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Community Blog Alibaba Cloud ECS - A Smart VM for Faster Cloud Computing

Alibaba Cloud ECS - A Smart VM for Faster Cloud Computing

This article explains Elastic Compute Service (ECS), its features, classification, and lifecycle.

By Rupal Shirpurkar, Business Head(Cloud BU - APAC) of Click2Cloud Inc. and Alibaba Cloud MVP

Alibaba Cloud ECS Bare Metal instance (EBM) is a virtual machine consisting of several essential computing units, such as CPU, memory operating system, network, and disk. It is an elastic and horizontally-scalable service developed by Alibaba Cloud and based on upcoming virtualization techniques. Alibaba Cloud EBM provides computing functions similar to traditional servers with physical isolation along with elasticity, better performance, and other features of physical servers. These instances offer advanced virtualization abilities and support standard Elastic Compute Services and nested virtualization. This helps you maintain the elasticity of a common ECS instance while providing solutions similar to physical servers. The UI of the Alibaba Cloud Management Console is simple and customizable. You can manage and configure the environment of an EBM instance per your requirement.

EBM Storage and Network

Similar to ECS instances, Alibaba Cloud EBM instances must have a system disk to store the operating system and core configurations. It uses an image to initialize a system disk showcasing the operating system and initial software configurations of that instance. The storage capacity of system disks is very small, but you can add data disks if you need more storage types or space.

EBM instances support the classic network and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The EBM instances lying in the same network, such as in the same VPC, can communicate over the internal network through private IP addresses. If you want your instances to communicate over the Internet, you can obtain the public IP addresses to communicate with other devices on the web.

EBM Instance Features

  • It is a high-performance physical server with the elasticity and scalability of virtual servers. It supports ultra-high frequency instances with expandable memory from 32 GB to 768 GB.
  • It offers support to virtual server images and cloud disks for faster instance delivery.
  • It delivers commendable performance and business stability similar to physical servers by supporting the VPC network that maintains seamless interconnection between instances and other cloud resources.
  • It implements the same images as other virtual servers, enabling flexible configuration changes to virtual servers without extra configuration.
  • It supports SGX to assure encrypted data is cleaned, processed, and computed in a secure and trusted environment.

EBM Instance Classification

Alibaba Cloud EBM is classified into different instance families based on business scenarios. These instance families contain different instance types positioned based on their vCPU and memory, such as CPU model and clock speed. Here, a vCPU acts as a thread, and a CPU is responsible for running those threads. For example, if you want to use a Windows Server image, you should purchase an instance type equipped with at least 512 MiB of memory. These instance types can be upgraded and downgraded easily within the same instance family or across instance families.

You can learn more about all the ECS Bare Metal Instance families at this link: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/60576.htm

Alibaba Cloud EBM was developed to meet the complex requirements of enterprise scenarios and business stability. They are divided into enterprise-level and shared instance families based on the suitability for enterprise scenarios.

EBM Instance and SGX Installation

The procedure to create an ECS Bare Metal instance is similar to the procedure to create a regular ECS instance. We will not be covering the installation steps in this blog. To learn more, please visit the following documentation pages:

Conclusion

You can leverage Alibaba Cloud EBM instance to provide an optimal user experience, reliable and secure physical isolation, faster delivery for diverse business requirements, and multi-cloud compatibility.

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Rupal_Click2Cloud

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Rupal_Click2Cloud

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