Boost Hybrid Cloud Efficiency: Integrating Hosted Physical Machines into UK8S

Hybrid Cloud Business Model

Xiamen SeaSeal Information Technology Co., Ltd., founded in April 2012, operates a B2C health e‑commerce platform and adopts a hybrid cloud (public + hosted) architecture to maximize existing IT resource usage while enabling elastic expansion with public‑cloud services.

Challenges of Building a K8S Cluster in Hosted Cloud

Initially, the company attempted to deploy its own Kubernetes cluster in the hosted cloud, but encountered issues with network connectivity, storage integration, and load‑balancing, as well as high personnel costs for deployment and ongoing maintenance.

Integrating Hosted Cloud Physical Machines into UK8S Cluster

UCloud's UK8S automates Kubernetes deployment and operation in public‑cloud environments, and the company plans to extend UK8S management to hosted‑cloud physical machines, allowing a single Kubernetes cluster to control both environments.

Solving Three Major Technical Issues

Network Implementation

Kubernetes relies on external CNI plugins for networking. The solution ensures direct IP communication between nodes, pods, and across public and hosted clouds by using an Underlay network model and appropriate CNI plugins.

Both public‑cloud and hosted‑cloud nodes adopt the Underlay CNI, enabling pod‑to‑pod communication across environments.

Storage Implementation

UK8S integrates UDisk and UFS storage for public‑cloud nodes; hosted‑cloud physical machines cannot mount these cloud storage products, so storage plugins are limited to public‑cloud nodes, using node affinity to schedule pods requiring persistent volumes.

Load Balancing Implementation

The solution uses public‑cloud ULB as the external LoadBalancer for services, forwarding traffic to public‑cloud nodes and then to pods via kube‑proxy iptables. Ingress controllers can also be deployed on public‑cloud nodes to proxy traffic to hosted‑cloud services.

Benefits of the Solution

Higher utilization of hosted‑cloud physical machines : Guarantees normal operation during low‑traffic periods and enables rapid scaling of public‑cloud resources during peaks.

Reduced redundancy of public‑cloud hosts : Faster container startup via UK8S shortens scaling time, decreasing the number of idle cloud VMs.

No need for dedicated K8S deployment manpower : Users can focus on business development while UK8S handles cluster management.

Accelerated service delivery : Consistent images across environments and integrated CI/CD pipelines streamline deployments and reduce manual intervention.

Conclusion

As Kubernetes adoption grows, managing multi‑cloud and IDC‑cloud hybrid environments becomes complex; a unified UK8S‑based approach, as described for UCloud’s hybrid cloud, offers a compatible and efficient solution applicable beyond UCloud’s ecosystem.