ACK Serverless Pro clusters target enterprise production workloads that demand higher reliability, stronger security, and a financially backed service level agreement (SLA). The Pro tier offloads master node maintenance, etcd backup, and cluster monitoring to Alibaba Cloud, freeing your team to focus on application delivery.
When to use ACK Serverless Pro
Use ACK Serverless Pro when your workload requires:
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SLA with financial accountability: A 99.95% uptime guarantee for the cluster API server, backed by compensation clauses.
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Large-scale pod density: Up to 50,000 pods per node in production.
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Regulatory or compliance requirements: Your industry (financial services, enterprise IT) mandates encrypted data management and auditable security controls.
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Reduced operational burden: Alibaba Cloud-managed etcd backups, cluster monitoring, and control plane security.
For non-production workloads or basic availability needs (99.90%, no compensation), use ACK Serverless Basic.
Typical scenarios
ACK Serverless Pro targets these enterprise segments:
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Internet enterprises: Organizations running large-scale production environments that require high stability, security, and observability.
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Big data computing enterprises: Organizations deploying large-scale data computing and high-performance processing workloads that require high elasticity, stability, and efficiency.
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International enterprises running businesses in China: Organizations prioritizing security that require SLAs with compensation clauses for China-region operations.
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Financial enterprises: Organizations that require SLAs with compensation clauses to meet regulatory and business continuity obligations.
Features
Reliability at scale
ACK Serverless Pro supports up to 50,000 pods per node. etcd is protected by high-frequency cold and hot backups plus geo-disaster recovery, ensuring cluster state recovery after failures. Control plane metrics are collected automatically for early risk detection.
Keep the pod count below 20,000 per node when many pods are associated with the same Service.
Security
The control plane encrypts etcd disks by default. In the data plane, kms-plugin encrypts Kubernetes Secrets with Key Management Service (KMS). Advanced security management lets you inspect running containers and enable auto-repair.
SLA with compensation
ACK Serverless Pro clusters carry a 99.95% uptime SLA for the cluster API server with compensation clauses. The contractually backed SLA suits workloads that require financial accountability from the infrastructure provider.
| Cluster tier | SLA | Compensation |
|---|---|---|
| ACK Serverless Pro | 99.95% | Supported |
| ACK Serverless Basic | 99.90% | Not supported |
Pricing
Comparison
The following table compares ACK Serverless Pro and Basic clusters.
|
Category |
Feature |
ACK Serverless |
|
|
ACK Serverless Pro cluster |
ACK Serverless Basic cluster |
||
|
Cluster size |
N/A |
Up to 50,000 pods per node. Note
Keep the pod count below 20,000 when many pods are associated with the Service. |
Up to 1,000 pods per node. |
|
SLA |
N/A |
99.95% (supports compensation) |
99.90% (does not support compensation) |
|
API Server |
Custom parameter settings |
|
|
|
Availability monitoring |
|
|
|
|
ETCD |
High-frequency cold and hot backups with geo-disaster recovery |
|
|
|
Observability metrics |
|
|
|
|
Security management |
Advanced security management with data encryption. See Use KMS to encrypt Kubernetes Secrets. |
|
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