In edge computing, nodes that belong to different groups are isolated from each other. For example, these nodes may be disconnected, may not share the same resources, may have heterogeneous resources, or may run applications that are independently deployed. ACK Edge provides the edge node pool feature. This feature abstracts nodes into node pools based on specific attributes, which allows for the management and maintenance of hosts in different edge locations. This topic describes edge node pools and how edge nodes are managed by edge node pools.
Traditional management
In edge computing, edge nodes are classified into groups by zone, region, or other logical attribute such as CPU architecture, Internet service provider (ISP), or cloud service provider.
Same applications or images may be deployed to different node pools.
The backend endpoints of Kubernetes-native Services are randomly distributed across nodes. Consequently, when Service requests are distributed to nodes across node groups, these requests may fail to reach the nodes or may not be answered promptly.
Node pool management solution
ACK Edge provides a solution to solve these issues, as shown in the following figure.
Node management by node pools: Nodes are abstracted into node pools, which allows for the management and maintenance of hosts in different edge locations.
YurtAppSet management by node pools: You can use YurtAppSets to deploy workloads to different node pools. You can also manage the number of business instances and image versions based on node pools.
Service topology management by node pools: You can configure a Service topology to limit access to the backend endpoints of a Service. For example, you can expose an application on an edge node only to the current node or other nodes in the same edge node pool.
Introduction to node pools
In edge computing, the ack-edge-yurt-manager (also known as yurt-app-manager in 1.24.6-aliyunedge.1 and earlier versions) component of ACK Edge provides the edge node pool controller. This controller abstracts nodes into node pools based on specific attributes, which allows for the management and maintenance of hosts in different edge locations. For more information, see the following figure.