Elastic Container Instance:Configure an eci-profile

Features of an eci-profile

To use Elastic Container Instance in Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), you must deploy the ack-virtual-node component that is integrated with the Virtual Kubelet technology. This may result in the following issues:

• To schedule pods to run on Elastic Container Instance, you must modify the YAML file of the upper-layer business.

• To enable specific advanced features of Elastic Container Instance, you must modify the YAML file of the upper-layer business.

The preceding issues blur the lines between O&M jobs and business jobs. To help avoid these issues, Elastic Container Instance provides eci-profile configuration files. eci-profiles provide the following features:

• ECI Scheduler

  In scenarios in which real nodes and virtual nodes are deployed, you can schedule Kubernetes pods to run on Elastic Container Instance by configuring pod labels, namespace labels, and Elastic Container Instance-based scheduling. To perform these configurations, you must modify existing resources in the clusters. The modifications may introduce vulnerabilities into your system.

  To address the issue, ECI Scheduler provides a new scheduling mechanism based on mutating webhooks. In an eci-profile, you can configure selectors. Then, the system filters pods based on the pod labels or namespace labels that are specified by the selectors. If a pod or its namespace has the corresponding labels specified in the selectors, the pod is automatically scheduled to run on Elastic Container Instance.

• ECI Effect

  To allow some features of Elastic Container Instance to take effect, you must add annotations or labels to pods. Examples of these features include specifying instance types of Elastic Compute Service (ECS), enabling image caches, and configuring the Network Time Protocol (NTP) service. For more information, see ECI Pod Annotation.

  ECI Effect can automatically add annotations and labels to pods. You can specify the filter criteria and the annotations and labels to add when you configure selectors in an eci-profile. Pods that meet the filter criteria in the selectors are automatically scheduled to run on Elastic Container Instance. The specified annotations and labels are added to the pods.

• Hot updates

  An eci-profile contains the configurations of the cluster IP address, hybrid cloud, log collection, and vSwitches. You can update the configurations based on your requirements.

  • You do not need to restart the ack-virtual-node component to update the configurations.

  • The updated configurations are immediately applied to newly created Elastic Container Instance pods, but are applied to existing Elastic Container Instance pods only after rolling releases are performed on the pods.

Precautions

• When you configure an eci-profile, make sure that the ack-virtual-node component in the cluster is of the latest version. For information about how to update ack-virtual-node, see Manage components.

• If you want to use the ECI Scheduler feature, you must enable mutating webhooks. Pods in ACK Serverless clusters are automatically scheduled to run on elastic container instances. You do not need to use ECI Scheduler to schedule the pods.

Configuration description

When the system creates a pod, the system reads the eci-profile configuration file (the ConfigMap named eci-profile) in the kube-system namespace. Then, the system creates the pod based on the configurations of the data section in the configuration file. You can run the kubectl get cm -n kube-system eci-profile -o yaml command to view the YAML file of the eci-profile. The YAML file template of eci-profiles:

apiVersion: v1
data:
  enableClusterIp: "true"
  enableHybridMode: "false"
  enableLinuxArm64Node: "false" 
  enableLogController: "false"
  enablePVCController: "false"
  enablePrivateZone: "false"
  enableReuseSSLKey: "false"
  featureGates: "WaitForFirstConsumer=false"
  securityGroupId: sg-2zeeyaaxlkq9sppl****
  selectors: ""
  slsMachineGroup: ""
  vSwitchIds: vsw-2ze23nqzig8inprou****,vsw-2ze94pjtfuj9vaymf****
  vpcId: vpc-2zeghwzptn5zii0w7****
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2023-01-11T08:28:14Z"
  name: eci-profile
  namespace: kube-system
  resourceVersion: "356"
  uid: b345fa8c-919e-41fc-a981-57864b1a****

You can modify the configurations of the data section in the eci-profile to configure selectors or update other required parameters.

You can use one of the following methods to modify the eci-profile:

• Run the kubectl edit command:

  kubectl edit configmap eci-profile -n kube-system

• Use the Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) console.

  1. Log on to the Container Service ACK console.

  2. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that you want to manage and click the name of the cluster.

