The article explains how OpenKruise Agents, an open‑source project from Alibaba Cloud, provides a cloud‑native sandbox infrastructure for AI agents on Kubernetes, detailing its architecture, lifecycle management, security challenges, resource pooling, and future roadmap for AI‑driven workloads.
OpenKruise 1.8, the latest CNCF‑incubated cloud‑native automation suite, introduces in‑place vertical pod autoscaling, native StatefulSet volume expansion, AI‑aware WorkloadSpread, serverless probe support, sidecar gray‑release capabilities, and a Helm pre‑delete safety hook, all backed by detailed YAML examples and future roadmap.
This guide explains how to use Alibaba Cloud's ACK Edge to create a secure, high‑availability Kubernetes cluster that unifies management and scheduling of ECS instances across multiple VPCs, regions, and accounts, with detailed scenarios, advantages, step‑by‑step procedures, and sample YAML deployments.
This article explains how Alibaba Cloud ACK’s four configurable plugins—ElasticWorkload, WorkloadSpread, UnitedDeployment, and ResourcePolicy—provide flexible, on‑demand resource scaling for serverless workloads, compares their architectures, outlines usage scenarios, shows real‑world examples, and discusses their strengths and limitations.
The article analyzes the rapid growth of China's game cloud market, explains why cloud‑native adoption has become industry‑wide, and details practical application‑layer and resource‑layer elasticity strategies—including OpenKruiseGame, state‑aware scaling, and Alibaba Cloud node‑scaling options—to improve performance and reduce costs.
This article examines Lilith Games' cloud‑native migration of the new title AFK Journey, detailing the motivations, technical challenges of containerizing stateful game servers, the adoption of OpenKruise for in‑place updates, and the measurable improvements in resource utilization, release speed, and operational costs.
OpenKruise v1.7, released in August 2024, upgrades its Kubernetes dependency to 1.28 and introduces features such as native Sidecar container support in SidecarSet, start ordinal configuration for Advanced StatefulSet, image‑preheat credential plugins, external CA injection, and structured logging, while maintaining compatibility with clusters running Kubernetes ≥ 1.18.
OpenKruise v1.6, an Alibaba‑backed CNCF‑incubated cloud‑native automation suite, introduces leader‑election leases, enhanced multi‑domain workload spreading, image pre‑warming with an Always pull policy, and delete‑protection for Service and Ingress, while outlining upgrade requirements, known issues, and upcoming roadmap.
The OpenKruise v1.4 release introduces the Job Sidecar Terminator for automatic sidecar shutdown, enables several stable capabilities by default, adds CloneSet performance and lifecycle improvements, provides a force‑recreate option for containers, and enhances image pre‑pull metadata handling, all while offering clear usage examples and configuration snippets.
OpenKruise v1.3 introduces the PodProbeMarker CRD for custom probes, adds new features to CloneSet, WorkloadSpread, Advanced DaemonSet, and SidecarSet—including historical version injection and pod annotation policies—while delivering significant performance gains for large‑scale clusters through queue optimizations and reduced CPU/memory usage.
Version 1.5 of the open‑source Cloud Native application delivery platform KubeVela introduces enhanced plugin specifications, built‑in observability with Prometheus‑Grafana, a browser‑based Cloud Shell, advanced Canary rollouts via OpenKruise, multi‑environment UI improvements, and performance optimizations, while moving toward CNCF incubation.
OpenKruise v1.2 introduces the PersistentPodState CRD for stateful pod retention, improves CloneSet partition logic and status fields, adds markPodNotReady to lifecycle hooks, and expands PodUnavailableBudget to protect custom workloads, with detailed YAML examples and usage notes.
This article explains how to use Kubernetes native autoscaling components—HPA, VPA, Cluster Autoscaler—and cloud‑native extensions such as Alibaba Cloud's Virtual Node, Elastic Container Instance, Elastic Workload, and the open‑source OpenKruise to build a cost‑effective, highly elastic architecture on ACK clusters.
This article explains how OpenKruise Rollout enables non‑intrusive, extensible progressive delivery on Kubernetes, covering its architecture, design goals, traffic scheduling, metric‑driven automation, and a complete canary release walkthrough with code examples.
