About last year I started using Kubernetes service on my company, Alibaba Cloud became the first choice of my company because it is the only one that provide Indonesia region, even now there are two zones in the region which can provide high availability of the services.
Alibaba Cloud or Aliyun Cloud provides some kind of kubernetes service, such as Kubernetes, Managed Kubernetes, A-Z Kubernetes and Serverless Kubernetes. Kubernetes standard is service which the master and the worker nodes is on ECS which you will be able to ssh into the master, different with Managed Kubernetes which you cannot access SSH to the master, but you ‘re able to connect to the master via kubectl with the kubeconfig provided on the console. A-Z Kubernetes provides high availability of the cluster wich the nodes will be deployed on multizones. And for the serverless I think we won’t see nodes on the ECS page and this kind is still on beta though.
So far, I’ve used 2 type of the Kubernetes service on Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes and Managed Kubernetes. There’s some of advantage and disadvantage choosing Alibaba Cloud as my Kubernetes Infrastructure.
Advantage :
- It’s available in my country. Alibaba became the first international level cloud service that is present in Indonesia, though Google Cloud Platform promising that they will open Indonesia region, but we don’t know when and my company cannot wait.
- Low latency. Maybe this is because of the point 1. Although it won’t be far away for other cloud service on Singapore region.
3. Provide High Availability Zone. This is kind of fulfillment of the service so we can get high availability on one region.
4. Though sometimes the issue takes my time, it makes my knowledge of Kubernetes Service deeper, because I need to know exactly where the issue come from, Kubernetes, or from Ali Cloud.
Disadvantage :
- Need to be improved. I found some bugs on the services. Like when i have custom routing table which make my Kubernetes uses wrong route and autoscaling issue.
- Basic Kubernetes Dashboard. Because Kubernetes Alibaba use it’s front end Kubernetes dashboard, so it won’t as smooth as Kubernetes Native Dashboard. One example is when I need to change container port, the container port need to use a number beside a port name.
- Lack of documentation of Terraform module. Despite the fact that Terraform has Kubernetes module, it’s still lack of documentation on the internet. So we need to be more carefully when we want to implement Infrastructure as a Code with this.
The conclusion is, when your Company is in Indonesia and you need a Cloud Kubernetes Service, you can go to Alibaba Cloud. It won’t be above Google Cloud Platform, but you can rely on it. And for the type, when you ‘re Kubernetes expert, you can go to Kubernetes standard, otherwise I suggest you to choose managed Kubernetes, because Alibaba Cloud will manage the master nodes for you.
