Arcfra is thrilled to announce the release of Arcfra Kubernetes Engine (AKE) version 1.5, a production-grade container management and service platform. This version focuses on enterprise-grade reliability and refined governance, delivers cross-site active-active disaster recovery capabilities, enhances multi-tenancy management, and boosts platform observability, ensuring the highest level of stability for core business applications.

Why This Release Matters

As enterprises shift their mission-critical production systems onto Kubernetes, the demand for uninterrupted service continuity becomes paramount. Traditional deployment models are inherently fragile when faced with “site-level” failures (like power outages or network interruptions).

AKE 1.5 directly addresses the challenge of building a truly reliable DR system for containerized core applications.

Users no longer need simple backup and recovery; they require a genuine active-active application solution with automatic failover. AKE 1.5 provides this by leveraging its deep experience in active-active storage to innovatively and deeply integrate its mature active-active capabilities with the container platform.

Key Innovations in AKE 1.5

1. Cross-Site Active-Active Deployment for Unmatched Reliability

AKE 1.5 introduces active-active cluster deployment built on hyper-converged software. By running Kubernetes clusters across primary and secondary availability zones, it enables real-time data sync, dynamic resource scheduling, and fast failover. If the primary zone fails, services automatically recover in the secondary zone — ensuring redundancy, cross-zone disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Compared with native Kubernetes multi-cluster or active/standby DR setups, AKE 1.5 active-active deployment offers the following advantages:

• Dual-layer High Availability (Control and Data Planes): Achieves cross-zone control plane redundancy AND guarantees data consistency at the workload level via distributed storage synchronization, mitigating storage risks native Kubernetes struggles with.
• Minute-level Business Recovery (RTO): By combining VM HA and K8s node self-healing, the system ensures rapid, automatic failover and recovery within minutes, significantly faster than cross-cluster backup/restore methods.
• Unified Cluster Management: Eliminates the complexity of building multi-cluster systems like Federation or Velero. Cross-availability zone management and failover are achieved simply through the AOC console.
• Optimal Resource Utilization: Both availability zones simultaneously bear the business load, avoiding the long-term idle resources typical of cold standby solutions.

Watch the demo

2. Enhanced Multi-Tenancy for Precise Resource Governance

Building upon the project-level permission control introduced in AKE 1.4, version 1.5 significantly improves enterprise governance and team collaboration:

• Project and Namespace Resource Quotas: Introduced support for project-level and Namespace-level resource quota management (CPU, memory, storage, GPU).
• Visualized Resource Control: Quotas can be intuitively set and resource usage statistics are displayed in real-time on the UI. Automatic alerts prevent resource contention and system risks in complex multi-team environments.

Watch the demo

3. Fully Controllable Platform with Enhanced Observability and Auditing

AKE 1.5 ensures operational security and compliance with significant enhancements to monitoring and traceability:

• Auditing Feature: Adds full traceability of user, application, Kubernetes API, and control plane activities. Users can flexibly configure audit policies, from concise (metadata-only) for resource-constrained scenarios to detailed and custom policies for production environments.
• Improved Observability: Continues to enhance the visibility gained in AKE 1.4, ensuring users have full support for key O&M functions like monitoring, alerting, logging, events, auditing, and traffic visualization to promptly handle cluster anomalies.

AKE: Proven in Production

AKE continues to power mission-critical systems, assisting enterprises in finance, healthcare, and other sectors to build converged virtualization and container infrastructure:

• ConnectWave, a leader in South Korea’s e-commerce market, uses AKE to run its PLAi AI platform, gaining the performance and flexibility required for efficient model training and deployment.
• Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturing services provider, implemented AKE to unify management of container workloads across DevTest and Shop Floor Control systems, increasing operational efficiency and service quality.

Learn More

• Download Arcfra Kubernetes Engine Product Brief
• Explore Arcfra Kubernetes Engine in Docs