OpenKruise v1.1 extends Kubernetes with ordered container startup, in‑place upgrade sequencing, StatefulSet PVC auto‑deletion policies, a refactored Advanced DaemonSet with lifecycle hooks, and a DisableDeepCopy performance tweak, all while remaining compatible with clusters running Kubernetes 1.16 or newer.
This article explains how OpenKruise, a CNCF sandbox project, overcomes native Kubernetes container‑runtime limitations by integrating with Kubelet and CRI, offering features such as in‑place upgrades, container restarts, image pre‑heating, and a modular architecture that enhances workload management and runtime control.
OpenKruise v1.0, the CNCF‑hosted Kubernetes extension, expands beyond basic workloads with enhanced Workload types, in‑place upgrades, high‑availability safeguards, and advanced operational tools, drawing on Alibaba’s massive container experience and now adopted by over 35 global adopters.
OpenKruise v1.0 introduces a suite of cloud‑native enhancements for Kubernetes, including in‑place upgrades for env variables, a new ResourceDistribution CRD for cross‑namespace resource syncing, container launch priority controls, an extended kubectl‑kruise plugin, and numerous optimizations across workloads and controllers.
This article explains how OpenKruise extends Kubernetes with PodUnavailableBudget to protect application availability during voluntary disruptions, compares it with native PodDisruptionBudget, and provides practical YAML examples for stateless, stateful, and single‑instance workloads.
This article explains the background, features, and implementation details of OpenKruise's WorkloadSpread, showing how it distributes Pods across zones, node types, and CPU architectures, compares it with existing solutions, and provides concrete YAML examples for elastic and topology‑aware scheduling.
OpenKruise v0.10.0 introduces major enhancements such as WorkloadSpread for flexible topology-aware pod distribution, PodUnavailableBudget that extends PDB protection to voluntary disruptions, CloneSet scaling rules based on topology, and Advanced StatefulSet’s maxUnavailable-driven streaming scale-out, all configurable via feature-gates.
This article explains how OpenKruise SidecarSet provides a hot‑upgrade mechanism for mesh sidecar containers, detailing the injection of dual sidecars, the three‑step upgrade workflow, and concrete code examples for migration and listen‑FD transfer.
OpenKruise v0.9.0 introduces a pod‑level container restart API, cascade‑deletion protection, new CloneSet capabilities such as deletion‑cost ordering, image pre‑download for in‑place updates, pod‑replacement strategies, partition‑based rollback, short‑hash labels, and a SidecarSet hot‑upgrade mechanism, all aimed at improving cloud‑native workload reliability and upgrade flexibility.
On April 17, CNCF and Alibaba hosted KubeMeet in Hangzhou where experts from Alibaba, Ctrip and Fourth Paradigm shared real‑world practices and challenges of cloud‑native application management, highlighting the roles of OAM, KubeVela and OpenKruise in enterprise Kubernetes deployments.
This article explains why image pre‑warming is essential for large Kubernetes clusters, describes OpenKruise’s architecture and custom resources (NodeImage, ImagePullJob) that enable cluster‑wide, sidecar, and resource‑pool image pre‑pulling, and outlines upcoming enhancements that combine pre‑warming with in‑place upgrades.
This article explains how OpenKruise SidecarSet enables automatic sidecar injection, in‑place upgrades without restarting the main container, and advanced rollout strategies such as rolling updates, canary releases, and scatter deployments, illustrated with a logtail sidecar example and detailed YAML configurations.
OpenKruise v0.8.0 introduces a new kruise‑daemon component for node‑level tasks, a scalable image pre‑pull capability via ImagePullJob, a fully restructured SidecarSet controller with enhanced injection and upgrade policies, a feature‑gate mechanism, and various optimizations such as CloneSet improvements and Alibaba Cloud image registry support.
This article explains the inherent security risks of cloud‑native Kubernetes deployments—such as workload, namespace, and CRD cascading deletions and concurrent pod updates—and presents practical OpenKruise‑based protection techniques like label‑driven cascade‑deletion blocking, pod‑deletion flow control, and automatic PUB/PDB generation to ensure runtime stability.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of OpenKruise, an open‑source cloud‑native application automation engine, detailing its core workloads, upcoming roadmap, risk‑control mechanisms, the new kruise‑daemon component, and the ControllerMesh design for scalable operator management.
