Elastic Container Instance (ECI) integrates with a range of Alibaba Cloud services across container management, networking, storage, and operations. The following diagram shows how these services relate to ECI.
Containers
| Service | Role in ECI |
|---|
| Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) | Provides the orchestration layer for ECI. ECI supplies on-demand compute to both ACK managed clusters and ACK Serverless clusters, scaling up capacity without node management overhead. |
| Container Registry | Stores and distributes container images and Helm charts that comply with Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards. Pull images from Container Registry when creating elastic container instances. |
Networks
| Service | Role in ECI |
|---|
| Elastic IP Address (EIP) | Assigns a public IP directly to a single elastic container instance for inbound or outbound internet access. |
| NAT Gateway | Provides shared outbound internet access for all elastic container instances in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) through an associated EIP. Use NAT Gateway when all instances in a VPC need internet access. |
| Server Load Balancer (SLB) | Distributes incoming traffic to elastic container instances registered as backend servers. Add instances to an SLB instance to improve application availability and throughput. |
Storage
| Service | Role in ECI |
|---|
| Disk | Mounts block storage to containers as persistent storage. Disks use Elastic Block Storage (EBS) with a distributed multi-replica mechanism. Attach a disk when creating an elastic container instance. |
| File Storage NAS (NAS) | Mounts scalable, distributed file systems to containers as persistent storage. NAS file systems are accessible over Network File System (NFS) and can be shared across multiple containers. |
| Object Storage Service (OSS) | Mounts OSS buckets to containers for storing large volumes of unstructured data such as images and videos. OSS does not support random read/write operations on files. |
Other services
| Service | Role in ECI |
|---|
| Simple Log Service | Collects, consumes, delivers, queries, and analyzes container logs without additional development. Export container logs from ECI to Simple Log Service. |
| Resource Access Management (RAM) | Controls which users and services can access ECI resources. Apply RAM roles to elastic container instances for fine-grained permission management. |
| Auto Scaling | Automatically increases or decreases the number of elastic container instances based on scaling policies and business load. Use Auto Scaling in non-Kubernetes deployments where ACK is not involved. |