Leveraging Alibaba Cloud ACK Backup Center for Cross‑Cloud Container Service Migration: Challenges and Solutions

Enterprises migrating container service platforms across clouds face numerous challenges such as data security, service interruption risk, platform compatibility, and migration complexity, especially for systems with extensive micro‑service architectures and large data volumes.

The article introduces Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Backup Center, a one‑stop solution for disaster recovery and migration, and illustrates its use through a real‑world case study of a technology company.

For disaster‑recovery scenarios, operators can create periodic backup plans or one‑time application backups that support namespace, label, and resource‑type filtering, as well as storage‑volume snapshots for stateful applications. The data‑protection feature enables backup of storage volumes only.

In migration scenarios, the Backup Center allows selected resources and volumes to be backed up to Alibaba Cloud and restored in a target ACK cluster, providing a seamless, observable migration process with clear backup inventories and progress tracking.

The migration workflow includes registering the source cluster with ACK One, deploying the Backup Center component, backing up applications and volumes, provisioning a target ACK cluster, initializing the backup repository, and restoring the workloads.

Specific challenges addressed include:

Fine‑grained backup strategies to exclude unnecessary applications, system namespaces (e.g., kube‑system), and specific storage volumes.

Compatibility adjustments for network annotations, CSI storage plugins, and image registry URLs, achieved via ConfigMap overrides and automatic CSI class conversion.

Cross‑version migration from older Kubernetes clusters (v1.16+) to newer versions, with automatic API version translation during restore.

Cross‑cloud storage migration, where the Backup Center leverages Alibaba Cloud Backup Service to store data from various source storage types (block, object, NFS, Ceph) and restores it to appropriate ACK CSI storage classes.

Minimizing downtime by using incremental backups, data compression, and deduplication, allowing most backup operations to occur during low‑traffic periods.

Ensuring data security through local encryption during backup and optional server‑side encryption for OSS buckets.

In summary, the ACK Backup Center automates comprehensive resource backup, provides flexible restoration options, handles compatibility differences, and reduces migration risk and downtime, enabling enterprises to merge, upgrade, and migrate container workloads across clouds efficiently.