OpenKruise v0.7.0 introduces major enhancements—including Advanced StatefulSet with v1beta1 CRD and ordinal reservation, CloneSet with percentage‑based partitioning, the new AdvancedCronJob controller, and a self‑operating webhook component—providing richer deployment, scaling, and automation capabilities for cloud‑native Kubernetes workloads.
OpenKruise’s Advanced DaemonSet extends native Kubernetes DaemonSet with sophisticated rollout controls—node‑level canary selectors, partition‑based quantity pacing, surging updates, and pause capabilities—enabling safe, fine‑grained, high‑availability deployments across massive, heterogeneous clusters, illustrated with concrete YAML examples and API definitions.
This article explains the concept, benefits, and technical implementation of in‑place upgrades for Pods in Kubernetes, detailing how OpenKruise leverages kubelet image hashing, update restrictions, container status reporting, and readiness gates to achieve fast, low‑impact, and controllable rollouts.
This article explains the Kubernetes update mechanism, why an API update can fail due to missing resourceVersion, how patch operations differ, and the internal logic of kubectl apply and edit, providing practical guidance for choosing between update and patch in cloud‑native deployments.
The article recaps a SIG Cloud‑Provider‑Alibaba webinar, detailing Alibaba’s large‑scale cloud‑native deployment challenges and how the open‑source OpenKruise project introduces extended workloads like CloneSet, Advanced StatefulSet, SidecarSet, and more to improve deployment efficiency, stability, and flexibility on Kubernetes.
This article explains the challenges of traditional Deployment and StatefulSet IDs, introduces OpenKruise and its five enhanced controllers, details the installation process via Helm, and demonstrates how Advanced StatefulSet enables parallel pod startup and in‑place updates for faster, more reliable workloads.
OpenKruise v0.5.0 introduces CloneSet maxSurge rollout and SidecarSet volume‑merge capabilities, addressing native Kubernetes limitations by allowing expand‑then‑shrink deployments, in‑place upgrades, and seamless sidecar injection without volume conflicts for large‑scale cloud‑native applications.
This article details Ant Financial's cloud‑native PaaS platform construction, covering financial‑industry challenges, Kubernetes‑based extensions such as CafeDeployment, fine‑grained release strategies, lossless traffic draining, and the open‑source OpenKruise UnitedDeployment that together enable stable, scalable innovation for banking services.
This article explains the Sidecar container pattern in Kubernetes, outlines common use cases such as logging, service mesh, and health checks, discusses real-world challenges like ordering and lifecycle management, and presents community-driven solutions including the Sidecar kep, PreSidecar/PostSidecar concepts, and the OpenKruise SidecarSet workload.
This article details Alibaba's four‑stage journey to migrate its core systems to Kubernetes, the operational challenges of legacy workflows, and the concrete cloud‑native transformations—final‑state deployment, self‑healing, and immutable infrastructure—that enabled a flawless Double‑11 sales event.
Alibaba’s journey from early LXC containers to massive Kubernetes clusters reveals scaling, performance, and operational challenges that led to the creation of the Open Application Model (OAM) and OpenKruise, offering a layered, role‑separated approach to cloud‑native application definition and delivery.
The article examines three practical ways to adopt Kubernetes—Above, On, and In—explaining their target scenarios, benefits, trade‑offs, and real‑world examples such as Alibaba Sigma, Meituan HULK2.0, JDOS 2.0, and OpenKruise, to help organizations choose the most suitable deployment model.
The CNCF has launched its first Application Delivery SIG, outlining its mission to standardize cloud‑native application management, define a layered delivery model, and foster collaboration among Kubernetes, serverless, and service‑mesh communities, with Alibaba sharing its practical experiences and future plans.
OpenKruise, announced at KubeCon Shanghai 2019, is Alibaba's open‑source cloud‑native automation engine that extends Kubernetes with custom controllers for deployment, upgrade, scaling, and sidecar management, offering in‑place updates, parallel upgrades, and a GitHub repository for community contributions.
