Container Service for Kubernetes:Comparison between Alibaba Cloud Knative and open-source Knative

Item

Alibaba Cloud Knative

Open-source Knative

References (Alibaba Cloud Knative)

Cost of platform development and O&M

• Supports one-click deployment as a service.

• Knative control plane components are fully-hosted and O&M-free.

You need to purchase resources to develop a platform, and platform upgrades and maintenance require manpower.

Knative overview

Ease of use

Provides rich features and an easy-to-use comprehensive monitoring system.

You need to manually develop and maintain the components in your monitoring system. This requires technical expertise.

• Collect log data of Knative components

• View the Knative dashboard in Managed Service for Prometheus

Elasticity

Supports the following scaling features:

• Knative Pod Autoscaling (KPA)

• Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)

• Reserved resource pools

• Multi-dimensional Pod Autoscaling (MPA)

• Advanced Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (AHPA)

Supports KPA and HPA.

• Use HPA in Knative

• Enable auto scaling to withstand traffic fluctuations

• Use MSE Ingresses in Knative to implement auto scaling

• Use Knative and AHPA to implement RPS-based scheduled scaling

Ingresses

Supports open-source Ingresses such as Kourier and Alibaba Cloud Ingresses provided by Application Load Balancer (ALB), Microservices Engine (MSE), and Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM).

Supports only open-source Ingresses, such as Kourier and Istio. You need to manually maintain these Ingresses.

• Use the Kourier gateway in Knative

• Use ALB Ingresses in Knative

• Use MSE Ingresses in Knative to implement auto scaling

Eventing

Supports integration with EventBridge.

Supports integration only with open-source Knative Eventing.

Use EventBridge to trigger Knative Services to consume events

CI/CD

Supports integration with Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow.

You need to manually develop a CI/CD platform.

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Monitoring and alerting

Supports a variety of metrics, including the QPS, response time, and service success rate metrics, and allows you to create custom alert rules and send alerts through DingTalk messages, phone calls, or text messages.

Supports only basic metrics. You need to manually develop an alerting system.

Enable the monitoring and alerting feature for Knative components

Alibaba Cloud service integration

Supports integration with Elastic Container Instance (ECI), Container Registry, Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS), and Simple Log Service to provide one-stop experience.

Does not support integration with Alibaba Cloud services.

Use elastic container instances in Knative