes. Optimizations: Improved pod-to-node binding efficiency.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.17.4	July 8, 2026	Optimizations: Improved pod authentication efficiency. Improved the efficiency of pod update comparisons. Optimized the API server address used by pods for in-cluster access. Reduced the memory footprint of pod metrics. Optimized the handling of oversized PodTemplates to prevent batch query errors. Bug Fixes: Fixed a rare issue where a failed wake-up was not retried. Fixed a rare issue where the certificate of a Sandbox instance became invalid.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

June 2026

Version	Date	Description	Impact
v2.17.3	June 5, 2026	Optimizations: Reduced pod creation latency at scale. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where an instance being woken up could be deleted in extreme cases. Fixed an issue introduced in v2.17.0 where a pod with an excessively long name remained in the Terminating state for an extended period.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

May 2026

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v2.17.2	May 8, 2026	New Features: Added automatic retries for pod creation when the `ImageCache.NotReady` error occurs. Optimizations: Changed the maximum number of metric shards to 48. Improved error messages when hibernation or wake-up operations are unsupported by the current compute type. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where disk scaling settings did not take effect. Fixed an issue where ACS instances were repeatedly woken up in extreme cases. Fixed an issue where the cause of an ACS instance wake-up failure was missing in some scenarios.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

April 2026

Version	Date	Description	Impact
v2.17.1	April 3, 2026	Fixed an issue in v2.16.3 and later where some ECI-based pods in the terminal `Failed` or `Succeeded` state could not be deleted.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.16.6	April 3, 2026	Fixed an issue in v2.16.3 and later where some ECI-based pods in the terminal `Failed` or `Succeeded` state could not be deleted.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

March 2026

Version	Date	Description	Impact
v2.16.5	March 20, 2026	Improved pod update efficiency at scale.	No service impact.

February 2026

Version	Release date	Changes	Impact
v2.16.4	February 26, 2026	Improved pod creation efficiency at scale. Improved pod-to-node binding efficiency at scale.	Non-disruptive update.
v2.16.3	February 5, 2026	Optimizations: Improved add-on startup efficiency for large-scale clusters. Improved pod deletion efficiency for large-scale clusters.	Non-disruptive update.

January 2026

Version	Update date	Changes	Impact
v2.16.2	January 28, 2026	Optimizations: Improved the retry mechanism for pod creation requests on virtual nodes when the quota is exceeded. Bug Fixes: Fixed an intermittent issue where pods on virtual nodes remained Pending because Unschedulable reserved nodes existed.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.16.1	January 27, 2026	Optimizations: Improved management of the add-on's internal HTTP connection pool. Improved pod creation performance at scale in v2.16.0 and reduced startup time. Bug Fixes: Fixed an intermittent issue where pods remained Pending in extreme cases.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.16.0	January 6, 2026	New Features: Enabled the pod capacity feature for virtual nodes by default. Added support for PodNetworking on ACS compute resources. Added support for ACS compute resources to reference cross-namespace resources through `NodePublishSecretRef`. Added support for enabling CSINode on reserved nodes. Added support for sending event notifications while reserved nodes self-heal. Added support for displaying the `InterruptionHardwareFault` condition on pods running on ACS GPU instances and reserved nodes. Optimizations: Improved add-on startup speed at scale. Improved the success rate of instance cleanup in extreme cases. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where reserved nodes could enter the `NotReady` state in specific scenarios. Fixed an issue where pod conditions could be unexpectedly overwritten in extreme cases. Fixed an authorization issue that could occur when SidecarSet injection is used with ACS compute resources. Fixed an issue where the `Instance.ToBeReleased` condition was not displayed correctly on ACS compute instances.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

December 2025

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v2.15.8	December 8, 2025	Optimizations: Improved local Informer cache expiration handling. Improved processing speed for pods in a terminal state. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where SidecarSet pod permissions were revoked. Fixed an issue where conditions were overwritten in extreme cases.	This update does not affect your services.

November 2025

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.15.7	November 26, 2025	Optimizations: Improved the rate-limiting retry mechanism. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where reserved node IP addresses were not updated.	This update does not affect your workloads.
v2.15.6	November 5, 2025	Optimizations: Improved ACS instance resource normalization. Improved the error message when pods on reserved nodes use an unsupported `ComputeClass`. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where the local Informer cache did not expire in time. Fixed an issue where a pod's Annotation could be inconsistent with the definition in its `Spec` after an in-place resource change (InPlace VPA).	This update does not affect your workloads.