  3. In the left-side navigation pane of the cluster management page, choose Configurations > ConfigMaps.

  4. Select kube-system from the Namespace drop-down list.

  5. Find the eci-profile and click Edit YAML in the corresponding Actions column.

Configure selectors

The selectors parameter contains the configurations of ECI Scheduler and ECI Effect. When the system creates pods, the system matches pods based on selectors. If a pod or its namespace has the corresponding labels in the selectors, the pod is automatically scheduled to run on Elastic Container Instance, or is added the specified annotations and labels to make the advanced features of Elastic Container Instance take effect.

You can configure multiple selectors for the selectors parameter. You must specify the name of each selector. You can also specify the following information of each selector based on your requirements:

• namespaceSelector: the namespace labels to match.

• objectSelector: the pod labels to match.

• effect: the annotations and labels to dynamically add to the pods.

The configuration template of selectors:

data:
  selectors: |
    [
      {
        "name": "selector-demo1", # The name of the selector. This is a required parameter.
        "namespaceSelector": {    # The namespace filter. This is an optional parameter based on namespace labels.
          "matchLabels": {        # The namespace labels to match. The logical relationship among multiple labels is AND.
            "eci": "true"
          }
        },
        "objectSelector": {       # The object filter. This is an optional parameter based on pod labels.
          "matchLabels": {        # The pod labels to match. The logical relationship among multiple labels is AND.
            "eci": "true"
          }
        },
        "effect": {               # The annotations and labels to dynamically add to the pods. This is an optional parameter.
          "annotations": {
            "k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs": "ecs.c6.xlarge"
          },
          "labels": {
            "created-by-eci": "true"
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "name": "selector-demo2",   
        "objectSelector": {      
          "matchLabels": {     
            "eci": "test"
    	  }
        }
      }
    ]

In the preceding template, a selector named selector-demo1 provides the following capabilities:

If a pod and its namespace both have the eci: true label, the pod is automatically scheduled to run on Elastic Container Instance. The "k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs": "ecs.c6.xlarge" annotation and the created-by-eci: true label are added to the pod.

After you configure selectors, you can run the following command to check whether the selectors take effect. If the returned YAML file contains the configured selectors, the selectors take effect. If the returned YAML file does not contain the configured selectors, check whether the selectors are formatted correctly.

kubectl get mutatingwebhookconfigurations -o yaml vk-webhook

data:
  selectors: |
    [
      {
        "name":"eci-selector",
        "namespaceSelector":{
          "matchLabels":{
            "type":"eci"
          }
        },
        "objectSelector":{
          "matchLabels":{
            "created-by-eci":"true"
          }
        }
      }
    ]

data:
  selectors: |
    [
      {
        "name":"gpu-namespace-selector",
        "namespaceSelector":{
          "matchLabels":{
            "gpu":"true"
          }
        },
        "effect": {
          "annotations": {
            "k8s.aliyun.com/eci-use-specs":"ecs.gn6v-c8g1.2xlarge"
          },        
          "labels":{
            "gpu":"test"
          }
        }
      }
    ]

data:
  selectors: |
    [
      {
        "name":"autoimc-object-selector",
        "objectSelector":{
          "matchLabels":{
            "imc":"auto"
          }
        },
        "effect": {
          "annotations": {
            "k8s.aliyun.com/eci-auto-imc": "true"
          }
        }
      }
    ]

Update other required parameters in the data section

Other required parameters that are contained in the data section specify information that is required to create pods. For example, the vpcId parameter specifies the virtual private cloud (VPC) to which the pod belongs. The vSwitchIds parameter specifies the vSwitches that are associated with the pod. You can update the required parameters based on your requirements. The updated configurations take effect immediately without the need to restart the ack-virtual-node component. The following required parameters can be updated:

The following sample code shows how to configure the data section.

data:
  enableClusterIp: "true"
  enableHybridMode: "false"
  enableLinuxArm64Node: "false" 
  enableLogController: "false"
  enablePVCController: "false"
  enablePrivateZone: "false"
  enableReuseSSLKey: "false"
  featureGates: "WaitForFirstConsumer=false"
  securityGroupId: sg-2zeeyaaxlkq9sppl****
  selectors: ""
  slsMachineGroup: ""
  vSwitchIds: vsw-2ze23nqzig8inprou****,vsw-2ze94pjtfuj9vaymf****
  vpcId: vpc-2zeghwzptn5zii0w7****