Alauda Container Platform

ACP 4.0

Minor Version: 4.0.0

Features and Enhancements

Installation and Upgrade: Modular Architecture

We've completely redesigned our platform's architecture to provide unprecedented flexibility, faster updates, and reduced operational overhead.

Core Package Installation

Our platform now supports installation via a streamlined core package that contains only essential components. After installing this foundation, users can selectively download, upload, and install only the Operators or cluster plugins they need - whether that's DevOps, Service Mesh, or other specialized functionalities.

Targeted Fixes

Platform fixes are now delivered with significantly improved efficiency:

  • Reduced delivery time for critical fixes from one month to two weeks
  • Platform updates now include only the components that require fixes
  • Stable components remain untouched during updates, minimizing system impact

Intelligent Upgrades

Platform upgrades have been revolutionized to minimize operational impact:

  • Components without code changes maintain version stability during upgrades
  • Only modified components are updated during version migrations
  • System restarts are limited to only those components requiring changes

Independent Component Versioning

Many platform Operators now follow independent release cycles, allowing us to deliver new capabilities more rapidly without waiting for complete platform release cycles.

Clusters: Enhanced Infrastructure as Code

YAML-Driven Cluster Management

On-premises clusters now fully support YAML-based operations including:

  • Cluster creation
  • Node addition
  • Configuration management

This enhancement seamlessly integrates with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows, enabling programmatic cluster lifecycle management.

Extend: Comprehensive Capability Visibility

Complete Operator Catalog

The OperatorHub now displays all supported Operators regardless of whether their packages have been uploaded to the platform. This enhancement:

  • Provides full visibility into platform capabilities even in air-gapped environments
  • Eliminates information gaps between what's available and what's known to users
  • Reduces discovery friction when exploring platform capabilities

Version Flexibility

Users can now select specific Operator versions during installation rather than being limited to only the latest version, providing greater control over component compatibility and upgrade paths.

Web Console Extensions

Operators now support anchor-based Web Console extensions, allowing functionality-specific frontend images to be included within Operators and seamlessly integrated into the platform's Web Console.

Cluster Plugin Enhancements

All improvements to Operator visibility, version selection, and Web Console extension capabilities also apply to cluster plugins, ensuring consistent user experience across all platform extensions.

Log query logic optimization

The log query page has been optimized to solve the experience and performance problems users encounter when using the log query function:

  • The original radio box has been replaced with the advanced search component. Now you can use the log search as you use the GIT search.
  • Independent query conditions for log content
  • The location of the time query criteria has been adjusted. Now you will not reset your log filter criteria when you adjust the time range.
  • Optimized the log query API to improve the overall query performance

ElasticSearch upgrade to 8.17

We upgraded the version of ElasticSearch to 8.17 to follow up the functions and improvements of the community.

ALB authentication

ALB now support various authentication mechanism, which allows user to handle authentication at Ingress level instead of implementing it in each backend application.

ALB supports ingress-nginx annotations

This release adds support for common ingress-nginx annotations in ALB, including keepalive settings, timeout configurations, and HTTP redirects, enhancing compatibility with the community ingress-nginx.

Kubevirt live migration optimization

During the live migration process, the network interruption time has been reduced to less than 0.5 seconds, and existing TCP connections will not be disconnected. This optimization significantly improves the stability and reliability of virtual machine migrations in production environments.

LDAP/OIDC integration optimization

The LDAP/OIDC integration form fields have been adjusted, mainly including removal of unnecessary/duplicate fields and optimization of field descriptions. LDAP/OIDC integration now supports configuration through YAML, allowing user attribute mapping within the YAML file.

Source to Image (S2I) Support

  • Added ACP Builds operator for automated image building from source code
  • Supports Java/Go/Node.js/Python language stacks
  • Streamlines application deployment via source code repositories

On-prem Registry Solution

  • ACP Registry delivered lightweight Docker Registry with enterprise-ready features
  • Provides out-of-the-box image management capabilities
  • Simplifies application delivery

GitOps Module Refactoring

  • Decoupled ACP GitOps into standalone cluster plugin architecture
  • Upgraded Argo CD to v2.14.x version
  • Enhanced GitOps-based application lifecycle management

Namespace-level Monitoring

  • Introduced dynamic monitoring dashboards at namespace level
  • Provides Applications/Workloads/Pods metrics visualization

Crossplane Integration

  • Released Alauda Build of Crossplane distribution
  • Implements app-centric provisioning via XRD compositions

Virtualization Updates

  • Upgraded to KubeVirt 1.4 for enhanced virtualization capabilities
  • Optimized image handling for faster VM provisioning
  • Optimized VM live migration, now initiable directly from the UI with visible migration status
  • Improved binding networking with dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) support
  • Added vTPM support to enhance VM security

Ceph Storage Updates

  • Metro-DR with stretch cluster enables real-time data synchronization across availability zones
  • Regional-DR with pool-based mirroring enhances data protection

TopoLVM Updates

  • Added support for multipath device deployment, improving flexibility and stability

Fixed Issues

  • Previously, after publishing a new Operator version, users had to wait 10 minutes before installing it. This waiting period has been reduced to 2 minutes, allowing faster installation of new Operator versions.
  • On gpu nodes with multiple cards on a single node, gpu-manager occasionally exists, with unsuccessful scheduling issues for applications using vgpu.
  • When using the pgpu plugin, you need to set the default runtimeclass on the gpu node to nvidia. if you don't, it may cause the application to not be able to request gpu resources properly.
  • On a single GPU card, gpu-manager cannot create multiple inference services based on vllm, mlserver at the same time.
    On AI platforms, this issue occurs when gpu-manager is used to create multiple inference services; on container platforms, this issue does not occur when gpu-manager is used to create multiple smart applications.
  • With mps, pods restart indefinitely when nodes are low on resources.

Known Issues

  • Occasionally, a pod may become stuck in the Terminating state and cannot be deleted by containerd. Although containerd attempts the deletion operation, the container remains in a pseudo-running state. The containerd logs show OCI "runtime exec failed: exec failed: cannot exec in a stopped container: unknown" while the container status appears as Running. This issue occurs very rarely in containerd 1.7.23 (observed only once) and affects only individual pods when triggered. If encountered, restart containerd as a temporary workaround. This is a known issue in the containerd community, tracked at https://github.com/containerd/containerd/issues/6080.
  • When upgrading clusters to Kubernetes 1.31, all pods in the cluster will restart. This behavior is caused by changes to the Pod spec fields in Kubernetes 1.31 and cannot be avoided. For more details, please refer to the Kubernetes issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/129385
  • Under high api-server pressure, the aggregate worker in kyverno-report-controller may occasionally fail to start, preventing proper creation of compliance reports. This results in PolicyReport resources not being created, causing the Web Console to either display no compliance violation information or only partial report data. To troubleshoot, check the kyverno-report-controller pod logs for the presence of "starting worker aggregate-report-controller/worker" messages to verify proper operation. If the worker is not running, manually restart the kyverno-report-controller as a temporary solution.
  • When the amount of logs in a single container is too large (standard output or file logs), it can happen that a log file reaches the rotate threshold and triggers a rotate, but the contents of the logs in it have not been captured yet, which results in the simultaneous capture of the old and new log files, and a chaotic log order.
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