What Is a CCE Autopilot Cluster?

Introduction

CCE Autopilot allows you to create serverless clusters that offer optimized Kubernetes compatibility and free you from O&M. After a CCE Autopilot cluster is created, you can deploy applications without purchasing nodes or maintaining the deployment, management, and security of nodes. You only need to focus on the implementation of application service logic, which greatly reduces your O&M costs and improves the reliability and scalability of applications.

Product Architecture

Figure 1 Product architecture
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Challenges with Traditional Serverful Container Clusters

Container technologies are driving the transformation of enterprise IT architecture in cloud computing due to their lightweight nature and high efficiency. However, traditional container services that rely on the serverful infrastructure are revealing the following issues, which severely hinder the pace of enterprise innovation:

O&M management: Enterprises need to manually manage server resource allocation and expansion, which involves complex capacity planning and resource scheduling, as well as continuous O&M such as node monitoring, troubleshooting, and system upgrades. This is expensive and requires a large workforce and many resources.
Scalability: Enterprises need to create joint scaling policies for nodes and workloads. However, worker nodes must be scaled beforehand, which takes a few minutes and affects efficiency and response speed.
Cost control: Enterprises need to allocate resources to nodes in advance. Unfortunately, those resources are often underutilized, or when there are heavy workloads, resources may be insufficient. This makes it hard to maximize cost effectiveness.

Benefits of Using the CCE Autopilot Cluster Architecture

Compared with CCE standard and Turbo clusters, CCE Autopilot clusters have the following advantages:

Serverless evolution: Worker nodes are fully hosted on Huawei Cloud, so you do not have to maintain node deployment, manage nodes, or worry about security issues. Cluster flavors are adaptive.
Resource pooling: A serverless converged resource pool is used to manage resources such as CPUs, memory, and GPUs, reducing resource fragments and enabling on-demand use of container resources.
Comprehensive performance optimization: Resource pool resources are pre-provisioned to enable fast resource allocation, allowing for the scaling of more containers within seconds based on workload size.

Figure 2 Differences between CCE Standard/Turbo and CCE Autopilot
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Comparison Between CCE Autopilot Clusters and Traditional Serverful Container Clusters

Category	Serverless Container Cluster	Traditional Serverful Container Cluster
Category	CCE Autopilot	CCE Standard	CCE Turbo
Node management	Worker nodes are fully managed. CCE Autopilot takes care of node scaling and pre-binding.	You need to take care of the management and O&M of worker nodes.	You need to take care of the management and O&M of worker nodes.
Node OSs	There are dedicated OSs that use containerd as the container engine.	You can select an OS and container engine.	You can select an OS and container engine.
Node specifications	Node specifications are adaptive to the workload scale.	You can select the node specifications as needed.	You can select the node specifications as needed.
Node upgrade and maintenance	Nodes are upgraded and recovered automatically.	Nodes need to be reset for upgrade.	Nodes need to be reset for upgrade.
Container network model	Cloud native 2.0 network	VPC network Tunnel network	Cloud native 2.0 network
Network performance	The VPC network and container network are flattened into one for zero performance loss.	The container network is overlaid with the VPC network, causing performance loss.	The VPC network and container network are flattened into one for zero performance loss.
Network isolation	Pods can be associated with security groups for isolation.	Tunnel network model: network policies for communications within a cluster VPC network model: isolation not supported	Pods can be associated with security groups for isolation.