What is ACK?

Cluster type

Description

Reference

Billing

Container Service for Kubernetes

ACK Pro clusters extend ACK Basic clusters with enhanced reliability, security, and schedulability. Covered by SLAs with compensation clauses, ideal for large-scale production workloads requiring high stability and security.

What is ACK managed cluster?

Billing of ACK managed clusters and dedicated clusters

ACK Serverless

Deploy containerized applications in ACK Serverless clusters without purchasing or maintaining nodes. Pay-as-you-go fees are charged based on the CPU and memory resources requested by your applications. ACK Serverless clusters are Kubernetes-compatible, letting you focus on application development.

Overview of ACK Serverless

Billing

ACK Edge

ACK Edge is a cloud-edge coordination solution for edge computing. ACK Edge clusters integrate cloud virtualization, storage, network, and security capabilities into standard, secure, highly-available Kubernetes clusters, simplifying O&M.

What is ACK Edge?

Billing of ACK edge clusters

ACK Lingjun

ACK Lingjun clusters are Kubernetes clusters developed based on Intelligent Computing LINGJUN with fully-managed and highly-available control planes. In ACK Lingjun clusters, Lingjun nodes serve as worker nodes.

ACK Lingjun

Billing for ACK LINGJUN clusters

cloud-native AI suite

A cloud-native AI technology and product solution that uses ACK as the base.

• Centrally manages heterogeneous resources, compatible with standard Kubernetes environments and APIs. Key components handle resource management, AI job scheduling and lifecycle, application scaling, data acceleration, workflow orchestration, big data integration, and artifact management.

• Covers key AI pipeline stages, including dataset management, model development, training, evaluation, and inference services.

Cloud-native AI suite overview

Billing of Cloud-native AI Suite

Distributed Cloud Container Platform for Kubernetes (ACK One)

ACK One is an enterprise-class cloud-native platform for hybrid cloud, multi-cluster, distributed computing, and disaster recovery scenarios. Connects and manages Kubernetes clusters across any region or infrastructure, including cloud, edge, and data centers. Provides consistent management and Kubernetes-compatible APIs for computing, storage, networks, security, monitoring, logs, jobs, applications, and traffic.

ACK One overview

Billing of ACK One

Comparison item

Self-managed Kubernetes cluster

ACK cluster

Cluster management

• Manually deploy clusters and develop a management system.

• Create clusters in the console with GPU-accelerated instances and Elastic Compute Service (ECS) Bare Metal instances. Deploy across zones for high availability.

• Provide OS images optimized for containers, with stable, security-enhanced Kubernetes and Docker versions.

• Support multi-cluster and cluster federation management.

Application management

Develop a management system.

• Support canary releases and blue-green deployment.

• Support application monitoring and scaling.

• Built-in marketplace for one-click Helm deployments and service catalogs for cloud service integration.

Network management

• Use community network plug-ins for adaptation.

• Develop a management system.

• High-performance network plug-ins optimized for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and elastic network interfaces (ENIs), with 20% higher performance than common solutions.

• Support access control and traffic throttling for containers.

Storage management

Develop a management system.

• Support Alibaba Cloud disks, local disks, File Storage NAS (NAS), CPFS, and Object Storage Service with standard CSI drivers.

• Support automatic volume creation and migration.

O&M management

Manually manage and maintain control planes.

• Quick Kubernetes version updates, component lifecycle management, and manual/auto scaling.

• High-performance log collection agent with multiple log dashboards.

• Support fully-managed Prometheus monitoring systems with built-in dashboards.

• ACK Pro control planes are fully managed, highly scalable, and deployed across zones for high availability. Built-in control plane observability.

Security management

Develop a security system.

• Support image scanning and image signing.

• Support container runtime security checks.

• Support Secret encryption.

• Support Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS) security hardening for operating systems and OS Security Hardening.

Service guarantee

• Build a dedicated team.

• No service-level agreement (SLA) guarantee.

• ACK team provides technical support for cluster stability and security.

• One of the largest public cloud container services in China, tested at scale within Alibaba Group.

• Alibaba Cloud has passed Kubernetes certification and is a CNCF platinum member.

• Top performer among Chinese Internet enterprises in Forrester Research Reports 2019. Only Asian cloud provider named a leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management.

• ACK Pro clusters are covered by SLAs that contain compensation clauses.