Edge Container provides elastic, easy-to-maintain computing resources based on containerized applications. Edge Container implements global deployment and proximity-based scheduling on points of presence (POPs) all over the world. This simplifies protocol processing and reduces response latency. You do not need to purchase server resources or worry about application scaling and O&M. This allows you to focus on application development rather than underlying infrastructure management.
Benefits
Global deployment, proximity-based scheduling, and ultra-low latency: You do not need to deploy containers in a specific region. Edge Container runs on the extensive global POP network of Alibaba Cloud. Requests from clients are automatically scheduled to the nearest POP. Containerized applications are triggered to process the requests and return the results to the clients. Compared with central deployment, Edge Container reduces the response time of client requests and provides low-latency computing.
Powerful proxy and protocol offload capabilities: Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) provides powerful protocol offload capabilities. You do not need to invest efforts in the development of access protocols for your containerized applications. Edge Container supports loading and offloading of protocols such as HTTP/3, HTTP/2, and TLS, which improves performance and security for your applications. In addition, Edge Container supports most ESA request and response processing features, such as request header modification and response compression.
Serverless mode, high elasticity, and easy O&M: You can focus on coding without the need to manage underlying resources, such as the CPU, memory, network, and operating system. ESA proactively and flexibly scales containers based on your resource usage. In addition, the system can detect and remove faulty containers at the earliest opportunity to ensure application stability, regardless of whether the cause is an internal exception of the container or a network issue of the Internet service provider (ISP).
Terms
application: An application is the basic unit for managing edge containers. You can create and release multiple versions for an application. You can also associate an ESA-accelerated domain name with an application to allow the application to provide external services.
release: Creating a version is the basis for application release. You can configure different images, computing power specifications, and probe methods for different versions. You can configure only one image for each version. You can release edge container versions in the canary environment and specify a release percentage. You are not allowed to release another version until the release percentage of the current version reaches 100%. However, you can roll back the version in the process.
trigger: Edge containers use triggers to provide external services. You can associate a containerized application with your website domain. Then, you can access the container by using the domain name. The domain name that you want to associate must belong to an available website. After you associate the domain name in the console, ESA automatically adds a DNS record for the associated domain name to the DNS settings of the website domain.
Feature availability
Feature | Entrance | Pro | Premium | Enterprise |
Edge Container | No | No | No | Yes |