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Last Updated:May 04, 2023

Introduction

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Distro is a Kubernetes distribution that Alibaba Cloud develops for heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments. ACK uses Container Registry to provide cluster images and technical support free of charge. The key components of ACK Distro are verified by ACK and Alibaba Cloud, and provide enhanced security and stability for workloads in large-scale production environments.

ACK Distro uses Sealer, an open source application packaging and delivery tool provided by Alibaba Cloud, to perform simple and fast application delivery in on-premises environments. This allows you to manage clusters in an easy and efficient manner. The key components of ACK Distro support the x86 and Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) architectures. ACK Distro uses the Hybridnet network plug-in to run on top of various types of infrastructure. In addition, you can register ACK Distro clusters to ACK. This allows you to share the resource management, policy compliance, and traffic control capabilities of ACK with ACK Distro clusters.

Differences between ACK Distro and ACK

ACK clusters are deployed on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances and managed by ACK. ACK Distro clusters are managed by users and can be deployed in on-premises environments, instances of other cloud service providers, or your on-premises machine. The update of Kubernetes versions supported by ACK Distro is consistent with the update of Kubernetes versions supported by ACK. For more information, see FAQ.

Benefits

Stability and reliability: The key components of ACK are also used by ACK Distro and updated accordingly. These components are tested by the key business within Alibaba Group and are accepted by hundreds of thousands of users. The components provide enhanced security and stability for workloads in large-scale production environments.

Agility and ease of use: ACK Distro is deeply integrated with Sealer to manage cluster lifecycles. ACK Distro can automatically deploy, scale, and upgrade clusters within a few minutes.

Consistent user experience: You can use ACK to manage ACK Distro clusters. This allows you to share the resource management, policy compliance, and traffic control capabilities of ACK with ACK Distro clusters. In addition, you can apply the solutions provided by ACK to applications in ACK Distro clusters.

Wide compatibility: The key components of ACK Distro support the x86 and ARM architectures. ACK Distro uses the Hybridnet network plug-in to run on top of various types of infrastructure.

Key features

Cluster creation

  • Supports single-node deployment, three-node deployment, and etcd/API server-decoupled deployment. Single-node deployment does not ensure high availability, whereas three-node deployment ensures high availability. etcd/API server-decoupled deployment will be available soon.

  • Supports environment precheck and cluster verification after deployment (coming soon).

  • Supports various IaaS services, such as ECS, VMware, VirtualBox, ZStack, OpenStack, and Bare Metal.

  • Supports various operating systems, such as Red Hat, Debian, OpenAnolis, Kylin, and Windows (coming soon).

  • Supports various CPU architectures, such as x86 and ARM64.

Cluster O&M

  • Supports node scaling and replacement.

  • Supports runtime inspection and cluster health check (coming soon).

  • Supports data backup and restoration (coming soon), and Kubernetes version upgrade (coming soon).

High-performance networks

  • Allows you to deploy containers in both overlay networks and underlay networks, and decouples the overlay network from the underlay network through tunnels. ACK Distro also connects the overlay network to the underlay network by using high-performance networks other than tunnels.

  • Provides flexible IP management methods, dynamic scaling of CIDR blocks, and customization of pod IP addresses.

  • Provides visualized and comprehensive auditing for network resources.

  • Supports networking for multiple clusters.

Local storage management

  • Supports local storage pool management, dynamic volume distribution, volume expansion, and volume snapshots.

  • Supports storage scheduling algorithms.

  • Supports volume monitoring.

HCI Solution Support

Around the ACK Distro, we build a hyperconverged infrastructure solution by a containerized distributed storage system (vCNS) and container networking in physical environments (Hybridnet). vCNS system is a data service scheduling system based on Kubernetes. It's designed based on the Kubernetes framework, using Kubernetes' native APIs and mechanisms to design the management, control, operation and maintenance of the entire storage system. By this way, computation and storage can be deployed in the same Kubernetes cluster without the need for a separate storage cluster or network environment. It provides file storage and block storage, supports horizontal expansion and multi-copy high availability.

Quick start

# Obtain Sealer.
wget -c http://sealer.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/sealers/sealer-v0.5.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz && \
        tar -xvf sealer-v0.5.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz -C /usr/bin

# Obtain an ACK Distro artifact and use it to create a cluster.
sealer run ack-agility-registry.cn-shanghai.cr.aliyuncs.com/ecp_builder/ackdistro:v1.20.4-ack-1 -m ${master_ip1}[,${master_ip2},${master_ip3}] [ -n ${worker_ip1}...] -p password

# Check the cluster.
kubectl get cs

For more information, see User Guide.

Introduction to components

Basic components

apiserver, scheduler, kcm, kubelet, kube-proxy, coredns, metrics-server, kubectl, and kubeadm.

Container runtimes

docker, containerd, and nvidia-docker.

Installation tools

Open source Sealer.

Network plug-ins

Open source Hybridnet, which supports underlay networks and overlay networks.

Volume plug-ins

Open source open-local, which supports local disk scheduling.

Community

For more information, see Alibaba Cloud ACK Distro community.