Elastic Container Instance：Common scenarios

Overview

You can connect Elastic Container Instance to your business systems by using the following methods:

• Seamlessly connect Elastic Container Instance to Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Serverless clusters.

• Connect Elastic Container Instance as virtual nodes to Kubernetes clusters such as ACK clusters, Kubernetes clusters deployed on Elastic Compute Service (ECS), or self-managed Kubernetes clusters in data centers.

• Connect Elastic Container Instance to your business systems by calling API operations.

Elastic Container Instance provides the benefits of serverless services, elasticity, cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and compatibility. These benefits make Elastic Container Instance best suited for businesses that have high elasticity and concurrency requirements. The following figure shows the scenarios.

Automatic scaling for online business

Elastic Container Instance uses Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) of Kubernetes to automatically scale up the capacity based on business traffic. This prevents system failures during traffic spikes and reduces the costs caused by idle resources. If you use ACK, you can proportionally deploy a business application on ECS instances or elastic container instances for more efficient resource usage, faster scale-out, higher system reliability, and lower costs.

• High elasticity

  Elastic Container Instance supports scale-out within seconds for handling hundreds of times the normal traffic volume during traffic spikes. Elastic Container Instance also supports HPA and CronHPA.

• Cost-effectiveness

  Elastic Container Instance dynamically adjusts resource usage based on business traffic and uses the pay-as-you-go billing method.

• High availability

  Elastic Container Instance supports fine-grained application scaling. You can specify the number of replicas to be scheduled to ECS. During a scale-out event, the system schedules the specified number of replicas to ECS and then schedules other replicas to Elastic Container Instance. During a scale-in event, the replicas that run on Elastic Container Instance are preferentially reclaimed.

Hosting for online business

Elastic Container Instance allows you to use Kubernetes clusters and O&M-free infrastructure fully managed by ACK so that you can focus on developing business applications without the need to invest in O&M. In addition, you can enable auto scaling based on business traffic to reduce operational costs.

• Zero O&M

  Elastic Container Instance allows you to focus on developing applications, services, and tasks without the need to manage clusters or worker nodes.

• Cost-effectiveness

  Elastic Container Instance dynamically adjusts resource usage based on business traffic and uses the pay-as-you-go billing method.

• High compatibility

  Elastic Container Instance supports the following types of workloads: StatefulSet, Deployment, Job, and CronJob.

Data processing

Elastic Container Instance breaks free of the limits of underlying resources due to costs when you process a large number of concurrent online tasks. You can create a large number of processing nodes in a short period of time to meet the requirements of big data and online AI processing. If you use ACK, you can seamlessly deploy Spark or Presto on Kubernetes.

• High compatibility

  Elastic Container Instance is fully compatible with Kubernetes deployed with Spark without the need to change your business systems.

• Cost-effectiveness

  Elastic Container Instance eliminates the need to reserve resources for jobs. When you submit a job, Elastic Container Instance automatically applies for resources required to run the job and releases the resources after the job is complete.

• High concurrency

  Elastic Container Instance can start a large number of concurrent jobs in a short period of time. This eliminates the need to scale up clusters and allocate resources.

Event-driven business

Elastic Container Instance provides a serverless infrastructure for containers. When events are triggered, Elastic Container Instance allows you to schedule containers or process a large number of events at high concurrency and low costs. For example, you can use Elastic Container Instance to execute recording and transcoding tasks for online education.

• High concurrency

  Elastic Container Instance can schedule a large number of resources for you to execute concurrent tasks.

• High elasticity

  Elastic Container Instance can scale up and start containers within seconds to handle a large number of concurrent events or tasks.

• Cost-effectiveness

  You are billed based on the resource types and the resource usage duration of Elastic Container Instance. The billing stops when events or tasks end.

CI/CD testing

Elastic Container Instance is integrated with a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) process to automatically deploy containers, package applications, and run test cases. You can create or release elastic container instances at any time. Elastic Container Instance can provide cost-effective large-scale resources for batch testing tasks during a CI/CD process, such as the full-scale simulation in the development and testing phase of autonomous driving.

• High elasticity

  Elastic Container Instance supports high concurrency, CPUs, and GPUs. This makes elastic container instances suitable for application packaging, stress testing, or simulation testing during a CI process.

• Cost-effectiveness

  You are billed by second. Elastic Container Instance automatically releases resources when the testing ends. This reduces the CI/CD costs.

• Deep integration

  Elastic Container Instance is deeply integrated with CI processes. After a version of code is submitted, Elastic Container Instance can directly trigger stress testing or simulation testing. Elastic Container Instance supports standard Kubernetes API operations.