You can register clusters that are deployed in data centers or on a third-party cloud to Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform (ACK One). This way, you can build hybrid cloud clusters and manage the external Kubernetes clusters in a centralized manner. This topic describes how to use registered clusters to manage external Kubernetes clusters in a centralized manner.
Use scenarios
You can use registered clusters to manage external Kubernetes clusters in a centralized manner in the following scenarios:
You want to manage Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters and external Kubernetes clusters that are deployed in data centers in a centralized manner.
You want to manage ACK clusters and external Kubernetes clusters that are deployed on third-party clouds in a centralized manner.
You want to manage ACK clusters that belong to different Alibaba Cloud accounts in a centralized manner.
Benefits
Allows you to manage clusters in a centralized manner.
You can manage clusters and applications in the ACK console in a centralized manner. This eliminates the need to switch between multiple cloud platforms when you want to manage different clusters and applications.
Provides a consistent security governance system.
You can use Alibaba Cloud accounts and Resource Access Management (RAM) users to manage the role-based access control (RBAC) permissions of the following types of clusters in a centralized manner: ACK clusters, external Kubernetes clusters deployed in data centers, and external Kubernetes clusters deployed on third-party clouds. In addition, ACK One provides the following capabilities: auditing, security inspection, and node risk detection.
Provides a consistent logging, monitoring, and alerting system.
Architecture
Procedure
Create a registered cluster and connect to the cluster. For more information, see Create a registered cluster in the ACK console.
Install components based on your business requirements.
Create a hybrid cloud cluster that uses elastic container instances as nodes. For more information, see Build a hybrid elastic container cluster and add ECS instances to the cluster and Schedule pods to elastic container instances that are deployed as virtual nodes.
For more information about security governance, see Security governance.
For more information about observability services, see Observability services