Integrate serverless computing power on the cloud

Key benefits

Virtual nodes offer the following advantages:

• O&M-free: You do not need to manage the underlying resource pool, which reduces your O&M workload. As managed resources, virtual nodes eliminate routine Kubernetes node O&M tasks, such as system upgrades and security patching.

• Ultra-large capacity: Scale out to a maximum of 50,000 pods without capacity planning in advance.

  Important

  If many pods are associated with services, we recommend that you keep the number of pods below 20,000.

• Elasticity in seconds: Create thousands of pods in seconds. This ensures that sudden traffic spikes do not affect your services due to pod creation delays.

• Security isolation: Pods are created based on ECI. Each container instance is strongly isolated from others using lightweight virtualization and sandboxed container technology. Container instances do not affect each other.

• Cost-effective: Applications are created on demand and use the pay-as-you-go billing method. You are not charged for idle resources, which eliminates waste. The serverless architecture also leads to lower O&M costs.

Use cases

Virtual nodes are well-suited for the following scenarios:

• Online services

  For online services that often experience traffic spikes, such as online education and e-commerce, virtual nodes support scaling in seconds. This prevents system failures caused by delayed scaling during traffic surges and avoids resource waste.

• Data processing

  When you process many concurrent online data tasks, such as Spark and Presto, you are no longer limited by the cost of underlying resources, which can restrict the concurrency of your tasks. You can quickly launch thousands of pods in a short time to meet the demands of online big data processing.

• AI tasks

  For AI tasks that do not need to run continuously and require a large amount of computing resources, such as model training and model inference, you do not need to reserve resources. You can use resources on demand and pay by the second to reduce AI inference costs. Virtual nodes also support elasticity in seconds to respond quickly to sudden task demands.

• CI/CD test environments

  For batch testing tasks in your CI/CD process, such as CI packaging, stress tests, and simulation tests, you can use virtual nodes to create and release container instances at any time. This supports on-demand usage and per-second billing, which provides low-cost, large-scale resource provisioning.

• Jobs and CronJobs

  Tasks such as Jobs and CronJobs do not need to run continuously. After a Job is complete, it automatically terminates, and the corresponding pod is deleted. Virtual nodes support automatic billing suspension and resource release after a task is complete to avoid resource waste.

Limits

Note the following limits before you use virtual nodes.

• DaemonSets are not supported. You can replace DaemonSets with sidecar containers.

• You cannot specify HostPath or HostNetwork in pod manifests.

• Privileged containers are not supported. You can use a security context to add capabilities to a pod.

  Note

  The privileged container feature is in internal preview. To use this feature, submit a ticket.

• NodePort Services and the Session Affinity feature are not supported.

• The China South Finance and Alibaba Gov Cloud regions are not supported.