Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) is a highly scalable and efficient cloud computing service that supports applications by providing elastic and secure cloud servers.
What is Alibaba Cloud ECS?
ECS (Elastic Compute Service) is a high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable IaaS-level service provided by Alibaba Cloud. ECS eliminates the need to invest in IT hardware upfront and allows you to quickly scale computing resources on demand. This makes ECS more convenient and efficient than physical servers. ECS provides a variety of instance types that suit different business needs and help boost business growth.
Alibaba Cloud ECS is scalable enough to support high elasticity that can meet your business demands from the website hosting to large scale calculation cluster with ease. It can provide hundreds of thousands of vCPUs in minutes for a single customer in a single region because of its sophisticated placement algorithm, dynamic planning, and hardware/software optimization.
Introduction Video to Alibaba Cloud ECS Scenarios and Features
The benefits of Alibaba Cloud ECS
- You do not need to purchase hardware or construct data centers.
- ECS instances can be delivered within minutes. This enables rapid deployment and reduces time to market.
- You can connect ECS instances to data centers including Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) computer rooms around the world.
- You can scale resources up or down based on your actual business needs at a transparent, easy-to-understand cost.
- x86 architecture-based ECS instances, ECS Bare Metal instances, and heterogeneous computing ECS instances such as GPU-accelerated and FPGA-accelerated instances are provided.
- You can use ECS to access other Alibaba Cloud services over the internal network, reducing Internet traffic costs.
- A host of security solutions such as virtual firewalls, role-based permission control, internal network isolation, virus protection, and traffic throttling are provided.
- ECS comes with a performance monitoring framework and active O&M system.
- A standardized API is provided to improve ease-of-use and applicability.
The Scenarios of Alibaba Cloud ECS
- Official websites and lightweight web applications
A new website has low traffic and requires only a low-configuration ECS instance to run web applications such as Apache and NGINX, host databases, and store files. As your website develops, you can upgrade the ECS instance configurations or add ECS instances at any time to provision sufficient resources for handling traffic spikes.
- Multimedia and high-concurrency applications or websites
ECS can be used with Object Storage Service (OSS) to store static images, videos, or downloaded packages to reduce storage costs. In addition, ECS can work with Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Server Load Balancer (SLB) to shorten waiting time, reduce public bandwidth costs, and improve service availability.
- Databases with high I/O requirements
ECS supports databases with high I/O requirements, such as OLTP and NoSQL databases. A high-configuration I/O optimized ECS instance can be used with ESSDs to achieve high I/O concurrency and higher data reliability. Alternatively, multiple lower-configuration I/O optimized ECS instances can be used with SLB to deliver a high availability architecture.
- Applications and websites with sharp traffic fluctuations
Some applications may experience sharp traffic fluctuations within a short period of time. When ECS is used with Auto Scaling, the number of ECS instances is automatically adjusted based on traffic. This way, you can meet the changing resource requirements at a low cost. ECS can also work with SLB to deliver a high availability architecture.
- Big data and real-time online and offline analysis
ECS provides big data instance families that support Hadoop distributed computing, log processing, and large data warehouses. Big data instance families adopt a local storage architecture, which helps deliver better network performance for Hadoop and Spark clusters while providing abundant storage space and higher storage performance.
- AI applications such as machine learning and deep learning
ECS allows you to use GPU-accelerated compute-optimized instances to build AI applications based on frameworks such as TensorFlow. Such instances have lower computing capacity requirements for clients and are suitable for scenarios such as image processing and real-time online rendering for cloud gaming and AR/VR applications.
Hosting on Alibaba Cloud ECS
Unlike the traditional models, ECS helps you overcome the scalability challenges to meet real-time demands by allowing instant resource deployment. It allows you to only pay for the resources you use and thus, helps to ease out financial pressure.
Alibaba Cloud ECS makes it easy for enterprises, small-and-medium businesses, and developers to procure virtual servers at a minimum cost in just a few minutes.
Alibaba Cloud ECS is an end-to-end solution to meet your diverse elastic computing requirements.
- Elasticity: It is easy to launch many instances simultaneously to match the on-demand requirements in a few clicks via the on-demand server provisioning system. ECS simplifies operations by allowing you to automatically scale resources, upgrade network bandwidth, and launch region-specific instances without any hassles.
- Stability: ECS supports reliable data backups and critical data recovery capabilities in the wake of emergency situations or disasters and guarantees 99.95% service availability.
- High Performance: ECS guarantees faster processing based on Alibaba Cloud's dynamic storage capabilities and high-quality network.
- One-Click Automation: With ECS's user-friendly management console you can access and manage all your resources with a single click. It also allows automating several related tasks such as database backups and deployment processes.
- Storage: Unlike on-premises models, storing data on ECS is simple and quick. You can also easily expand the storage on the go attaching different types of cloud disks, including Basic CloudDisk, Ultra Cloud Disk, and SSD Cloud Disk.
- Security: Alibaba Cloud ECS supports Anti-DDoS and Network Security Group (NSG) protection that allows users to control instances across different ports.
Alibaba Cloud ECS Learning Path
Embrace a more scalable and efficient management mode with Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS).
- About ECS
- How Is ECS Billed?
- Get Started with ECS
- Hands-on Practice
- Ready to Dive In?
- Developer Resources
For more information, please check:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/getting-started/learningpath/ecs
Related Product:
Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides fast memory and the latest Intel CPUs to help you to power your cloud applications and achieve faster results with low latency.
Deploy ECS instances with just a few clicks from the easy-to-use console and scale capacity up or down based on real-time demands.
More information at https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/ecs
Alibaba Cloud ECS Savings Plans
Offsets pay-as-you-go bills for ECS computing resources, system disks, and public bandwidth.
Improves flexibility and reduces costs by up to 76%.
More information at https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/ecs-savings-plans
ECS(Elastic Compute Service)
ECS Bare Metal Instance
Elastic Desktop Service
Compute Nest