October 2025

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v2.15.5	October 20, 2025	Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where reserved node IP addresses were missing in ACS clusters.	This upgrade has no impact on your services.

September 2025

Version	Date	Changes	Impact
v2.15.4	September 28, 2025	Optimizations: Improved the error messages for scheduling DaemonSet Pods to virtual nodes. Improved the recovery of GPU Pods from abnormal states in ACS clusters. Bug Fixes: Fixed an intermittent issue preventing ACS Pod status updates. Fixed an issue where the IP address of a reserved node was missing in an ACS cluster. Fixed intermittent crashes when using CNFS volumes.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.15.3	September 28, 2025	Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where Pods remained in the `Pending` state for long periods in rare cases. Fixed an issue where Pods failed to reach a terminal state, such as `Succeeded` or `Failed`, in rare cases.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.15.2	September 22, 2025	Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue in v2.15.0 where ACS resource normalization did not take effect. Fixed an issue where the KubeletVersion field for reserved nodes was inaccurate. Fixed an issue where local cache data would expire due to delayed API server pushes.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.15.1	September 9, 2025	Fixed an issue where Pod creation failed when a vSwitch was specified by using an annotation.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

August 2025

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.15.0	August 19, 2025	New features: Introduced support for reserved nodes. Introduced automatic protocol conversion from ECI to ACS. Improvements: Reduced memory usage by approximately 40%. Improved the reliability of ACS pod creation. Adjust the virtual node's ephemeral storage capacity (`ephemeral-storage`) to 60000 Ti to prevent scheduling failures. Bug fixes: Fixed a bug that caused ACS GPU pod scale-up to fail when a cloud disk was mounted. Fixed failures during in-place container restarts. Fixed an issue where the `PodNetworking` configuration does not take effect in an ACK cluster.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.12.0-acs.16	August 7, 2025	Fixed an intermittent bug that caused pods to get stuck in the Pending state. Added status reporting for reserved nodes. Improved reporting for the Interruption.GPUShareReclaim condition.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

May 2025

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.14	May 12, 2025	Fixed unexpected updates to reserved nodes. Fixed parsing failures caused by an invalid acs-profile format. Added support for exposing the Interruption.GPUShareReclaim Condition.	No impact on running workloads.

March 2025

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.13	March 20, 2025	Added support for inventory-aware scheduling for GPU-accelerated pods.	This update does not affect your workloads.

February 2025

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.12	February 13, 2025	Adjusted the ephemeral storage capacity on a virtual node to 60,000 TiB. Fixed an issue where retries were not performed when ServiceUnavailable was encountered during advanced scheduling. Optimized the interaction between a PVC and the csiprovisioner component in WaitForFirstConsumer mode.	No impact on your workloads.

January 2025

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.11	January 21, 2025	Optimized the advanced scheduling feature.	This upgrade does not affect your workloads.
v2.12.0-acs.10	January 17, 2025	Added support for exposing metrics for reserved nodes. Optimized the retry mechanism. Other feature optimizations.	This upgrade does not affect your workloads.

November 2024

Version	Date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.9	November 27, 2024	Supports scaling up cloud disks for GPU-accelerated Pods. Supports inventory awareness for general-purpose and performance-enhanced Pods. Other feature improvements.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

September 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.8	September 13, 2024	Upgraded the Kubernetes API dependency to v1.30. Added the container_sockets and container_processes Prometheus metrics. Enabled KubeSkoop to collect network metrics. Enabled mounting disks to GPU-accelerated pods. Enabled CPU hot scaling for general-purpose pods.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

August 2024

Version	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.7	August 21, 2024	Fixed an issue where an associated event was missing a UID.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.
v2.12.0-acs.6	August 2, 2024	General-purpose and performance Pods support expanding cloud disk volumes.	This upgrade has no impact on your workloads.

July 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.5	July 25, 2024	Replaced role and role binding authentication with pod identity verification.	No impact on workloads.

June 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.0-acs.4	June 21, 2024	Integrated with the scheduler to support Kubernetes-native scheduling. Added support for creating Pods using a Capacity Reservation.	No impact on workloads.