What is a multi-cluster gateway - Container Service for Kubernetes

The multi-cluster gateway of Distributed Cloud Container Platform for Kubernetes (ACK One) is a solution provided by Alibaba Cloud for application disaster recovery and north-south traffic management in hybrid cloud or multi-cluster environments. The solution helps you quickly implement zone-disaster recovery or geo-disaster recovery for hybrid cloud and multi-cluster applications, and facilitates traffic management and governance.

Architecture

ACK One provides the multi-cluster Ingress controller on the Fleet instance to support north-south traffic load balancing across clusters, including clusters in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, and across regions. ALB multi-cluster gateways and Microservices Engine (MSE) multi-cluster gateways are supported. For more information about the details and comparison of the two types of gateways, see Multi-cluster gateways.
Create an AlbConfig or MseIngressConfig gateway on the ACK One Fleet instance and use the Ingress controller to create an ALB or MSE multi-cluster gateway.
Create an Ingress on the ACK One Fleet instance and configure routing rules. The multi-cluster gateway routes traffic to multiple clusters based on the rules.

Benefits

Multi-cluster gateways have the following benefits:

Fully managed and O&M-free gateways.
The number of gateways is reduced, and costs are lower. They serve as region-level multi-cluster gateways for layer-7 north-south traffic management.
Simplify traffic management in multi-cluster environments. You can configure forwarding rules for multi-cluster Ingresses on the Fleet instance instead of configuring the rules in each cluster.
Designed for cross-zone high availability (HA).
Provide millisecond-level fallback. If the backend server error occurs in a cluster, multi-cluster gateways smoothly redirect traffic to other backends.

Multi-cluster gateways

Gateway type	Scenario	Limit	Billing	Protocol
ALB multi-cluster gateways	Active zone-disaster recovery. Active geo-disaster recovery. Hybrid cloud and active cross-cloud disaster recovery (underlay and overlay networks are supported). Split traffic based on weight. Route traffic to a specified cluster based on the header.	The ALB multi-cluster gateway is in invitational preview. To contact the container team for testing, Submit a ticket . To manage clusters across regions, you must use Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) to connect networks and ensure that the CIDR block of nodes and pods do not overlap with each other. To manage on-premises or third-party public cloud clusters, use Express Connect circuits to connect to the network.	For more information about the billing of ALB multi-cluster gateways, see ALB billing.	The following types of protocols are supported for backend services: HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC, and QUIC.
MSE multi-cluster gateways	Active zone-disaster recovery or active-standby disaster recovery. Hybrid cloud or cross-cloud disaster recovery (underlay networks are supported). Split traffic based on weight. Route traffic to a specified cluster based on the header.	By default, an MSE multi-cluster gateway can manage traffic of multiple clusters deployed in the same virtual private cloud (VPC). If you want to manage traffic of multiple clusters in different VPCs in the same region, connect the VPCs by using the CEN and make sure that the CIDR blocks of nodes and pods do not overlap with each other. You cannot deploy multi-cluster gateways across regions. On-premises clusters that use overlay networks or third-party public cloud Kubernetes clusters are not supported.	For more information about the billing of MSE multi-cluster gateways, see Billing overview.	The following types of protocols are supported for backend services: HTTP, HTTP2, HTTPS, gRPC, and gRPCS.